Having tricked the Lords of Xibalba into willing their own death, the hero twins do not, of course, bring them back to life, and so the Xibalbans are vanquished and the twins pass judgment on them by speaking a variant of the lines that Castellanos chose as the epigraph to The Book of Lamentations. This episode of the Popol Vuh resonates throughout her book (“I wrote the Popol Vuh,” Poniatowska remembers Castellanos joking), but never more strongly than in the passage where the rebelling Indians tell a cunning old Ladino that they have defeated death. At the old man’s prompting, one of them volunteers to be shot in the chest to prove it. The old Ladino fires the shot; the Indian dies. The Tzotziles fall for the hero twins’ own stratagem, tricked by their own myth. Death cannot be cheated. The laws of the material world are supreme and unalterable.

Its incorporation of the Popol Vuh is, however, the point where the novel’s obsession with synthesis can come to seem more affirmative. For even as it resists and argues against the dominant Mexican myths of cultural and racial fusion, The Book of Lamentations proposes a syncretism all its own. In 1959, three years before Lamentations was published, the woman who joked about having written the Popol Vuh wrote (with, it must be said, mixed results) two lyric dramas, Salomé and Judith, which recast Old Testament stories in terms of the conflict between Chamula and Ladino in Chiapas. The Book of Lamentations is clearly a project along similar lines, except that the story it retells is the Gospel itself.

This gospel according to Chiapas is not some pristine and incorruptible Word of God, but a human, hybrid revelation, shot through with traces, echoes and reflections of other texts and outside forces. There are, first and foremost, the Bible and the Popol Vuh; there is the historical record of the 1867 Chamula uprising and the land redistribution project attempted by Lázaro Cardenas in the 1930s. There is also Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, echoed in the story of Leonardo Cifuentes’ early years and in the novel’s clinical dissection of romantic passion. There is the fictionalized autobiography of Castellanos’s own earlier novel Balún-Canán, which resurfaces in the relationship between the neurotic invalid Idolina and her Tzotzil nana. There is the work of the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose ideas had influenced Castellanos to return to Chiapas to work with Mexico’s National Indigenist Institute in the years before she wrote this novel. And finally, there was the birth, in 1960, of the only surviving child of this woman writer who had quipped to her dissertation defense committee ten years earlier that “Women writers are writers because they don’t have children.” (For this book is, among other things, the story of a woman who quite literally sacrifices her child to her own ambition.)