Overview
According to an Andean native legend, a condor carries the sun each day out of a sacred lake and into the sky. In a feat of storytelling imbued with the wonder of that daily miracle, Jerry McGahan opens up the living heart of the ancient Runa culture with the luminous story of Pilar, a young woman from the mountain village of Wasi. As the living archive of her people's history, Pilar has memorized twenty-three stories, one from each of her foremothers in an unbroken line reaching back to the Incas. The ancient lessons for withstanding outsiders - the "peeled ones" - suffuse almost every ritual of the Runa, but the arrival of Shining Path terrorists forces them to ask once more how much they are willing to sacrifice to preserve their ways. When Pilar meets Arnie, an American biologist studying the spectacled bear in Peru, she is already the reluctant protagonist in her own story. Soon, Arnie and his American friends find themselves caught in a bizarre scheme, unable to resist the power of a woman so incomparably certain of who she is and from where she has come. Against the backdrop of two cultures, this tale explores the harmony and the conflicts between men and women, tradition and progress, and people and nature.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
When Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebels invade Wasi, 27-year-old Pilar Achahuanco's Peruvian village, the disturbance is the latest in a 500-year saga of oppression and violence that Pilar knows only too well. In the 15th century, her Runa ancestors were forced by the Incas to settle in Wasi, more than two months away by foot from their tribal home. Pilar's ancestor Soona brought with her the stories of her past and taught them to her daughter, making her promise to "keep the line.... She said we would lose our home but not ourselves," says Pilar, the 24th link in this unbroken chain of living human history. In this ambitious, thoughtful first novel, McGahan artfully splices Pilar's mystical, often brutal tales of her family's past into an account of her 20th-century romance with 33-year-old Arnie Wolcott, a wildlife biologist doing fieldwork in Peru. Exiled from Wasi by the rebels, Pilar accepts Arnie's offer to return with him to his home in Missoula, Mont. There, uprooted like Soona before her, Pilar finds strength in the collective wisdom of her forebears as she struggles with personal and family responsibility, ultimately dragging Arnie into a high-suspense escapade he'll never forget. When the action shifts abruptly from carefully observed descriptions of traditional Peruvian life to chatty scenes in Missoula, readers may feel as disoriented as the transplanted Pilar, but considering its scope (how many first novelists dare to cram more than 500 years between two covers?), McGahan's reflective narrative is an elegantly written, astonishingly cohesive debut. (Sept.)Library Journal
Pilar lives in 20th-century Peru but embodies an ancient culture, that of the Ruma, a pre-Inca, pre-literate society first subjugated by the Incas, then by the Spaniards, and now attacked by the Shining Path guerrillas. What makes this novel extraordinary is that Pilar's story is interwoven with the stories of 23 generations of women, stories passed on from mother to daughter. Pilar flees her family and home village and falls in love with gringo wildlife biologist Arnie Wolcott, moving with him to North America. As their lives become intertwined, their differing world views on humanity's harmony with nature come together in a bizarre and wonderful rescue, and finally Pilar has her own daughter, another link in the chain of women. First novelist McGahan, who holds a doctorate in zoology, has published fiction and scientific articles in a number of journals. Recommended.Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., Mcminnville, Ore.Kirkus Reviews
First novel spinning a love story around ecological themes, set in the Peruvian Andes and Montana.Pilar is a young Runa Indian woman whose identity is shared with her 23 mothers—or maternal ancestors—and she tells their stories as if to carry her race into the future. One such story is the myth that the great condor flies every morning from the East, bringing the sun. Another tells of the invasion of the Incas, yet another of the conquering Spanish. The present, too, is full of travail, for the Sendero Luminoso, violent left-wing guerrillas, have arrived in Pilar's village. They begin a ruthless purification program, and Pilar is threatened, since her knowledge of the past brands her in some eyes as a sorceress. She flees over the mountains along the ancient Inca Road to the village of Ollantaytambo, where she meets a norteamericano named Arnie Wolcott. A clumsy but likable fellow, Arnie is an expert on grizzlies who has come to Peru to census the population of spectacled bears for his master's thesis. High in the mountains, he and Pilar make love, and Pilar follows Arnie to the US as his wife. With some friends, the two undertake to free a grizzly named Celeste and her cubs from the tortures of university research. Mission accomplished, the two part. But Pilar brings a little money home to Peru and buys a nice plot of land far from the Senderistas. Arnie has settled down some, having loved once, but well, and having done a good deed.
Splitting the novel into two sections, one told from Pilar's point of view, the other from Arnie's, is jarring. And, given the high romance of this unlikely pair in the first place, to part them seems arbitrary. Far-fetched, then, though pleasant and diverting.