Bless Me, Ultima

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Average customer rating 4.5 (2 comments)

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I met Rudolfo Anaya in Albuquerque, NM, at a book signing. He is beyond charming and his personality is reflected in this amazing book. My mother is Northern New Mexico Spanish and these stories are her life. If you want an inside look at this beautiful culture and its people, I highly recommend this book.

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Beautiful, mysterious tensions and collisions between earth and sea, God and the gods, innocence and knowledge, good and something other than good abound in this novel of a young Chicano in New Mexico in the days during and just after World War II. An incredibly-realized first novel, now nearly 50 years old, by the author some consider the Father of Chicano Literature. The point of view is that of a seven year-old boy entering school and the larger community from his family's life on the plains, as an old woman known to make cures in the old ways comes to live with his family and teaches him what she knows. It's a rough couple of years that passes, with the protagonist seeing more death and ugliness than perhaps a young boy ought to witness first-hand. Antonio tries to grapple with these events through the strong Catholic religion he's growing into, yet also through the paganistic sensibilities of some of his young cohorts, and eventually through the all-knowing eyes of La Curandera herself, as he comes to understand that all things are not knowable, at least not all by way of the same cosmic answers. Opened a world completely unknown to me, and yet is entirely accessible, sympathetic, relevant. If not for some very slight ragged edges, this would rate a 5 for me.