Leaving Tabasco by Carmen Boullosa

My spouse is a man who has a great deal of difficulty leaving a free book behind.  He has read countless books that he would have returned to the library had we taken them out but that he cannot leave in the seat pocket on a plane.  As addictions go, it is a benign one but that is how this book came into our lives.  We were staying at a hotel in the very center of the tourist section of Oaxaca, where the staff spoke remarkably little English, but which had a little impromptu book exchange shelf right outside our gorgeous room.  He left something there that my mother had given him and he picked this book up.

The heroine of the story is Delmira.  She is raised in an unapologetically emotionally austere home in Tabasco.  Her mother and her grandmother are singularly unappealing and unfeeling women, and in the case of the grandmother, she has the magical realism of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character.  Delmira sees her grandmother float above the bed when she sleeps.  But that is not all--stones turn to water and there are other strange goings on.  There is a backdrop of the political changes that were going on in Mexico in that later part of the 20th century, and all in all it is a good book to read when you are enjoying some Mexican sun in the dead of winter.