A Desert Between Two Seas
A Novel in Stories
This is the kind of book I don’t actually want to review. It’s not because I didn’t love it. I loved it. I don’t want to review it because a review feels like the wrong way to appreciate the book’s dreamlike magic. I don’t want to come out from under its spell.
The book opens at a mission church in Baja California in 1820. Santa Rosalía de Mulegé is a “stone mission . . . set among rugged hills above the river that flows to the bloodred waters of the Vermilion Sea.” After a series of stories following three interconnected characters, the book ends in 1937 at a prison, also in Mulegé, also “above the adobe homes and streets and shops and the groves of date palms and orchards and vineyards.” The church is inhabited at the beginning of the novel by a priest, Fr. Magín Matías Espín. The prison is inhabited, more than a hundred years later, by his grandson, simply called Chema, as if titles and names were among the things the characters lost along the way.
The three people that Muia primarily traces through the course of the novel are Espín, who turns from priest to vagabond; Dolores, a fierce woman who was born without ears; and Chema, a musician in love with the wrong woman. We travel Baja California from Santo Tomás near the border of “alta” California to San Xavier in the south, visiting ranching, fishing, and mining communities. Hidden in all three sections of the novel is a pearl that a native boy Espín once knew pulled from the sea.
