The Red of His Shadow: A Novel

An intricately woven tapestry of love, hate, and death follows the vibrant Holy Week festival where passion blossoms between Mistress Zule, a voudou priestess and spiritual leader, and the notorious Simila Bolosse, a rival priest who has the support of the brutal tontons macoutes. 30,000 first printing.

From Publishers Weekly

A major writer of the contemporary, post-Boom generation in Latin America, Cuban-born Montero (The Last Night I Spent With You; The Messenger) offers up more of the startling imagery and hypnotizing storytelling her readers have come to expect in her fourth novel to be translated into English. This time, however, the brutal tale she has to tell sags under the weight of its dark portentousness. In her retelling of the true and tragic love story of Simil  Bolosse and Zul‚ Rev‚, Montero illuminates the world of Haitian Voudon as it is practiced by the downtrodden Haitian immigrants who work in the sugar-cane fields of the Dominican Republic. At the age of 12, Zul‚, the wild and willful only surviving daughter of a cursed family, is anointed mambo, or priestess, of a powerful Dominican Voudon community and undergoes a seven-year apprenticeship. The most important of the celebrations she presides over is a Holy Week procession, a Gag , which each year wends its way across the sugar-cane fields. As the novel begins, a Gag  is being planned, but threats of violence threaten to derail it. Simil  Bolosse, a Haitian renegade once Zul‚'s lover and now her enemy, has pledged to cut her to pieces if she refuses to join forces with him. Perhaps even more dangerous is Zul‚'s half-Chinese bodyguard, who pines for his mistress and is consumed by jealousy. At once a brutal, expressionistic voodoo fairy tale and an indictment of the plight of Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic, this demanding novel proves that Montero is capable, like Zul‚, of "looking at the sun for a long time, searching with staring eyes for the temporal cause of its fury." Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Montero, a columnist in Puerto Rico and the Cuban-born author of a string of celebrated novels, based this grim glimpse into the vicious and corrupt politics of Hispaniola and contemporary Haitian voodoo on true-life events. Taut, cryptic, and disturbing, this is a highly mythologized story about a contest of wills between the leaders of two voodoo societes. At the head of one, a community composed mostly of Haitians who crossed the Dominican Republic border to cut sugar cane, is Mistress Zule, a young priestess of considerable powers and little experience. Her rival is Simila Bolesseto, a notoriously violent and wily voodoo priest and trickster. As the two circle and confront each other, Montero portrays a terrifying world poisoned by hate, greed, and sexual jealously, in which people cast spells to torture and kill, and, even more horrific, where the capricious gods, or loa, mount, or possess, their worshipers to enact bloody dramas of their own, letting mere mortals fall where they will. Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952, but has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a weekly column in El Nuevo Dia newspaper. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards. Each of her subsequent books -- The Last Night I Spent With You, The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm of Darkness, and The Messenger -- has been published in the United States in translations by Edith Grossman, as well as in several European countries. Her other nonfiction work appears frequently in scholarly and literary publications throughout the world.

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