THE WEIGHT OF ALL THINGS

A nine-year-old boy wanders through war-torn El Salvador, trying to find his mother and stay out of the line of fire, in this lucid but limited tale.

Benítez (Bitter Grounds, 1997, etc.) sets her third novel in the six-week period between two recent cataclysms of Salvadoran history: the March 1980 funeral of assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, at which 35 mourners were killed; and the military’s massacre of 600 fleeing peasants on the Honduran border. Although her protagonist, Nicolás de la Virgen Veras, lives in the countryside with his grandfather, he goes to San Salvador to join his mother at “the funeral of a martyred saint.” When violence breaks out at the cathedral, Nicolás’s mother is killed by a bullet. Separated from her body by chaotic circumstances, the boy thinks she’s still alive, but he doesn’t have the address of the house where she was a servant. So he journeys back to his rural village, only to find it abandoned and devastated by bombings. As he roams about, Nicolás meets both leftist guerrillas and right-wing army soldiers—all of whom say exactly what you’d expect—and comes to understand the tragedy of being caught in the middle. As Benítez notes, “While the two sides fought for their principles, most of the dying was done by the people.” Contrasting with the novel’s usual plainspoken realism are the occasional manifestations of the Virgin Mary, who gives guidance and reassurance to Nicolás during his most harrowing moments. Such scenes—when, for example, a statuette of the Virgin actually speaks to the little boy—are authentically weird and sometimes a bit mawkish. But they don’t distract from Benítez’s vivid portrait of a time and place in which even children are murdered without second thought.

Quite a valuable history lesson, despite its stock types.