Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima seems to be widely hailed as the forerunner of most Chicano/a and Southwest fiction, and in fact I can see its fingerprints all over Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, which I reviewed back in April. While Kingsolver's book was about coming home again, Anaya's is a coming-of-age story about 7-year-old Antonio, who is caught between two ways of life (will he be a priest or a farmer?), two religions (Catholicism and the native religion embodied by the Golden Carp), two identities (Antonio at home, Tony at school) and a whole series of intra- and inter-family struggles.

In some ways the novel is brilliant; New Mexico in its complexity absolutely comes to life. The greater world available to those who move away is portrayed in its absence by brothers who leave for war, return, and then leave again for the cities, but the variety of the countryside is clear as well. The school Christmas pageant is brilliant comic relief. More than anything else, however, the symbolism is poured on more thickly yet consistently than in just about anything I've ever read.

Yet, I still have a lot of reservations about this book, because I cannot relate to its central theme of the multiplicity of sprirtuality. As someone who is basically (for lack of a better term) a secular humanist, the basic battle between Catholicism and "pagan" religions for Tony's soul just isn't compelling to me. Ultima is an old bruja (witch) from the llano rangelands, and she is the spiritual center of the book. But at the end of a day I just can't abide by a book where the strong suggestion is that the witch actually has powers, as opposed to the type of the book that suggests earthly causes of the apparently supernatural. Because of the overwhelming presence of the supernatural here, I couldn't help but drift in and out of interest in places.

I highly recommend this book for its prose and its portrayal of Chicano/a culture; I would have reservations, however, about recommending it to people who just aren't that interested in the spiritual and supernatural.