The Bullet Swallower opens with a folklore-laden prologue telling the story of one Alferez Antonio Sonoro, a man "born with gold in his eyes," in a tiny mining town just south of the Rio de la Norte which Texans know as the Rio Grande. Sonoro lets greed get in the way of both generosity and good sense which literally destroys the town.
The bulk of the novel, rooted in the traditional Western novel with heavy doses of fantasy, alternates 69 years between Alferez's grandson, Antonio, in 1895 and Antonio's grandson, Jaime, in 1964 as a well-known actor living in Mexico City. Linking these two main characters is the mysterious Remedio, kind of a soul collector in training.
As author Elizabeth Gonzales James tells us in her Author's Note, "Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up," with many descriptions of the late 1890s drought conditions along the Texas-Mexico border not to mention the violence of law enforcement in those borderlands. Her own family history provided the inspiration for the plot:
"My great-grandfather Antonio Gonzalez was a bandido in the late-1800s. At some point he was put in jail in Houston, escaped, was chased down by the Texas Rangers, shot in the face, and left for dead. Except that he lived, hid out in Texas for a year (supposedly in an encampment of former slaves), and then made his way back to his family in Mier, Mexico. After that people started calling him "El Tragabalas," or the Bullet Swallower, and for a while I believe he enjoyed some notoriety in South Texas and Northern Mexico, becoming a minor local legend."
The major part of the novel concerns Antonio who has promised his new bride that will hang up his bandit ways and end his life of crime. Amidst a severe drought and a desperate lack of money, Antonio decides he will rob a train in the Houston railyards said to be full of gold and other treasures. When he could not find anyone to assist in his plans, his adopted brother Hugo, a somewhat gentle soul, soon joins him in a venture that has the potential to change their fortunes forever.
After the attempted robbery goes awry, Antonio is hell bent on revenge and sets off on a crusade to right these wrongs and cast vengeance on the Texas Rangers who end Hugo's life in a shootout and destroys his face. His legend as a dead man back from the dead as well as the descriptive epithet El Tragabalas ("The Bullet Swallower) inspires both fear and admiration as he treks across southern Texas in search of two particular Rangers.
Jaime has made different kind of name for himself as a greatly admired movie star and singing cowboy known as El Gallo (The Rooster). His life is as pleasant as Antonio's was hard, but his comfortable existence is turned upside-down by two unexpected arrivals: a somewhat stinky and ancient book entitled The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family from Antiquity to the Present Day and the appearance of Remedio. Jaime soon realizes just how much blood covers the hands of his ancestors.
The novel alternates between Antonio's need for revenge and his desire for repentance, and Jaime struggling to understand what his family's past means for himself, his father, and his children. The result is a gory and rollicking shoot-em-up leaving the reader to question whether evil is inherited and are later generations bound to atone for or repeat the sins of their ancestors.
The descriptions can be quite stomach-churning at times, particularly the entire chapter devoted to Antonio's injuries in the shootout that initiates his quest for revenge. Along the way, there are humorous elements such as his teaming up with the Englishman Peter while trapped in a soon to be torched lumber yard adjacent to an exploding ice factory. The fantastic elements abound and it is clear that Gonzales James has done her research into the realism that anchors the book.
While not for the faint-hearted, The Bullet Swallower is a solid addition to the modern magical-realism Western genre. I found it both interesting and gut-wrenching.
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