Avenue of Mysteries
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 10, 2017 1:29 PM | Last Updated: April 11, 2017
John Irving
As we grow older — most of all, in what we remember and what we dream — we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. "An aura of fate had marked him," John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. "The chain of events, the links in our lives — what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do — all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious." Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past — in Mexico — collides with his future. (From Knopf Canada)
From the book
In Oaxaca, he was what they called a dump kid (un niño de la basura); he lived in a shack in Guerrero, the colony for families who worked in the dump (el basurero). In 1970, there were only ten families living in Guerrero. At that time, about a hundred thousand people lived in the city of Oaxaca; many of them didn't know that the dump kids did most of the picking and sorting through stuff at the basurero. The children had the job of separating the glass, aluminum, and copper.
People who knew what the dump kids did called them los pepenadores — "the scavengers." At fourteen, that was who Juan Diego was: a dump kid and a scavenger. But the boy was also a reader; the word got around that un niño de la basura had taught himself to read. Dump kids weren't the biggest readers, as a rule, and young readers of any origin or background are rarely self-taught. That was why the word got around, and how the Jesuits, who put such a high priority on education, heard about the boy from Guerrero. The two old Jesuit priests at the Temple of the Society of Jesus referred to him as the "dump reader."
From Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving ©2015. Published by Knopf Canada.