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 Mapmaker's Opera. Born in Seville, Spain to a dishonored governess, a young Diego Clemente finds solace in the world of books, in particular John James Audubon's Birds of America. Mesmerized by the wondrous images in Audobon's magnificent volume, he longs to travel to the New World to find his destiny and see these amazing creatures for himself. When renowned American naturalist Edward Nelson enlists him by chance to create a guide to Yucatan's birds, Diego's dream comes true. Arriving on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, Diego finds himself in a world that is as precarious as it is beautiful, where opulent henequen plantations are built on the backs of slave labor and the social order is on the brink of imploding. And there, Diego falls for the young Sofia, a woman who longs to be as free as the birds she also loves. He tries with all his might to win her and, with Nelson's help, to save the last pair of passenger pigeons in existence. A mesmerizing tale of star-crossed passions, a pair of mysterious birds, and a young man's quest to honor both his passions, The Mapmaker's Opera transports its audience with stunning vistas, magical storytelling, anda universal story of love.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312364660
• ISBN13: 9780312364663
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.1" x 5.5"

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.