With its simple language, this book is easy to skim. Guard against that.

I was drawn to Stones for Ibarra by a Wikipedia comparison to One Hundred Years of Solitude and a mention of magical realism.

Stones is the story of Sara and Richard Delton and their experience in moving from California to Ibarra, a small village in Mexico, to reopen Richard’s grandfather’s abandoned copper mine. Nearly every chapter is a glimpse into one facet of the lives of the villagers – the poor, the pious, and the slightly criminal. Soon though, it’s clear that we are inside Sara’s head, and the last few chapters are less about the village and more about their marriage.

Doerr’s prose is spare and expressive; if the book were a painting it would be drawn with vivid colors, a landscape populated with simply depicted people and animals. The viewer would have a clear understanding of the lives being illustrated and of the natural world surrounding them.

What puzzled me was why the Deltons even have a place in the painting. They definitely have their own story line, and a sad one it is – but it’s awkwardly juxtaposed with village life until the last couple of chapters.

This is explained by the fact that Harriet Doerr and her husband Albert did move from San Francisco to Mexico to run Albert’s family mine, and their story ended much as the Deltons’ did. Although it’s presented as novel rather than memoir, this is based on actual events. I’m not certain how strictly autobiographical it is – did Luis, Ignacio, and Paz really exist? Did Lourdes the housekeeper really hide charms around the house to keep the Deltons healthy and the mine prosperous? We don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

Stones for Ibarra was published in 1984 – a little young for a classic, but it reads like a classic and it won a National Book Award for First Work of Fiction, among many other awards. The author wrote a second novel and a collection of short stories and essays. The book was the basis for a movie made for TV in 1988 starring Glenn Close and Keith Carradine. ( )

Dower is fantastically talented. But felt more like linked stories than a novel. About an American wife trying to process the slow decline and death of her husband in Mexico. ( )

3.5***

At the outset of the novel Richard and Sara Everton arrive in the remote mountain of Ibarra, Mexico. The state is never specified but I believe this fictitious town is in the state of Michoacan. They have sold their home in California and most of their belongings to move to Ibarra so that they can reopen the Malaguena mine that Richard’s grandfather abandoned some fifty years previously.

What were they thinking? This is not a quaint, lovely town, it’s a dusty, dying village with impoverished and little-educated residents, and little to no infrastructure. Yes, they have plumbing and electricity, such as it is. But they must travel several hours to a larger city to place a phone call. At least they speak Spanish … sort of.

But the Evertons are committed to this plan. They work hard to re-establish the mine, hire a housekeeper, cook, gardener, and security for the front gate. Begin to hire and train workers for the mine, buy local furnishings for the house, and make a life here. They don’t really understand the local culture, but they are at least open to learning.

I found this very atmospheric. I loved the descriptions of the various festivals and local traditions, the unique blend of native religious beliefs with Catholicism, and of herbal medicine administered by a curandera vs “modern” treatments by a university-educated physician.

There are several subplots involving the residents of the town, including a love-triangle between two brothers and a fetching young girl, a procession of young priests brought in to assist the resident pastor, and a series of doctors, mostly fresh out of school, whose life’s ambitions were clearly NOT to live in remote Ibarra.

The book was made into a TV movie in 1988, starring Glenn Close and Keith Carradine as Sarah and Richard Everton. I’ve never seen it. ( )

Stones for Ibarra originated as a group of short stories about an American couple in a small Mexican village. The vignettes that constitute the eighteen chapters of the novel are set in the 1960's and chronicle episodes that focus on the interactions of the couple with the denizens of Ibarra, connected by the passage of time between the arrival of Richard and Sara Everton and Sara’s departure six years later. The author claimed that only a small part of Stones for Ibarra was autobiographical, but the framework of the novel recalls the Doerr family’s forays to Mexico.

In the first chapter, “The Evertons Out of Their Minds,” the couple go to Mexico from San Francisco, California, to reclaim their family estate and reopen a copper mine abandoned since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Not long after their arrival at the unexpectedly dilapidated house, which fails to match the faded family photos or the Evertons’s dreams, Richard is diagnosed with leukemia and given six years to live. Despite the brevity of the second chapter, “A Clear Understanding,” several months pass in which the Evertons are observed by the townspeople, who find the Americans peculiar. Interestingly the Evertons never really shed their outsider status in spite of their interest in the culture of the small community.

Richard seems emboldened by his medical diagnosis and works hard to make the mine operable, hiring many locals and becoming something of hero in a strange way. The stories that comprise the short chapters drift backward and forward in time, though when a native is asked about specifics of an incident he replies: "Senora, it is as difficult to recapture the past as it is to prefigure the future." The author meanwhile is successful in portraying the landscape, and gradually providing evidence of the kind of culture that exists in this out of the way place.

The town priest is a frequent visitor to the Everton home, and he figures in many of the vignettes of the novel. He has a variety of assistant priests, who build basketball courts, are beloved of dogs, and impregnate a woman from a neighboring village. He sponsors a town picnic and solicits donations from the nonbelieving Evertons. Other vignettes relate the sad tale of brother killing brother, the use of native remedies to protect the Everton house, Sara’s Spanish lessons with Madre Petra, and the visit of a Canadian geologist and his Lebanese engineer.

The novel is written in a thoroughly crafted prose in which each sentence is pared down and polished until only the essential remains. As a consequence, the reader seems to somehow create the text while reading it, to discover in Doerr’s spare phrases the meaning and emotion the characters themselves hesitate to reveal. The novel reveals as much about the “lost” American expatriates as it does about the Mexican natives, by shifting perspectives and allowing the reader to see each group or individual through the eyes of the other. ( )

11. Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
published: 1984
format: 214 page paperback
acquired: inherited from my neighbor upon his move
read: Feb 20-24
rating: 4

Doerr's claim to fame seems to be that she published her first book, this one here, at the ripe young age of 74. She outlived her husband, who died of leukemia, and then went back to school to complete her unfinished BA and that led to here.

Gentle and atmospheric are two things I struck me initially on starting this. Richard Everton abandons his career in the US to re-open a family owned mine in the middle of nowhere desert of Mexico. He brings his wife, Sara, and they move into an old run-down mansion in a tiny town, find plenty of locals willing to work the mine. Shortly afterward he is diagnosed with leukemia. Most of this is autobiographical.

The novel isn't like a novel. It has the feel of linked short stories, with each chapter focusing on one character or oddity of the region. Several were published prior to the book. First Sara is generally amused. She struggles to learn Spanish well enough to have clear communication, but wonders and is charmed by the passionate and brutal Catholic community she now lives within. But these stories seems to get darker, and Richard gets sicker, and husband and wife remain non-religious outsiders (called North Americans), wealthy benevolent respected and necessary heathens. Eventually the stories settle more on Sara and her mental and emotional struggles with her husband's sickness, and somewhat with her grief after his passing. There is a cumulative gravitas. And there is a lot of Mexico. Still thinking about it.

2017
https://www.librarything.com/topic/244568#5950618 ( )