Curva Peligrosa
Lily Iona MacKenzie, 2017
Regal House Publishing
312 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780998839806
Summary
According to Steven Bauer, author of The Strange and Wonderful Tale of Robert McDoodle and A Cat of a Different Color, "Curva Peligrosa is a wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths; it’s a book which attempts to say serious and important things about language, story-telling, mortality, indigenous cultures, love, and sex."
At its center is a big woman—Curva Peligrosa. Over six feet tall, she is possessed of magical powers, adventurous, amorous, sexual, and fecund. She’s got the greenest of thumbs, creating a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she has a wicked trigger finger.
When she rides into the town of Weed, Alberta, she’s like a vision out of a surrealistic western, with her exotic entourage—two dogs, Dios and Diosa, and two parrots, Manuel and Pedro—and her glittering gold tooth, her turquoise rings, her serape and flat-brimmed hat, her rifle and six-shooters. After a long—twenty-year-long—trek up the Old North Trail from Mexico, she’s ready to settle down a bit. Her larger-than-life presence more or less overturns the town of Weed, whose inhabitants have never seen anything like her. She’s a curiosity and a marvel, a source of light and heat, a magnet.
In fact, she’s the physical embodiment of the tornado that will hit Weed two years after her arrival, a storm that turns the place upside down and unearths a trove of bones of those who had lived on the land before the Weedites: Native Americans and prehistoric animals.
While the tornado damages Weed and disrupts the lives of its white inhabitants, it provides an opportunity for the relatively feckless (at that point) Billie One-Eye, the putative chief of the local Blackfoot tribe. As he protects the bones and dreams of preserving them, he turns into a true chief when he creates a museum that will honor them.
Curva and Billie share the book with a raft of colorful characters, borrowing from the literary tradition of South American magic realism. Curva Peligrosa attempts to bridge North and South America, Natives and whites, Americans and Canadians, urban and country, nature and technology. It pushes the limits of reality, showing how novel reality is and how real a novel can be in how both depict the everyday.
A love story, Curva Peligrosa reminds us that life is a mystery, inscrutable, as is art, one reflected in the other, an attempt to articulate what is eternally present and true. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• Education—Two M.A's., San Francisco State
• Currently—lives in Richmond, California
A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in her early years, Lily Iona MacKenzie supported herself as a stock girl for the Hudson’s Bay Company, as a long distance operator, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored her into the States).
She also was a cocktail waitress at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, was the first woman to work on the SF docks and almost got her legs broken, founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, co-created The Story Shoppe, a weekly radio program for children, and eventually earned two Master’s degrees, one in Creative Writing and the other in the Humanities.
Her reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir have appeared in over 155 American and Canadian venues. Fling! was published in 2015. Curva Peligrosa, another novel, launches in 2017. Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Her poetry collection All This was published in 2011.
Lily taught at the University of San Francisco for over 30 years and currently teaches creative writing in USF’s Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
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Book Reviews
For those who love adult fables and supernatural tales, Curva and her mysterious powers will keep you enthralled and entertained.
K.L. Romo - Amazon Customer Review
Curva Peligrosa had me hooked from the opening paragraph. It's so easy to enter Curva's world full of memorable characters, the dead as well as the living. It was really hard to put this book down, and I felt a bit bereft when I reached the end.
Mary E. Corbett - Amazon Customer Review
Why must you read Curva Peligrosa? It's a story of the living — and dead. It is an inspiration to live life fully, and well. It's an education into history, travel, and indigenous people. it's a story of people, and change, and written with a very strong sense of place. It's full of characters you will love. And, it's a book you won't be able to put down. I loved Curva Peligrosa, and tell everyone I know about it. Highly recommended.
Jessica Voights - Amazon Customer Review
Discussion Questions
1. Curva’s letters from the trail have a unique function in the novel. How does your understanding of Curva evolve based on these letters? What role do Curva’s letters have in the narrative? How does the Old North Trail educate Curva? What difference is there in the first and third person perspectives?
2. Poems (”Bone Songs”) appear between major sections of the narrative. What is their purpose? What dimension do they add to the work?
3. Sabina appears mysteriously as Curva’s daughter. How does their relationship shift over time? How would you describe their relationship? How are mother and daughter similar and different? Who is Sabina’s father?
4. The Weedites collectively play an important role in Curva Peligrosa. How would you describe what they contribute? Who are your favorite Weedites and why?
5. Billie One Eye figures significantly in the novel. In what ways is he an important character and why? How does he complement Curva?
6. When Billie goes on his vision quest, he hopes to have the sight restored to his one eye. It isn’t, so he believes the quest was a failure. Is he correct? Why or why not?
7. Not only is Curva Peligrosa a fiction, but there also are additional fictional worlds within this novel, such as Berumba, created by the imagined novelist Luis Cardona. How do Berumba and its characters interact with Curva Peligrosa’s narrative? How is the novel about storytelling and the ways people get succor and enlightenment from it?
8. Bones of various kinds turn up in Curva. In what ways do they complicate the story?
9. The novel starts out with a tornado, and Curva’s arrival in Weed two years earlier was almost a tornado in itself. What did she introduce to the town? Is she a positive or negative influence there?
10. Sabina has important relationships with Billie and Ian. What does each contribute to the girl’s development?
11. Curva’s twin brother Xavier is more than a ghostly figure in the narrative. How do you understand his part in the book and his relationship with Curva?
12. What are the parallels between Curva and Don Quixote? Is Curva mad? Is Cervantes’ Don Quixote mad? Do Curva and the knight share the same goals? Does Curva have her own Sancho Panza?
13. Curva makes it clear from her first meeting with Shirley that he’s a danger to her and what she believes in. How do you understand his presence in the narrative and the nature of Curva’s attraction to him?
14. Does the natural world function as a character in Curva? If so, how would you describe its part in the narrative? How do you understand the greenhouse?
15. From the beginning, Curva makes known her desire to discover the elixir of life. Is she successful? Has she fulfilled her quest for immortality?
16. Curva Peligrosa fits into the magical realism genre, though realism also plays its part. Describe the magical elements in the narrative and how they interact with the more realistic ones? What qualities give Curva Peligrosa a mythic/fairy tale tone?
17. Several different worlds intersect in Curva Peligrosa: Berumba, the Blackfoot reservation, Weed before and after Curva’s arrival, the American oil scene, etc. How do you understand the ways in which they relate to each other?
18. Curva, who grew up in Mexico, resists living out the kind of traditional female role prevalent then, in Mexico and elsewhere. Is she successful?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)