Revue de presse :
'Was she a traitor or the mother of modern-day Mexico? Malinalli, the Native American translator and mistress of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, has been called both. Laura Esquivel's poetic new novel, MALINCHE, brings her to life . . . as much about the life of a woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances as it is about the destruction and creation of cultures. Esquivel, who wrote LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, has woven together Native American myth, legend and history, and loaded it with earthy imagery . . . it is hard not to be drawn into the fascinating and complex interior life of a woman who helped shape Latin American history' FT MAGAZINE, 8/7
'The expression "malinchismo" survives in modern Mexico to mean a traitor, but the iconic presence of Malinche herself is more ambiguous - she was not only a traitor but also a diplomat, abandoned child, victim, whore and mother of the first mestizo, or mixed-race Spanish-Mexican child, the symbolic mother of the new Mexico . . . Esquivel's narrative . . . proceeds in a series of tangents - memories, legends, ancient stories of the gods, retreats from painful reality into mystical reverie - all expressed in a style both vivid and naive' THE TIMES 8/7
‘Tells the story of an Aztec woman who changed sides and helped the Spanish conquer Mexico’
New Statesman Christmas books 18/12
Présentation de l'éditeur :
An extraordinary retelling of the passionate and tragic love between the conquistador Cortez and the Indian woman Malinalli, his interpreter during his conquest of the Aztecs.
Malinalli's Indian tribe has been conquered by the warrior Aztecs. When her father is killed in battle, she is raised by her wisewoman grandmother who imparts to her the knowledge that their founding forefather god, Quetzalcoatl, had abandoned them after being made drunk by a trickster god and committing incest with his sister. But he was determined to return with the rising sun and save her tribe from their present captivity.
Wheh Malinalli meets Cortez she, like many, suspects that he is the returning Quetzalcoatl, and assumes her task is to welcome him and help him destroy the Aztec empire and free her people. The two fall passionately in love, but Malinalli gradually comes to realize that Cortez's thirst for conquest is all too human, and that for gold and power, he is willing to destroy anyone, even his own men, even their own love.
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