I got Zama among 6 books I ordered during the New York Review of Books anniversary sale - the discount went up to 40% on orders over 4 books and so I went a little overboard. I surely have written before about how I'm a sucker for the look and feel of these books. (I believe the first one I ever came across was Raymond Queneau's Witch Grass, which I bought at a Borders in central New Jersey in 2003 despite never having heard of the author or book. I loved it. Though it may have been a few years earlier that I read a review of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which was reissued by NYRB in 1999, so maybe I was already aware of the editions.) In any case, I added Zama to my order based on virtually nothing. This sentence from the publisher's website may have sealed the deal, "First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature." I think I was also trying balance Italian and non-Italian books (of the 6 books I ordered, 3 were Italian). And I hadn't read a whole lot of Argentinian literature. (Though with a name like Antonio di Benedetto, he is likely one of the Argentinians who hails from Italy.) Anyway...
Zama follows the rising and falling hopes of Diego de Zama, a government functionary in a remote town in the Spanish South American colonies in the late 18th Century. The first half of the book takes place in 1790 and Zama is hoping to be transferred to Santiago de Chile or Buenos Ayres or Peru in the near future. The book picks up again in 1794 and again in 1799 and Zama is still waiting on some change of circumstance. The book provides an opening to consider some complexities of colonial life -- of race, class, and nationality. For just one example, Zama is an americano - born in the new world - but considers himself a Spaniard, while recognizing that people born in Spain likely consider him as an inferior. The book also illustrates how painfully slow communication must have been. Waiting months for letters and news that is no longer current. The book was also frustrating. I found Zama a different character to reconcile; I didn't understand a lot of his motivations or his actions. I often found myself wondering, is this how a person in that time in those circumstances behave? And sometimes I thought that yes, maybe it was, even though it made no sense to me. And other times I thought, I have no idea. (To be fair, I almost never thought "No;" I vacillated between "yes maybe" and "I don't know.") In any case, this made it somewhat hard for me to connect. There were some really lovely passages though and the book really did make me reflect on what life must have been like in a remote place some 250 years ago.
I was 3/4 of the way through Zama when I felt like spending a day in bed reading a book. I could easily have finished Zama that day, but Zama wasn't the book I wanted a book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I had recently acquired Jasmine Guillory's third novel, The Wedding Party and it was exactly the book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I read each of her previous novels in a single day under the same circumstances. These books are a joy to read and The Wedding Party might be my favorite yet. I loved that it shared a timeline with the previous two books, so it felt like getting let in on secrets that were happening behind the scenes in the first (and to a lesser extent the second) book. These books are also very funny. The denouement in The Wedding Party had me laughing almost to the point of crying. Each one of these books is a perfect little Rom-Com and now I'm very excited for the next installation.
