Instead, her method was to reimagine each element of the story on its own terms and within the echo chamber of everything she brought to the writing of the novel. She then juxtaposed the various strands in all their radical incompatibility. “When they are written out, incidents adjoin one another so closely that their proximity looks like coherence,” the reader of The Book of Lamentations is cautioned. Without calling attention to its resistance by using experimental narrative techniques (“The story is, in and of itself, complex and confused enough not to add further architectonic and stylistic difficulties,” Castellanos said), The Book of Lamentations tacitly combats this illusion of coherence, representing an infinitely-faceted event in such a way as to include the silent abysses that gape between each participant’s understanding of it.

Like the nineteenth-century Latin American novels of the tradition that it recuperates and transforms, this book is concerned, above all, with synthesis. Unlike those novels, Lamentations aims not to reassure its readers of the peaceful fusion of all the disparate elements of their nation but to depict the shattering absence of any such fusion. As it rejects a narrative synthesis that would gather different viewpoints into a seamless whole, it also rejects the overarching myth of racial and cultural synthesis (of mestizaje and syncretism) that is the foundation of Mexico’s national self-image.

The story begins with the rape of Marcela, a Tzotzil girl, by Leonardo Cifuentes, a Caxlán or Spanish-descended landowner (and here it’s worth mentioning that when I first visited San Cristóbal in 1990 there were huge graffiti everywhere that said “Stop the rape of indigenous women,” which apparently continues to be a favorite local pastime). Likewise, Mexican history begins with the conquest and ravishment of indigenous peoples by European invaders, a violation that gives birth to la raza, the people of modern Mexico. But the mestizaje of Castellanos’s novel is a forced and unwilling proximity, without community, without understanding, without fusion. Despised by whites for being an Indian, Domingo, the child born of rape, is rejected by his mother because of the European blood that his curly hair betrays. Later, when the people of Chamula put him to death, the question arises: Does the fact of his Caxlán blood make it easier and more tempting for them to crucify him?