Author Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ new book, The Bullet Swallower, has been making a splash in literary circles from an interview with NPR to positive reception from Kirkus Reviews and the L.A. Times to being chosen as Boston.com’s Book Club Read for February. Amidst it all, the indie bookstore in Warren, RI, Ink Fish Books, has become a local touchstone for the author and her new book, hosting the Boston.com Book Club discussion virtually on the 26th, as well as an in-person event with James and local author and professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University, Grace Talusan (The Body Papers) on the 28th.
The Bullet Swallower, James’ third book, is a western magical realism novel “about violence and revenge, a story about who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.” The novel weaves a narrative between grandfather and grandson: in 1895 where Antonio Sonoro, a fearsome bandido, sets off from northern Mexico to rob a train in Texas with his younger brother, but things fall horribly awry when they are caught by the Texas Rangers; and in 1964, Jaime Sonoro, Mexico’s darling singing cowboy, finds trouble when he discovers a cryptic book detailing the horrific crimes of his ancestors, their cosmic debt, and how he might be the next in line to pay the price.
The book is based on (mostly) true events. “The Bullet Swallower is loosely based on the true story of my great-grandfather who was a bandito, and he was shot in the face by the Texas Rangers,” explains James. “He lived, and that little seed formed the basis of the novel.” And while the rest of the novel includes magic and a range of fictional characters, much of the book is steeped in historical research about life at the Mexican-American border in the late 1800s and the Texas Rangers. “Anytime I found a really compelling character or arresting image, I just grabbed it and put it in the novel. It was kind of like a collage [or…] like quilting, stitching together all these pieces into a coherent picture […] of little found scraps.”
James gives an example of one of these found scraps in a scene where the bandito Antonio sees tens of thousands of dying cattle lying in the bank of the Rio Grande. That image was pulled from the collected letters of a woman who was an earlier settler in Corpus Christi, Texas. Proof that reality can be just as compelling, strange, or disturbing as fiction.
The idea behind The Bullet Swallower hadn’t started out as a grand epic in the same vein as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (even though the true story of her great-grandfather seems incredible on its own). In fact, James had “never read a western before I started writing this book; I had no interest in westerns. I’m from Texas, the cowboy mythology is so thick in the air there already.” Instead, this novel started from the realistic world of sales: her debut work Mona at Sea gave publishers pause because it refused to sit in a marketing box (not YA or adult, not literary or commercial fiction, and it strained the lines between “dark” and “comedy”), and a western adventure about swashbucklers already had its place on the shelf.
But once she started researching, the author fell in love with (at least a few) westerns, the epic ideas grew (the first draft was over 500 pages long and included gun smuggling, a movie set, and a the construction of a dam along the border), and then Trump had gotten elected “and all of this anti-immigrant sentiment was getting whipped up […] and suddenly this area in Texas that I’m from is like the political flashpoint of the moment,” remembers James. The book is historical, “but the stuff I’m talking about is still going on: the racism, the economic disregard the United States has for Mexico, and the way Mexican people are treated in this country are still very present-day issues.” The call to write not just a gun-slinging western about Mexico and America became a story about the border: “I had a large and sacred duty to get this right.”
Despite – or perhaps because of – the political themes, the response from readers has been (so far) very positive. James spoke about a woman she met on tour in Rockport, Texas, who had told her that how this novel portrayed the complicated struggles along the border “humanized” the struggles on both sides. “I would hope that anybody who read the book would have maybe a more complicated understanding of the border,” James says. “When you reduce something as complicated as people fleeing civil war, or poverty, or crime, and seeking asylum, when you flatten that into good guys/bad guys, you foreclose a lot of possibilities for how to actually help.”
For further reading, a good resource might be Reading Across RI’s 2024 book pick, Solito, a memoir about a boy’s migration story from El Salvador to the States.
