So Far From God

Essential points: This book is great for folks wanting an engrossing family story and/or who like magical realism—think One Hundred Years of Solitude, but feminist/woman-centric. Readers identified with or interested in learning more about the American Southwest (including indigenous, Mexican, mestiza/o, Chicanx and Latinx experience generally) will also find this a stimulating read. Subjects this novel includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find included in their literature!): magical realist elements including coming back from the dead, spirits returning after death, prophecy; queer relationships; death; gambling; indigenous religious beliefs coexisting and comingling with Catholicism.

“Only in hell do we learn to forgive and you got to die first,” La Loca said. “That’s when we get to pluck out all the devils from our hearts that were put there when we were here. That’s where we get rid of all the lies told to us. That’s where we go to cry like rain. Mom, hell is where you go to see yourself.” –So Far From God, p42

Ana Castillo’s 1993 novel So Far From God plays with life, death, hell, belief, the real and the unreal, turning the concepts like light-catchers to refract meditations and reflections on family, politics, sexuality, and humanity. The great part about this novel is that it truly does “play,” or else an assumption that this novel is a somber or academic one would be entirely reasonable. In fact, it is more like a ripple of water with light flashing upon it: sometimes light, sometimes dark, frequently delighting me so much that I laughed aloud, often sending me to the internet to search some phrase or concept (malogra or susto, for example), and engrossing me so thoroughly that I read the whole book in two days.

The tale is most fundamentally about a family. It’s about Sofia, who raises her four daughters mostly in the absence of their father, Domingo, who abandoned her—or—maybe it was Sofi who told him to get out of her house. It’s about the eldest daughter, Esperanza, who leaves her home in New Mexico to be a war reporter, and ends up vanishing in Saudi Arabia. It’s about Fe, longing always for a normal life, picture perfect and straight out of the catalogue, and who ends up preyed upon by the evils of corporations in the process of achieving her dream. It’s about Caridad, unable to stop loving despite a life of lost loves, who is both terribly destroyed and magically healed by mystical powers, and who becomes a healer in her own right—and maybe even a saint, or at least a sacred hermit. And of course it’s about La Loca, La Loca Santa, who rises from the dead at her very funeral, flies to the roof of the church, and is ever after wary of and revered by people, comfortable only with her sisters, mother, and the family’s animals.

Written in a literary genre dubbed Xicanisma by Castillo herself, this novel is just as much a heartwarming family story as it is a politically and spiritually engaged treatise on modern life for women, for Chicanx and indigenous people living in the United States, and for poor people. Even while relating utterly amusing tales of the characters’ various trials and tribulations, relationships and accomplishments, Castillo sustains a deep and sound critique of the United States, colonialism, and the systems that maintain generational poverty. For every joy in this novel, there is also a sorrow. Death—terrible and often senseless—is omnipresent. The injustices set in the way of poor people, such as environmental racism and severely curtailed life opportunities, are equally so. Similarly interwoven are the colonial languages of Spanish and English, creating a rich and impactful mixture. While there are certainly inside jokes included for feminists and social activists to enjoy—“Helena and Maria, although both born in Los Angeles, had met each other at a grass-roots organizers’ conference in Oakland…Finally, they came together and made their home, with their three cats, Artemis, Athena, and Xochitl, in a rented two-bedroom nestled in the redwoods just outside ese village called Santa Cruz. There they lived productive and peaceful lives, Maria as a tarot reader and social worker and Helena as an independent landscaper” (121)—the novel is by and large an embrace with open arms, not so much written for a particular subset of humanity as for humanity itself.