Book Review: Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men

A novel by James Canon

by Pauline Uchmanowicz, December 27, 2006

Colombia-born-and-raised writer James Cañón spent the past five years working on his lyrically satisfying debut novel, Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men. Cañón sets his story against the backdrop of his native country’s prolonged civil war, focusing on recent atrocities in the annals of its “disappeared” (more than 3,500 people vanished between 1996 and 2000, and the toll continues to mount). The author derived his evocative premise from a Colombian newspaper article about two mountain villages where Communist guerillas had taken away most of the men. Imaginatively chronicling what might happen to the women left behind, Cañón envisions the emergence of an equality-based society.

Wry and episodic, Tales from the Town of Widows opens in November of 1992, when Marxist guerillas come recruiting in tiny Mariquita, a hand-drawn map of which serves as the book’s frontispiece. Ominous signs, such as roosters forgetting to announce the dawn, mark this day when “the men disappeared” (though a handful remain, including a deceitful Catholic priest who is ultimately banished). Resigned to food shortages, no electricity, and virtual widowhood, the women realize they must fend for themselves.

Middle-aged Rosalba viuda de Patiño, widow of the former police sergeant, soon seizes control as magistrate, appointing a displaced 67-year-old spinster, Cleotilde Guarnizo, as schoolteacher. With Cleotilde as her counsel, Rosalba sets about creating a functioning, agrarian economy, based on bartering and collectivism—ironically mirroring socialist ideals espoused by the guerillas. The duo’s most ingenious strategy for maintaining order in “New Mariquita, an independent, all-female community with special social, cultural, and economic characteristics, and close bonds with nature,” proves to be a lunar cycle-dominated, female-centered concept of time (pictured in a diagram in the book) that elapses in reverse so that the story’s running dateline concludes roughly where it began.