Malinche

Library discard. 1 of 12 for $6.

Are you one of those people who keeps reading books even though they don’t like them? I am. I had a feeling I’d hate Laura Esquivel’s Malinche by about page 8. By about page 30, I knew I hated it. But I kept reading anyway.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with conquistador history, Malintzin/Malinalli was an indigenous slave who was given to Hernán Cortés when the Spaniards landed in Mexico; she eventually became his interpreter. Malinche, as she is more commonly known, has been a controversial figure in history. Some revere her, some pity her, and some consider her a traitor to her people.

Now, it doesn’t really bother me that much when people take some artistic license with historical events. When I saw The Patriot, I was fine with the way the American Revolution was portrayed, so long as I could keep seeing Heath Ledger. So long as the filmmaker/writer is not injecting fiction into a documentary or actual history book, I can accept that stuff’s going to get changed to make it more appealing to the masses.

But COME ON, Laura Esquivel.

Malinche tells the story of the “passionate love affair” between Malinalli and Cortés. Malinalli gets sold into slavery at age 5, continuing to get shifted around to different owners until her adolescence, when she’s given to the Spaniards. She starts out by working for one of Cortés’s men, and as her gift with languages becomes clear, she moves up in status to become the Spaniards’ interpreter. By then she has caught Cortés’s eye, and the two develop a secret attraction to one another; [trigger warning] taking advantage of the situation one day when he sees her bathing alone in a lake, Cortés rapes Malinalli, then reassigns her to be his woman.

This is one of the many major disconnects in the story. She falls in love with him, though they have a tempestuous “relationship” (I say “relationship” because it is clear throughout the book that she is still his slave, and he is still the one with all the power). After bearing witness to his thirst for power and the brutal slaughter of thousands of people, Malinalli is left trying to reconcile her love for this man and her horror at his actions, as well as the role she has played in helping him. There is no believable love story here; it’s all about rape, abuse, control, and victimization...

Read full review here. ( )

Malinche is a very controversial figure and it is hard to extract her own history from that of the conquistador, Hernan Cortes. Known as Malinalli in the book or Marina (her baptismal name), this is her story from childhood, being instructed by her grandmother, sold as a slave by her mother through to her meeting with Cortes.
As with Like Water for Chocolate, there is a lot of local colour and flavour in the book, I liked Malinche's descriptions of codices. Each chapter is preceeded by a codex, to give you an idea of what they are like.
Malinalli faces a dilemma, she is trying to understand the arrival of the Spanish, who were seen as the return of Quetzalcoatl, a creator god . She becomes his "tongue", translating the meeting between him and Montezuma, which ultimately led to the fall of his empire. Malinalli must deal with the reprecussions of her actions and her relationship with Cortes - being his slave, lover, translator.
Not a bad read, but I think that the love story which made Like Water for Chocolate so compelling is not here, nor is there a substitute for it. ( )

I knew this was fiction when I picked it up. I hoped it was historical fiction, and that I would learn something of Mexico's history by reading it. I was profoundly disappointed. Instead of historical fiction, I felt like I was reading a mixture of New Age spirituality and a Harlequin romance. The book primarily describes Malinalli/La Malinche's spiritual reflections on life, with occasional breaks of a paragraph or two to describe historical places, people, or events. I'm not convinced that the religious beliefs portrayed in the book were authentic to Malinche's time and culture. Malinalli/La Malinche seemed more like a 21st century adherent to New Age beliefs than a 16th century Nahua woman.

The book's one redeeming feature is its bibliography of sources about La Malinche, Cortés, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico. I've developed an interest in this topic since becoming close to several of my brother's Mexican in-laws. Maybe I'll find what I'm looking for in one of the books in the bibliography. I certainly didn't find it here. ( )

Malinche is best described as a novel of historical fiction. The title character, Malinalli also known as Malinche or Dona Marina was actually very real and played an integral part in Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire.
Malinalli was purchased by Cortes to be his translator and to interpret the many dialects he would encounter during his trek towards Tenochtitlan especially important were the words of Montezuma whose city of gold Cortes so desired. Malinalli knew she was in a very precarious situation, one in which she held much power in her words but in translation brought death and destruction to a powerful and proud group of people whose blood she shared.
For any fan of Laura Esquivel who expects lyrical prose, magical realism and vivid depictions of love and nature, I must warn you, you will not find it between these pages. The supposed love affair between Cortes and Malinche comes off more like a lust affair on the part of Senor Cortes. Other than Malinalli’s vivid dreams of the four elements of nature and images of her gods there is little else in this novel that resembles Like Water for Chocolate or The Law of Love. Granted the conquest of Mexico is a very serious and complicated subject but it seems Esquivel’s style of writing does not do it justice. Trying to include historical, cultural and personal information only produced a disjointed and incohesive product. ( )