Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Gabriela Cabezón Camara’s new novel finds glimmers of hope for the future in the brutal history of colonial Latin America Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he's become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, cabin boy, and conquistador; he has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement, and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis, which just might save the new world from extinction… Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire and a historical novel that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny, and the treatment of women and indigenous people. It is a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center, finding in the rainforest a magical, surreal space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.

The positive thing we have to say about We are Green and Trembling is that some of its magic real storyline is exploring interesting ideas. The nature of the narrator's growth from a girl to a boy to man and finally to a parent was an interesting arc and the picture of the indigenous people of Peru and their conflict with the colonists both felt real to the region and well imagined. Unfortunately, that's where the praise ended. There were two big issue we had with this novel. First, the style, most notable the style of the letter the narrator writes, is just painful to read. We don't want to blame Camara for this -- it's a work in translation and it's hard to tell what was lost. Nonetheless, it was so hard to read those letters that many of us quit to avoid having to read more of them. The more central issue was that it wasn't clear at all what Camara was trying to say with this book. There is a ton of content about the indigenous people of Peru, but the narrator was not part of that culture, so the narrator had a strange ambiguous relationship to that content that never really gelled. It seems critical that the narrator is transgendered, but aside from the fact that he had that life, those issues never surface in the rest of story. Most of the plot never moves; we just jump between different moments in the narrator's history that essentially sit still. And there's a completely unnecessary queer romantic plot among the colonizers that never connects thematically to anything else. All of this made the novel both confusing and slow and it largely ends without resolving any plot except the colonizer march to genocide. There are really interesting concepts in this novel, but everything here just feels tossed together without any sense of how it fits and thus NUBClub can't recommend it.