The Summer of the Serpent: The Violence Beneath a Neighbourhood

The Summer of the Serpent, a novel by the Mexican writer Cecilia Eudave, has been published in English for the first time, translated by Robin Myers and issued by Soho Press. Over several weeks of email exchange, with Myers translating Eudave's answers from Spanish, Shandela Contreras spoke with them both about writing violence through the surreal, about carrying distinct voices across into another language, and about the significance of 1977 as a year suspended between eras. The story opens in the sweltering summer of 1977 in the Moderna neighbourhood, on Francia Street in Guadalajara, and closes in 2017, two years that the author describes as opposing mirrors, showing the same atrocities at different moments in time. Eudave chose 1977 because it was the year of the snake in the Chinese zodiac, and because its events shaped the close of the twentieth century, a year when the century seemed to be shedding its skin. The Moderna neighbourhood, she says, recreates in miniature the vices and virtues of Mexican society, a society whose obsession with globalization has cost it its way, and whose traditional values are fractured by what she calls the ghost of modernity. The novel is told in six distinct voices, children and adults who witness the same events and understand them differently, none of them seeing the whole. Maricarmen brings an innocent inquiry, Uriel an analytical precision, the garbage collector a dreamlike and philosophical quality, Uncle Carlos a passionate verbosity. Eudave says she knew from the very beginning that one voice could not hold this story; she wanted each reader to recognize themselves in one angle or another. What happens in that neighbourhood stays with the reader: a serpent girl weeping in the glass box of a travelling fair, whose prophecies only make sense in hindsight; a neighbour's dog dangled from a tree, again and again; and a ghost that returns night after night to a bed in a sinister house, insisting on being heard. Eudave stresses that in Spanish the ghost must always be named in the feminine, even though the noun is masculine, because she is a metaphor for gendered denigration in Mexican society, carrying a burden of guilt that was never hers to bear. The novel's fundamental thesis, in the author's own words, is about cruelty: everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is cruel, and the degree of cruelty we witness or receive in childhood is the first doorway onto the violence later exerted in society. The real fear in the book comes not from the ghost or the snake but from acts of violence committed in plain sight, which settle into being an ordinary part of neighbourhood life. Eudave says she no longer believes that reality as we know it is enough to help us understand the violence of contemporary life, which is why we need metaphor and the unusual to glimpse what the reality we inhabit keeps hidden. Part of the conversation turns on translation itself, and its neatest detail is that the father in the novel is a translator: Esteban, who translates instruction manuals and longs to translate poetry. Myers says she feels a strong affinity with him, having once had the same job while longing for the same thing, and agrees with him that even technical translation is a creative rather than a mechanical job. To hold the voices apart in English she read the manuscript aloud; to write anything at all, including a translation, she says, you need your ears. Eudave belongs to the Latin American current known as narrativa de lo inusual, the narrative of the unusual, a term coined by Carmen Alemany Bay, whose appeal, she says, lies precisely in leaving it to the reader to decide whether what they have read is a realist novel or a surrealist one.