Stanford's Albert Guerard writes an evocative novel
"The Hotel in the Jungle," by Albert Guerard; Baskerville; 392 pp.; $23
by Don Kazak
Sometimes, a part of our own past, or the life of someone we knew, can have as strong a grip on us as the reality before us each day. And at times it can become difficult to separate the realness of the past from the realness of life to come. Several of the key characters in Albert Guerard's new novel, "The Hotel in the Jungle," are mesmerized by the past in different ways.
They each journey to a hotel in a remote and inaccessible part of Mexico at different times. At the hotel, events that happened in 1870 are revisited in 1922, and the events of 1922 are revisited in 1982. They are each searching for something. But who, including them, can say for what?
This is Guerard's ninth novel. A Stanford professor emeritus of English, he has also published six books of literary criticism.
Guerard has taken a sliver of history and created a much greater fiction around it. The sliver of history is that of the poet Mina Loy who married the poet-boxer-art critic Arthur Craven in Mexico in 1918. Craven, the nephew of Oscar Wilde, later disappeared and was rumored dead. Loy refused to believe him dead and continued to search for him in Mexico.
In the book, Monica Swift becomes Mina Loy, and Jack Desmond her missing Arthur Craven.
There are others, both real and historical, who may or may not be dead. They include the (real) American William Walker, conqueror of Nicaragua, killed, or not, by a firing squad in Honduras. There is a young Mexican Indian girl who sleeps with a young American engineer who comes back 50 years later to find her. And there is the manager of the hotel in the jungle who keeps written dairy-like entries and photographs of all the guests and then mysteriously disappears.
The book, in some ways, hinges on the experiences of Charles Stanfield, the American engineer.
In 1870, when he was just 20 years old, he comes to Santa Rosalia, a remote village in the jungle, to help determine if a railroad could be built, and he encounters the legend of Walker, who did lead a revolution in Nicaragua and proclaimed himself president for a time. It is said that Walker died by a firing squad. It is also said the firing squad used blank bullets.
The jungle in southern Mexico, in addition to being remote and impenetrable, is mysterious and rich with forbidding legends. It includes an abandoned city, Casas Grandes, where the jungle won't grow and which animals avoid. Native Indians won't go near it.
The jungle also includes a rumored hidden trail, the camino secreto, which is supposedly the route of Spanish conquistadors who died in the jungle but buried untold treasures of gold there. Many have searched for the route, without success.
And the jungle includes the Gran Hotel Balneario, which was built in 1890 and destroyed by an earthquake and flood in 1891, and then rebuilt in 1908. The hotel is where the people congregate in 1922 and in 1982, when the descendent of an earlier character visits the hotel again to unravel some mysteries.
The descendent, Eloise Deslonde, is a graduate student in history who has some old journals to help guide her.
A part of the mystery is Charles Stanfield, who has a remarkable experience in the jungle at age 20 then returns to the United States, gets married, has a family, and is a high school science teacher for the rest of his career until he returns to the jungle in 1922, more than 50 years after he left it.
Why did Stanfield come back? Guerard writes:
"He walked more slowly, took to wearing a heavy sweater under his jacket, also wore a scarf. His last Cambridge Latin students saw a kindly and absent-minded man who might quote poems in the middle of a biology class, though no one could see the connection, and who held the door open for girl students and might pick up the books even a boy had dropped.
"In due time his placid wife quietly died, the children grew up and went away, and at sixty-five he retired, moving to an apartment on Memorial Drive. In his solitude, the memories of Santa Rosalia came strangely to life . . .
"For now he realized he had known all along, in some dark dreaming corner of his mind, that he would someday return. Without this journey his life, and its long underflow of dreaming, would not be complete."
Guerard touches a sensibility with those words--"long underflow of dreaming"--which speaks to the yearning we all have, at one time or another, for something else, for another life, for a quest.
The journey Charles Stanfield takes, like the journeys the other characters all take, is a real one, with dangers and hardships and warnings. But the journeys are ultimately interior journeys. That's where the search lies.
"The Hotel in the Jungle" has a "Heart of Darkness" feel to it, full of fear, hope and fate. The lines cross between the living and the dead in fiction, as they do in life.
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