The Dark Virgin Oakland Ross by Oakland Ross 9781443403641, 1443403644 instant download after payment.

Imagine a city, the greatest city on earth, with great towers and wide boulevards, filled with beautiful people, writers, artists, administrators, and prosperous merchants. Then see it suddenly reduced to rubble, its population wiped out by religious fanatics from across the sea armed with terrible explosive weapons and deadly diseases like smallpox.

In Oakland Ross's The Dark Virgin, the year is 1519, the place is Mexico City, or Tenochtitlén, the capital of the Aztec empire, and the tale of the conquest of New Spain is profoundly disturbing. Ross's excellent retelling makes use of recent revisionist histories of this event, focusing on the ambivalent but fascinating figure of Doña Marina, the translator and mistress of the conquistador Cortés and the epitome of treachery in Mexican tradition. Although the settings are magnificent, the main characters are simple to the point of being banal. Yet their selfish, picayune motivations, which set in motion a terrible train of events, are probably closer to how history actually works than any theory of "great men" or ideas. Ross's laconic narrative throws together all manner of clashing beliefs and world views, with the Dark Virgin of the title appearing out of left field, appropriately unexplained. Finally, a gringo gets magic realism right, even if he blows it in his over-explanatory afterword. Although The Dark Virgin (the first volume of a projected trilogy) owes a lot to Eduardo Galeano's visionary history of the Americas (Memories of Fire), it's a hell of read. It will be interesting to see if he can keep it up. --Robyn