In a jungle village an old man sees a strange girl who has collapsed in a field. Once a holy man, he is sure she is not an evil spirit. He carries her inside despite his wife's warning that the girl is the evil Xtabay, pretending to be lost and exhausted.
The girl has fled her home in search of a mysterious boy who wandered into her village. She senses in him her own despair and loneliness and intends to follow him to the "great modern city" he was seeking.
Using archetypal figures - the man, the boy, the woman - John Rechy's Pablo! is steeped in indigenous myths and superstitions. Restless spirits roam the dark jungle howling for redemption amid the pyramids of their ancestors, witches predict doom and snakes stir ancient curses, like the disastrous loss of crops. Native religious rituals conflict dangerously with the Catholic religion.
The novel is framed by a Mayan legend about the soul wandering aimlessly until the sun and moon fuse. Like the forgotten bride who longs endlessly for the elusive sun, the girl searches for the boy in the vast contemporary city.
"One of the few original American writers of the last century." - Gore Vidal
"A novel with more truth in it than a carload of best-sellers."
- The Washington Post on The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez
"Tense metafiction, pungent with desire and emotional cruelty ... Rechy's prose is lean and sinewy."
- Publishers Weekly on After the Blue Hour
JOHN RECHY is the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times best-sellers City of Night and Numbers, the Los Angeles Times best-sellers The Coming of the Night, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens and The Sexual Outlaw (all from Grove Press). He is the recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature. He is the first recipient of the Los Angeles Review of Books-University of California, Riverside Lifetime Achievement Award.
Genre: Literary Fiction
The girl has fled her home in search of a mysterious boy who wandered into her village. She senses in him her own despair and loneliness and intends to follow him to the "great modern city" he was seeking.
Using archetypal figures - the man, the boy, the woman - John Rechy's Pablo! is steeped in indigenous myths and superstitions. Restless spirits roam the dark jungle howling for redemption amid the pyramids of their ancestors, witches predict doom and snakes stir ancient curses, like the disastrous loss of crops. Native religious rituals conflict dangerously with the Catholic religion.
The novel is framed by a Mayan legend about the soul wandering aimlessly until the sun and moon fuse. Like the forgotten bride who longs endlessly for the elusive sun, the girl searches for the boy in the vast contemporary city.
"One of the few original American writers of the last century." - Gore Vidal
"A novel with more truth in it than a carload of best-sellers."
- The Washington Post on The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez
"Tense metafiction, pungent with desire and emotional cruelty ... Rechy's prose is lean and sinewy."
- Publishers Weekly on After the Blue Hour
JOHN RECHY is the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times best-sellers City of Night and Numbers, the Los Angeles Times best-sellers The Coming of the Night, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens and The Sexual Outlaw (all from Grove Press). He is the recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature. He is the first recipient of the Los Angeles Review of Books-University of California, Riverside Lifetime Achievement Award.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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