This hybridity is soaked into the very fabric of the text, which is interlaced with Tzotzil words, used casually and without explanation, as a natural part of the bilingual world the novel inhabits. This bilingualism can be detected even in the cadences of Castellanos’s prose, the preference for three words where one would do that is typical of Tzotzil phrase-making. In this way, Castellanos’s novel embraces the one thing neither Indian nor Ladino can bear to acknowledge: the fact that the two groups are inextricably part of each other, mutually interwoven and interdependent, indivisible.

Castellanos’s ambition to portray all sides of the cultural divide between Indian and Ladino has recently met with some criticism in the United States. Since she was not an Indian herself, the logic goes (and from a strictly genetic perspective, this is already a dubious proposition where any Mexican is concerned, and particularly one with tiny Mayan hands and a Mayan profile), she had no right to speak for Indians or represent them and by doing so was collaborating in the oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples. That logic—that no one has the right to speak except as a representative of their individual gender, class, sexual persuasion, ethnic background, religion, etc.—presupposes a vision of the world far blacker than the one depicted here. The one possibility of redemption this profane gospel holds out can be found in its own imaginative leap, its will to see reality in its entirety, to overcome the limitations of any individual viewpoint. That such an achievement can always only be partial does not mean it should ever be rejected. The complex act of understanding that this book embodies is the one hope it offers of a real understanding, somewhere, somehow, outside its pages.

For the most part, however, the gospel according to The Book of Lamentations holds out little hope of salvation. Its only god is force, its only ideology the universal struggle for power. These are unusual qualities in a work involving a political struggle in Latin America published only three years after Fidel Castro’s triumphant revolution. Its complete rejection of Cold War ideologies is another of the ways in which this novel goes against the grain of its time.

Fernando Ulloa, the reformer sent by the Mexican government to redistribute land, is accused of being a Communist, but his accusers have little idea what the term means: their charge is motivated by Ulloa’s assertion that all men are equal. And the categories of subversion and order are hopelessly jumbled: Ulloa is not a guerilla, but a civil servant charged with upholding the law and returning private property to the rightful owners from whom it had been confiscated. From the perspective of the late 1990s, this dismissal of the Cold War mindset seems highly prescient; the battle that rages in this novel is exactly the kind of ethnic conflict that has become all too familiar over the last decade.