A 12-Year-Old Recommended This Book To Me

Missy was telling me about her latest read that is 'The Murmur of Bees' (2015), originally written in Spanish by Mexican writer Sofia Segovia and translated into English by Simon Bruni. When she summarized the story for me, I was like, this is quite a difficult read for a 12-year-old. When I scanned the summary of the book, I was like, 'OMG this is so not my kind of read.' I read it anyway. 

Set in 1918 against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish flu (pandemic), it goes to agrarian hills and fields around Linares, southeast of Monterrey. It traces the life of landowner and his family, and that of an abandoned baby under the bridge, covered in a blanket of bees. The abandoned child with no upper gums and lips is adopted by wealthy landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, and named Simonopio. The story is narrated by one of the Morales' sons, Francisco Jr.; he looked back on the chaotic events surrounding the pandemic, the evacuation to another hacienda, and general unrest in the country. 

Simonopio is clairvoyant, unable to speak, and is followed around by his protective swarm of bees. He senses danger and all positive future events. The people in the small town is superstitious and views him as an underling of the devil. In Manuel Roig-Franzia's review for The Washington Post on May 14, 2019, he wrote,

But Segovia doesn’t fall prey to sentimentality. For all his laudable traits, Morales — who like many of the Mexican elite of the day is pale-skinned and fair-haired in contrast to the dark-skinned campesinos — has benefited from a brutal system in which poor sharecroppers work the land with little hope of ever becoming owners. Espiricueta’s family had been homeless and starving when they were granted permission to farm on Morales’s land, but they feel trapped, “prisoners of their will to live and the unexpected and cruel kindness of these people who offered only false hope.”

On the hacienda, Simonopio grows into a remarkable child, in tune with nature, even as he is unable to speak. Bees follow wherever he goes, except on the rare occasions when he strays onto the land tended by Espiricueta, whom he imagines as a menacing coyote, a figure of complicated mythical significance in Mexican lore.

This is a very long book, with two separate timelines in this story of magic, kinship, love for the land and the hacienda, and the warm and colorful traditions of the people. It took me three sitings to get through this book because, like I said, this is the 'family saga' type of novels or long-running television series whose storylines span decades and generations. I cannot. How on earth did that girl finish this book? I'm full of admiration. 

It's not just about magic and psychic abilities or nature. There're interwoven themes of obviously family loyalty, love and all that. It's rather complex because it's of a hacienda owner, the family's history and the relationship with their workers. I was left raising eyebrows at some of the paragraphs — not for any obscene or unsuitable topics for a 12-year-old, but for its complex political ideology and civil society comments. I wonder exactly what 12-year-olds learn in school nowadays, and what they talk about with their friends. 

Then the war ceased to be a distant curiosity and became an insidious poison. Beatriz's self-deceit came to an end in January 1915, and the armed struggle arrived in her home and her life to stay, like an unwanted, invasive, abrasive, destructive guest.

That was when it knocked on her family's door, which her father opened with a naivety for which Beatriz still could not forgive him.

.....................

All Mariano Cortés left behind when he died was a deep void. 

Now they had to keep enduring the mournful tributes and accept that they were well intentioned. Beatrize continued to do so, though the rage and hatred that filled her at times like this, when she succumbed to introspection, frightened her. If she loved her father, why could she not forgive him for dying? As a good Catholic, why had she been unable to look the bishop in the face since that moment in the middle of the Requiem, when he said that her father's death was God's plan, and that He sent ordeals as a blessing to those who deserved them most and were most able to endure them? And why did she now look with suspicion and anger at the people of worth, the cream of society, with whom she was supposed to mix?

Perhaps because she knew that one of them had been her father's betrayer.