Review by Annie Dawid
Novel – July 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Rise, Do Not Be Afraid
by Aaron Abeyta
Published in 2007 by Ghost Road Press
ISBN 0-9789456-8-9
ENTERING COLORADO POET Aaron Abeyta’s first novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, is like visiting a world that no longer exists — if it ever did. Santa Rita, the mythical Western town that forms the subject of this short, dense novel, is a place reminiscent of Eden, both before and after the Fall. One is reminded of Gabriel García Màrquez’s fictional Colombian town, Macondo, as Abeyta creates a culture in a specific place and witnesses its dissolution — from greed, abandonment, and the withering of love.
Like García Màrquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Abeyta begins with an annotated cast of characters, for it’s easy to confuse the people in this novel. Abeyta moves through time and generations as if through memory: “That was 1926,” when the fences were built, we are told in the same paragraph in which we have traveled even further back to the arrival of the treacherous Matthews family in 1878.
“Santa Rita sat in a long and deep canyon cut by an ancient river of ice, now melted to a river that flowed east toward the Rio Grande. There was no TV reception in Santa Rita. Most news traveled like it always had, by word of mouth.”
Author of the poetry collections colcha and as orion falls, Abeyta has written a novel that reads like narrative poetry, epic in subject, biblical in implication. Epigraphs from the Gospel of Luke begin most of the chapters, all unnumbered.
“He Viewed the Town and Wept Over It” (Luke 19:41) commences with “Nineteen fifty-five was the last good year. Ponce sold in 1926, but the devil did not come into Santa Rita until New Year’s Eve, 1955.”
Into this high desert paradise, the devil walks. He marries Malinche Santistevan-Matthews, lifelong beloved of Aresando, a damaged veteran. Love stories underlie the main narrative charting the rise and fall of Santa Rita, but the most compelling feature of Abeyta’s novel is the prose itself. Suffused with Spanish, it sings and mourns throughout.
“There in the sombra of the bosque he saw Rafael’s piano, he saw his tia Adelaida’s abandoned house beneath a bent cottonwood, Nonnatusia standing in a field of clover and brome, lirios purpling around her. …”
Abeyta informs us: “It’s not true what they say: we are not made of bone and blood. Humans, all of us, are made of choices.”
–Annie Dawid
This review originally appeared in High Country News, which covers the West’s communities and natural-resource issues from Paonia, Colorado.
Local addendum:
I had read Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, but hadn’t gotten around to writing a review for Colorado Central when this review arrived from the syndicate. I was in general agreement with it, but I’ll add a little.
In ways, it was like reading Tolkien — you move into a mystical world based on familiar elements. Tolkien’s Middle Earth had farms and rivers and roads, just as Abeyta’s Santa Rita has farms and rivers and roads. But they also have mystic and supernatural aspects.
Dawid’s comparison to 100 Years of Solitude also fits well; before I finished the first chapter, I thought “this mix of history and fiction and myth reminds me so much of Gabriel García Marquez and his magical realism.”
The book demands close reading, and it helps to have a Spanish dictionary and a Bible nearby. But it’s worth the effort as you see a community develop into a character, and share the frequent sorrows and occasional joys of life in some hard country.
— Ed Quillen
