Country Life

Originally published in America in 1908, this charming book is much more than the “traveller's account of life in Mexico” that its subtitle modestly proclaims, Charles Macomb Flandrau lived for several years in that country, and his impressions are deep, sympathetic, and judicious. In addition, he is a marvellous writer, with something of Mark Twain's high spirits and Henry James's suavity.

Flandrau's Mexico is a fascinating, exasperating place, “one long carelessly written but absorbing romance”, where “there are no fixed rules”. But he does not let the picturesque gild the grinding lot of most of her people. He knows that the Diaz government, nominally republican, is in fact arbitrary and oppressive. The Church, though disestablished and less able to present reality as “a priest with hell in one hand and a yawning purse in the other”, is still “corrupt, grasping, resentful”, whatever the vision of ultimate solace it provides.

Yet he takes things as he sees them, and is as witty as he is observant. His catalogue of sights includes, for instance, a New Englander on his first trip south, so obsessed with poisonous snakes and insects that “he had a haunting idea that the entire toxical population of Guatemala would be lined up at the railway station to receive him”. A chapter-long letter from his brother's coffee plantation is both touching and hilarious, moving from descriptions of helpless poverty and ignorance, to a native wake which ultimately becomes “in every respect like a dance, except for the facts that there is a dead person in the room and that there is no dancing”. He records with equal zest as Mexican salsa, in which conversation is continuous, simultaneous and deafening, and supper at his brother's struggling finca, where he interrupts a discussion of War and Peace to crush a passing tarantula with a candlestick.

Indeed, most of Viva Mexico's charm is due to Flandrau himself, to his combination of urbanity and integrity. I appreciated meeting him as much as the country he so infectiously appreciates.