This week, I completed two novels pretty much on the same night.  One was short and sweet crime novel translated from French.  The other was a very thick Spanish-language novel that took me a long time to finish.  I would love to share them both with my students, but for different reasons these books are never going to see the light of day in my classroom. Too bad.  At their centers are strong female characters that take the bull by the horns, as they say. 

Aimée Joubert, the protagonist of Jean-Patrick Manchette's Fatale is a cold-blooded killer.  She's a Femme Fatale.  Like Lou Reed says in his song of the same name, "Here she comes/ You better watch your step/ She's going to break your heart in two/ It's true…"  Jaja.  On the cover of my copy, Aimée is wearing silky, sexy lingerie and packing a heavy black automatic pistol.  I'm not sure which gets my heart beating faster.  She commits her first murder on page four when she points a 16-gauge shotgun at a man taking a rest during a Sunday-morning duck shoot on a quiet French countryside.  He has a gun in his hands as well, and that's probably why he smiles at her when he sees her coming.  Apparently, she didn't think anything was so amusing. Before, he could say anything, she lets him have it with both barrels.   We don't know why she kills him, or anything about her background, but as she walks away, this guy is lying face down in the mud, and we know she is bad-ass.  She is a Femme Fatale.

  In Luis Urrea's Into the Beautiful North, La Nayeli is based on a true character.  I know that because I read the author's "afterward."  Luis met 19-year-old Nayeli while he was doing research for another book at a Tijuana dump site close to the border that separates the United States and Mexico.  In the book I read, Nayeli has come to T.J. with a small group of friends to cross. You see, they are on a mission to bring back a few men to their small village in Sinaloa.  It seems that over the years all the men from Tres Camarones have gone north to seek a better life in "Los Yunaites" – this leaves the women in their hometown vulnerable to a gang of Narcos who look to take over.  It was Nayeli's idea to cross over and bring men back.  She got the idea from watching the movie The Maginificent Seven with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.  Nayeli has no passion for violence like Aimee does in my first book selection, but she may be just as hard to the core.  You get this feeling, that no matter what happens, nothing is going to stop her from getting what she wants.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could invite my students on a journey through both of these novels?  I've read both of  them multiple times. Fatale may be considered a novela.  It's 91 pages.  I read it twice in one week. Into the Beautiful North is 338 pages, but I 've read it FOUR times.  TWICE in English and TWICE in Spanish.  Jaja.  I would have little difficulty arranging in-class lessons or activities for either, but Fatale may be much-too-violent for a college read. Beyond page four, Aimee hangs, stabs, and drowns her victims. One succumbs to a heart attack for pure fear of his antogonist.  Into the Beautiful North may glorify illegal immigration. From his previous books, Urrea knows of the brutal conditions many women face to cross the border. La Nayeli's ultimate objective may be to reunite with her estranged father. Her mission is heroic, but her means are criminal.  I've been around long enough to know this type of material doesn't fly with my many of my peers and administrators.  My students are the same age as La Nayeli.  Many of them  have friends and family members that have found themselves under similar circumstances. Sadly, in today's political climate, it's something we just don't talk about in class.

From reading student essays night after night, I have come to learn that sense of family is paramount.  I'm not sure how it happens, but a lot of nostalgia seeps into their writing.  Their essays often reflect their feelings for their parents, grandparents and Mexico.  They see important meaning in their roots. I know.  I know, I'm like 700 words into this piece of writing and I have yet to hint of Aimee's motivation for killing. I find it ironic, that in French the name Aimée can be loosley translated to "beloved."  How could anyone with such hard edges carry such soft spots in her heart?  But, Aimée does.  In between  killings she visits her near-deaf mother who lives alone in a small stone house in a tiny hamlet in the French countryside.  Probably not too far away where Aimée had blasted the duck hunter in the first chapter.  Here, Aimée stops by to ensure that her mother is safe and happy.  She brings her mother her favorite tobacco and conveys to her she has placed more money in her bank account. This passage reminds me of something eerily similar to something I read about Marilyn Monroe.  At age four, Marilyn was separated from a mother who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  Marilyn's mother was institutionalized in a mental hospital, and Marilyn was left to live in foster homes and orphanages.  Through to her adulthood, Marilyn maintained a complicated and strained relationship with her mother, but she never abandoned her.  Up until the day Marilyn died, she strived to provide her mother with the emotional and financial support she needed.  I write this because many of Marilyn's biographers imply Marilyn inherited an emotionally scarred life from her mother, and she knew it.  I know almost nothing about Aimée's childhood, but following my readings of Marilyn, I can infer a connection between the way Aimee treats her mother and her complicated and/or violent nature.

La Nayeli hasn't seen her father in ten years.  All that she has left of him is the last postcard he had sent to her from Kanakee, IL.  Clearly, La Nayeli loves her father.  In Tres Camarones, before he left, he was a police officer.  He taught his daughter football and encouraged her to study karate.  Maybe he had always wanted a son, but Nayeli thought he loved her as much as she loved him. From her father, La Nayeli developed a hard edge.  Several times in the novel, she faces violent confrontations with men and always comes out on top. She carefully keeps her father's postal card tucked away safely in her back pocket.  It reminds her to never back down or give up. Much of the novel describes La Nayeli's search for her father.  Nothing is easy. From San Diego, she crosses the country with out money, contacts, or language skills, ands she overcomes all obstacles in her way.  I won't give away the ending here, but for me, it was sad and unexpected. After all that work, I envisioned a happy ending between Father and Daughter.  That didn't happen, and that doesn't change my appreciation for the novel.   Let me put it this way:  I bet you that after reading this book, my students will be less surprised than I was.  Note to Jay: This passage will make for a great classroom discussion.

I'm not writing book reports here; I'm just thinking out loud. I'm fairly sick of grading student reading repsonses to standardized questions. I don't  think I read Fatale or Into The Beautiful North on any conscious literary basis. At the same time, the female protagonists have haunted me to this day. I think about the connections Aimee and La Nayeli had for their  mothers and  fathers. I would imagine my students would too. I hope my classroom assignments encourage students to write on a personal level.  My students are a diverse bunch.  They come from different backgrounds and maintain different viewpoints.  But one thing is clear:  my students share a sense of empathy and compassion stories about the family.   They will read well beyond the basic character descriptions of Aimee and La Nayeli.  That's important, because in these times of isolation and despair, it's easy to forget what is most important.     

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