March Madness and Viva Zorro!

There are two kinds of March Madness in Long Beach at the moment: the basketball kind and the literary kind.

Sadly, Long Beach State was eliminated from the NCAA tournament last night, but March in Long Beach also means we are mad for One Book, and this year, it’s Isabel Allende’s Zorro. Sponsored by the Long Beach Public Library Foundation, Long Beach Reads One Book encourages everyone in the city to read the same book, and to meet to discuss it in a variety of venues and formats. There are readings, exhibits, and activities geared for every age, for every reading level, and for every book club, even the ones who spend more time drinking sangria than discussing Zorro.

And because it’s Zorro, there are even lessons in sword fighting!  And there's geocaching, because, why not?

I fell in love with Isabel Allende’s books (and developed a wee girl-writer-crush on Isabel herself) when reading her first novel, The House of the Spirits. It’s a gorgeous mess of a book, full of romance and magic and ghosts and beautiful girls with mermaid green hair and old men who unlearn their bitterness. All of Isabel’s books are messy, and most of them are successful in spite of that messiness. Her writing has a charm, a loveliness, that you can’t resist, and her stories are so wild, so outlandish, that you cannot help but turn the page.

And you will turn the pages of Zorro, and quickly – it is a sprawling, romantic, tumbling, successful mess. I’ve been trying to avoid using the obvious “swashbuckling,” but really, I can’t – this is, truly, a swashbuckling novel, one that is perfect for a city-wide read. It is a traditional adventure tale, sprinkled with postmodern touches, and it is a lot of fun to read.

In Zorro, Allende does what hasn’t been done before with the Zorro legend: she gives us Zorro as a youth, before he dons his infamous mask and cape. Through a mysterious narrator, we learn about the birth and early life of Diego de la Vega, son of a Spanish father and Shoshone Indian mother. Diego grows up on the Spanish mission in Monterrey and learns the lessons and values of both old California and the native warrior: honor, justice, respect, dignity, and courage. During an ancient native ritual to test his maturity and strength, Diego meets his alter ego, his spirit guide: el zorro, the fox.

The action moves from California to northern Spain, to the Caribbean (complete with pirates), to New Orleans, and back to California. There are pirate raids and Gypsy caravans. There is magic and mysticism and Indian folklore. There is political intrigue and tension between cultures and classes. And pirates, did I mention the pirates? And prison breaks and sword fights and unrequited love.  And a very big, very satisfying, surprise ending.

In Zorro, Allende does what she does best: she takes true events and real people from history and transforms them into a fairy tale. By adding the fantastic and the improbable, she makes the events even more gripping and the people even more real. Diego is a complex, conflicted character, and it’s his crises of identity that drive the action of this fast-paced novel. Our narrator tells us at the very beginning that “there is no one like Zorro,” and by the end, we not only agree, we understand why.

Are you reading Zorro? What Zorro events are you attending? Slash up the comments, Long Beach readers!