The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon.
MacMurray and Beck, Inc.
Cloth, $17.00; 224 pages.
Reviewed by Wendy Cholbi
Rick Collignon's first novel, The Journal of Antonio Montoya, takes place at once over three days and 75 years, simultaneously during the dog days of summer and the chill of January, and tells of the lives of a family and of their deaths. It is a story of homecoming and farewell, of grief, but inevitably, of joy.The setting is Guadalupe, a fictional town at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico (there is a real town there called Guadalupita, or little Guadalupe, but one should never try to force a one-to-one connection between fiction and lif th and inevitably return to earth.
People, too, inevitably return to earth, but not, it seems, in Guadalupe. Little Josè Montoya's parents, Loretta and big Josè, die one August morning (killed, as it happens, by a cow) but do not behave in a way befitting dead folk.
More family members (still alive) are introduced at the funeral. Big Josè's sister (and therefore little Josè's aunt) Ramona, enters the story as if she has known us from the very beginning. Her brother Flavio wonders what he is doing there. His wife Martha does not like to speak.
Later, through the eyes of Ramona:
"She thought that the idea of death was to let the living go on, not to have to eat enchiladas with one's dead relatives."
Touches like this sentence are the jewels of this book. It is Ramona who usually provides them. She had a life beyond Guadalupe, before she came back to live in the house left to her by her grandparents. It is the perspective of a woman who is at once a native and an outsider that lends these comic, almost-sarcastic comments their poignancy. These quick moments are interspersed with passages of slow poetry, descriptions of a town who itself is a character, whose buildings are characters, whose inhabitants may be alive or dead. When Ramona was away from the town,
"She didn't paint for three years; then one day she picked up a brush and began to paint the village of Guadalupe. She painted the outside of the Guadalupe lumberyard in the heat of summer and Felix's Cafe before dawn. She painted fields of sagebrush as the sun was setting bloodlike on the mountains. She painted trucks abandoned in arroyos in the midst of stunted piñòn, and shovels spaded in the earth along irrigation ditches. She painted the Guadalupe church with its roof that swayed and bellied and its buttresses that grew from the ground and melded with the thick walls. Ramona painted the village of Guadalupe as if it lived in her bones, as if she and the village were haunted."
And perhaps she is, perhaps they both are. The journal of the title belongs to a relative who is long gone. It tells of a winter when the ground froze and fires were built in cemeteries to enable graves to be dug for those who died. It tells of a time that is somehow alive within Ramona, though it should be long dead, like her relatives.
Comparisons to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez will probably be made. Certainly things happen in this story that could be labeled "magical realism." Perhaps a more apt comparison would be to Jon Cohen's novels Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger and The Man in the Window. There, too, things happen that aren't supposed to, though the setting is more urban, more obviously modern. The Journal of Antonio Montoya takes us to a time that never was, that somehow still exists.
At the same time, it is the story of a story. What does it mean when your relatives refuse to stay dead? Why did someone who kept a journal 75 years ago write so much about the weather? Why is Ramona alone, if she is really alone? There are no answers, only more story. Perhaps Ramona and her family, indeed the whole village of Guadalupe, are indeed haunted. Perhaps there are times when magic is possible. The only sure things are the earth and the water, and love, which lives on though people die.
Also possibly tortillas.
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