A lean, quibble-less, and trimmed tale of the trip of a migrant soul amongst ghosts and spirits in search for a scope in life.
Essential, but not scant, the novel is set in a Mexico far removed from the holiday resorts, the Caribbean playas, and the tall and mysterious Mayan pyramids. This is the Mexico of the 'new’ colonizers, of the coalmines, of the fog that gnaws one’s bones.
Boston resident Eric and girlfriend Em set off on a journey, pushed by different reasons and motivations: while she is on a scientific expedition for her research study, he tags along searching for inspiration to write a book with the University funding he has been granted. They soon part: Em goes to the Yucatan peninsula and its voracious mosquitoes, Eric heads to the mining towns of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Almost by chance, Eric re-traces his grandparents’ lives and finds himself surrounded by the crowd of Cornish emigrants and indigenous servants who used to populate the mountainous region north of Mexico City in the XIX century.
The time of the year the story takes place secures for the book the sadness pervading Eric’s search: it is around the end of october-beginning of november, when the Day of the Dead falls, and its celebrations make a perfect background for the plot. Especially in Mexico, this recurrence is deeply felt and venerated. Mexicans commemorate and honour their dead in grand fashion, with special foods prepared and eaten at actual picnics held in the cemeteries, and family reunions that last all day and all night.
The reverence towards one’s dead, as a matter of fact, is a year round thing in this side of the world. One of the most peculiar museums you can come across on the planet is actually located not too far from where The zigzag way is set. The ground on which Guanajuato, capital of the homonymous State, is built are rich in minerals that end up preserving corpses when these are buried in the local cemetery. To avoid overcrowding the graves, the best-looking mummies are collected in the spectacular 'Museo de las momias’ that gets a steady flow of visitors, respectable families and kids included, not just the odd, macabre-loving nutcases.
Likewise, shops and shop windows, from Mexico City to the Pacific and the Caribbean coasts, are filled with small to real size skeletons, dressed up in any imaginable fashion, to testify the deep devotion and the easygoing intimacy that Mexicans hold towards those who anticipated them in the long afterlife journey – or simply in the exit from this world, depending on your credo.
The zig-zag way too is populated by dead people, and I don’t limit this definition to the many spirits that come back from wherever they finished up at the end of the 1800 when they died. Anita Desai makes it hard for the reader to grow fond of any of the characters, as they remain somehow detached, struggling to come to life, the alive ones resembling flickering ghosts and the dead ones faded photos. The narration is almost rushed, as if the author deliberately did not want to linger over the various stories, fretting towards the final denouement when all the threads come together and free Eric of his uncertainty.
One more theme to the book is peyote, and the indigenous pilgrimages revolving around it. The peyote is famously consumed by locals and tourists alike in this area, although, generally speaking, for very different reasons: to cause a state of meditative and religious contemplation in the Huichol Indian’s case, while mainly for recreational purposes by the uninitiated tourist.
To explain Eric’s final transformation from awkward post-doc to wise and inspired observer of the human nature and history, everybody is free to choose the explanation that best suits him/her: hallucinogenic trip or paranormal encounters, it does not really matter. The real merit of this book is the metaphor of the journey (the zigzag way, precisely) like the mind and heart opening tool that we should all experiment at one point of our existence.