cover image The Hotel in the Jungle

The Hotel in the Jungle

Albert J. Guerard. Baskerville Publishers, $23 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-880909-45-4

In a novel as dense as the Mexican jungle in which it unfolds, Anglo fantasies collide with Indian and Latino realities as Guerard (Gabrielle; The Past Must Alter) mingles historical and fictional characters who, in search of lost loves or impossible dreams, descend on a remote resort hotel in Chimalapas. In 1870, Rosellen Maurepas, free-spirited New Orleans widow of a Civil War soldier, journeys to the jungle on a quixotic search for William Walker, the notorious buccaneer and real-life conqueror of Nicaragua. Next, we jump to 1922, when English poet Monica Swift--who is modeled on Mina Loy (1878-1966), bohemian literary lioness of Paris and Greenwich Village--returns to Mexico in search of her husband, Brian Desmond--a stand-in for Arthur Cravan, the flamboyant real-life poet, boxer, vagabond and nephew of Oscar Wilde who mysteriously disappeared in 1919. Monica is accompanied by the frequently drunk, black ex-heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson (1878-1946), who spent a year in Leavenworth prison because he transported a white woman--his future wife--across state lines. Another hotel guest in 1922, retired septuagenarian Boston schoolteacher Charles Stanfield, is seeking a Zoque Indian woman who was his servant and lover 52 years earlier. The final section, set in 1982, casts the hotel itself as the main character as Tulane grad student Eloise Deslonde pieces together the fates of those who preceded her. If this is all a bit labyrinthine and weighted with historical freight, it will seduce readers of an obsessive, romantic bent similar to that of the characters in this ingeniously crafted, colorfully peopled tale. (June) FYI: Interest in Loy's life should peak in June, when Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish two related books: a biography by Carolyn Banks, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, and a collection of Loy's work edited by Roger Conover, called The Last Lunar Baedeker.