The Queen of the South

by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Found this book at B&N while buying B. a birthday present - The Conscious Bride. That book was recommended to me by a friend, and another friend I gave it to pre-wedding found it useful as well. B. has since said that book has made her tear up, but that she's enjoying it... Maybe someday she'll get her own book blog.

This book is about a drug-runner's girlfriend, and her transformation to become a powerful, self-aware owner of a key transportation route and fashion icon. The South referred to in the title is the South of Spain, definitely not the south of Scarlett O'Hara. And it managed to add another list of places to my eventual destination list.

The book is told in a journalistic style, like News of a Kidnapping, cutting back and forth between the author-narrator's interviews with key figures from her life. These interviews are great, as they lend a lens of hindsight to the story, and also manages to weave the episodes of her life together nicely. The author does dig at Garcia-Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude in the book, but I can get past that ;) Other motifs in the novel include the Count of Monte Cristo (which I might have to pick up now) and narco corridas (songs about the drug runners and drug trade in Mexico). The book has also immensely improved my skill at swearing in Spanish, though when one learns Spanish from narcotics traffickers, the swearing might go a little overboard for what situations might require of me. Anyway, it's a great book that I both enjoyed while I read and enjoyed thinking about later.

"The door slammed. She held her breath. One, two, three. !Hijole! - shit. Three male silhouettes standing alongside the car, backlighted by the streetlamps. Choose. She'd thought she could be safe from this, on the sidelines, while somebody did it for her. 'You just take it easy, preitita' - that was at the beginning -'you just love me, and I'll take care of the rest.' It was sweet and dcomfortable. It was deceptively safe to wake up at night and her her man's - any man's? - peaceful breathing. There was not even any fear back then, because fear is the child of the imagination, and back then there were only happy hours that passed like a pretty love song, or a soft stream. And the trap was easy to fall into; his laughter when he held her, his lips traveling over her skin, his mouth whispering tender words, or dirty words down below, between her thighs, very close and very far inside, as though it were going to stay there forever - if she lived long enough to forget, that mough would be the last thing she forgot. But nobody stays forever. Because nobody is safe, and all sense of security is dangerous. Suddenly you wake up ith proof that it's impossible to just live - you realize that life is a road, and that traveling it entails constant choices. Who you live with, who you love, who you kill. Whether you want to or not, you have to walk down the road by yourself... The Situation... What it came down to was choosing."

"'In this business,' Guero had said, 'you've got to know how to recognize The Situation. Somebody can come over and say Buenos dias. Maybe you even know him, and he'll smile at you. Easy. Smooth as butter. But you'll notice something strange, a feeling you can't quite put your finger on, like something's this much out of place' - his fingers practically touching. 'And a second later, you're a dead man' - Guero would point his finger at Teresa like a revolver, as their friends laughed - 'or woman.'

'Althought that's always preferable to being carried alive out into the desert,' he'd added, ''cause out there, they'll take an acetylene torch and a lot of patience, and they'll ask you questions. And the bad thing about the questions is not that you know the answers - in that case, the relief will come fast. The problem is when you don't. It takes a lot to convince the guy with the torch that you don't know the things he thinks you know.'"

"You could perfectly imagine him so scared he was shitting bricks, or anything else Teresa Mendoza told him to shit."