A Tumble Through Time, Space

Magic and mystery abound in “Chronicles of Air and Dreams: A Novel of Mexico� by Rosa Martha Villarreal (Archer Books: $22, 239 pages), but the book is not just another work of magical realism. Although the author is capable of dazzling and enchanting us with feats of literary legerdemain, “Chronicles of Air and Dreams� can also be read as a hard-edged historical novel, a ghost story with unsettling psychological overtones, and a postmodern parable about the search for meaning in a materialistic world.

The conjuring begins when Maria Elena Vazquez, a young Mexican-American woman from Northern California who works as a translator at an archeological dig in southern Mexico, survives the collapse of a pyramid and emerges from the ruins with the ability to speak only a single language--a dead language of the ancient past. Is her ailment best explained as a psychiatric disorder, or is it possible that Maria Elena has passed through the looking glass into a landscape in which time and place, gender and identity, are no longer fixed points?

Maria Elena appears to be haunted by a man who has been dead for nearly 500 years--Martin Cortes, the bastard son of Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, and the high-born Aztec woman named Malintzin who had served as translator to the conquistador. Eventually, Maria Elena finds herself drawn to a site in the Yucatan--the Pyramid of the Magician--and that’s when the secrets that have confounded her, some of them profoundly mystical and some of them very much in the here and now, slowly but relentlessly begin to reveal themselves.

What gives “Chronicles of Air and Dreams� so much of its power and punch is Villarreal’s own fascination with the politics that are at work in every human enterprise, ranging from a family in crisis to a nation struggling to resolve its oldest conflicts. Born in Texas and now living in Central California, Villarreal traces her bloodlines to 16th century Mexico, and she is animated as much by history and politics as by mysticism and magic. Above all, Villarreal succeeds in telling her tale in the clear and compelling voice of a gifted storyteller.

“Chronicles of Air and Dreams� brings to mind a primeval insect caught in amber, something strange and baffling that we are able to see and ponder with perfect clarity.

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In the opening scene of “Reunion� by Sam Bluefarb (Creative Arts Book Co.; $14.50, 221 pages), the author reveals something fundamental about his frame of reference when he pauses to point out that one of his characters has “Merle Oberon eyes.�

Suddenly, we find ourselves in Los Angeles in the late ‘40s, a place where newly returned veterans on the GI Bill are struggling to reinvent themselves as civilians, and opportunity-seekers from all over a war-shattered world are seeking to invent themselves as Americans. The Red Cars are still running, but freeways are already under construction; young lovers are still obligated to register in hotels as “Mr. and Mrs.,� but they are not waiting until they are married to do so.

“Reunion� focuses on one emblematic veteran in particular, Dan Hellman, and the exotic young woman with whom he falls in love--Kathleen Ariel, an Iraqi-Jewish woman from Bombay who is studying at USC. “It’s like the end of the world, isn’t it?� muses Kathleen as the two of them look out over the Pacific at Big Sur. “No, Kathy,� says Dan, “it’s the beginning of the world . . . for us!� But Bluefarb reminds us that, for all of the boom spirit of postwar California, the storm clouds of the Cold War were already building on the horizon and the sunniest landscape was overshadowed by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

“Live it up!� goes a toast on New Year’s Eve in 1948. “Doomsday tomorrow. Uncle Joe’s getting the Big Bomb, and old Winnie the Pooh Churchill’s helping him fire up Project Mutual Suicide.�

Dan and Kathleen turn out to be star-crossed lovers, and “Reunion� spans a lifetime of intimate agony. To show us the wounds that Dan carries, both physical and emotional, Bluefarb flashes back to the trenches of World War II and flashes forward to the compromises that Dan makes in order to soothe himself. But, as the title implies, the story comes full circle, and we end up back in Los Angeles in yet another era of high spirits and high hopes.

Nothing in “Reunion� quite prepares us for how it will turn out for Dan and Kathy. But we are reminded that, for some storytellers, Southern California is always the place where dreams eventually come true, one way or another.

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.

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* Sunday: A holiday shopping guide to “The Best Books of 1999,� including 96 fiction titles and 70 nonfiction titles.