The Mapmaker's Opera

By Bea González

Book Overview

IN A TOWN IN THE HEART OF LA MANCHA, home to Don Quijote and his windmills, the Clemente family lived for centuries, their fortunes tied to those of a plant... So begins the grand tale that is The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0007207794
• ISBN13: 9780007207794
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

oh, you lucky canadians

This is a startlingly beautiful novel, even better than the author's previous work, The Bitter Taste of Time. The present work is a love story of innocence and purity battling family and societal traditions, written with the plot structure and emotional denouement of an opera. The setting is the Latin lushness of both the Old World and the New, Seville and the Yucatan, described in living prose suffused with azafran and agave. It is a tale of aesthetes written by an aesthete. The real genius in the writing is how so many threads of art, science, and history, including opera, ornithology, cartography, revolution, and even astronomy, are woven together into such a compact but rich backdrop which serves to enhance the beauty of the central love story. The only thing wrong with this book, indicated by the title of this review, is that it's not published in the United States. I got my copy during a recent stay in Toronto. (I also tried to bring back a national health care system, with less success.) Feel fortunate to be able to get your hands on this book, especially in its handsome first edition. It's a masterpiece.