The Sage of Mexico

A monumental novel takes on the legendary poet Sor Juana.

HUNGER'S BRIDES

A Novel of the Baroque

By Paul Anderson

Carroll & Graf. 1,358 pp. $35

At the age of 16, Juana Inés Ramírez de Santillana y Asbaje -- the illegitimate offspring of an illiterate, if prosperous, mother and an absent father -- was summoned by the scholars of Mexico's viceregal court for an oral examination to determine if her famed knowledge of history, mythology, theology, literature and languages was genuine. It was. The legend of her all-encompassing mind crossed the Atlantic to Europe, where she became known as America's Tenth Muse.

In our day, we know her simply as Sor Juana, the most important writer the Americas produced during the colonial era. She was a fecund lyricist and playwright, and a subtle and controversial theologian. Initially a lady-in-waiting to the vicereine, she left the court at 19 -- changing her name to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz -- to live the rest of her life in convents. But in 1693, when she was 44, the Officers of the Inquisition forbade her to put pen to paper ever again for daring to critique a sermon on the nature of God's gifts to us by the Jesuit priest António Vieira. She was ordered to give away her immense library and to sign her mea culpa in her own blood. Two years later, she died of the plague.

But it is as a poet that Sor Juana made her greatest contributions. Her erotically unambiguous love poems well up from a fountain of Sapphic longing. Even today, their nakedness can be shocking. Her long visionary poem, "First Dream," puts her in the company of the likes of Milton. As a writer of sonnets, Sor Juana's achievement ranks with those of Shakespeare, Donne and the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote.

Octavio Paz's Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith carved for Sor Juana her rightful place in the Western canon. Now arrives Paul Anderson's epic novel, Hunger's Brides, 12 years in the making. Whereas Paz's seminal work remains unsurpassed in its thorough mapping of the political, cultural and intellectual landscape that produced Sor Juana, a novelist's empathy was needed for the flesh-and-blood woman to emerge. The creation of a believable voice for Sor Juana is Anderson's most remarkable achievement in his debut novel.

His reconstruction of the culture of racial fusion created by the conquest of the New World and of the religious and political climate of 17th-century Mexico is vivid, written with verve and authority. Equally impressive is Anderson's knowledge of Mexico's pre-Columbian past -- which he sees as a golden age. And he does a wonderful job showing us how important that past was to the development of Sor Juana's art.

Anderson's filigreed language is often resplendent, nowhere more so than in Book One, which describes Sor Juana's childhood in her family's hacienda. Its depiction of Juana's homoerotic friendship with Amanda, the child of the family cook, is lyrical and chock-full of dazzling images -- the bull standing "silent, solid, puffing gouts of steam, like the mountain itself . . . . Around its horns was wound, in a long figure eight, a dark blue cornflower crown." These early portions are the most focused and honed writing in Hunger's Brides.

Book One cast such a spell on me, in fact, that it made me forget about the framing device of the novel. In the Prologue we meet the book's narrator, Donald J. Gregory, a philandering professor of American literature in Canada who has found his student lover, Beulah Limosneros, covered in blood and near death. Eventually we learn that the rest of the novel is the manuscript Beulah had put together and which Gregory, who purloined it when he found Beulah in a coma, has embellished.