This week, we're pleased to welcome author Claudia H. Long with her latest novel, THE DUEL FOR CONSUELO. The author will offer a free copy of The Duel for Consuelo to a lucky blog visitor. Be sure to leave your email address in the comments of today's author interview for a chance to win. Winner(s) are contacted privately by email. Here's the blurb.
The second novel of the Castillo family, The Duel for Consuelo is the gripping, passionate story of a woman struggling to balance love, family, and faith in 18th century Mexico - a world still clouded by the Inquisition.
History, love, and faith combine in a gripping novel set in eighteenth century Mexico. In this second thrilling story of the Castillo family, the daughter of a secret Jew is forced to choose between love and the burdens of a despised and threatened religion. The Enlightenment is making slow in-roads, but Consuelo’s world is still influenced by the dark cloud of the Inquisition. Forced to choose between protecting her ailing mother and the love of a dashing Juan Carlos Castillo, Consuelo’s personal dilemma reflects the conflicts of history as they unfold in 1711 Mexico. It's a rich, romantic story illuminating the timeless complexities of family, faith, and love.
**Q&A with Claudia H. Long**
You've written three historical novels. How are they related?
Learn more about author Claudia H. Long
The Duel for Consuelo
www.claudiahlong.com/blog
History, love, and faith combine in a gripping novel set in eighteenth century Mexico. In this second thrilling story of the Castillo family, the daughter of a secret Jew is forced to choose between love and the burdens of a despised and threatened religion. The Enlightenment is making slow in-roads, but Consuelo’s world is still influenced by the dark cloud of the Inquisition. Forced to choose between protecting her ailing mother and the love of a dashing Juan Carlos Castillo, Consuelo’s personal dilemma reflects the conflicts of history as they unfold in 1711 Mexico. It's a rich, romantic story illuminating the timeless complexities of family, faith, and love.
**Q&A with Claudia H. Long**
You've written three historical novels. How are they related?
Josefina's
Sin is about a young
landowner's wife in 1690 Mexico. She goes to the Vice-Royal Court and meets the
famous poetess, Sor Juana. She discovers the treacherous worlds of illicit
love, duty, poetry and the terrors of the Inquisition. The Harlot's Pen
jumps to 1920 in San Francisco, where the Labor Movement is just starting to
include women. At the same time, the brothels are being closed down in a big
"clean up" effort, and women are being cast into the street. Our
heroine becomes an "embedded" reporter, literally ;) to write about
the real conditions of working women. The Duel for Consuelo follows Josefina's
Sin now in 1711, where Consuelo is trapped between the secret practices of
hidden Judaism and Inquisition-imposed Christianity, between family and love,
trapped between two men with secrets of their own.
Why did you
choose to write about 1700 Colonial Mexico? (It's a pretty unusual setting for
historical fiction!)
I grew up in
Mexico City and wrote my undergraduate thesis in 1972 on Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, Mexico's famous poet. She was a true feminist, a passionate defender of
women's right to study, read and write in an era where that was beyond radical.
In Mexico she is considered a national treasure, and as a college student I
couldn't help but fall in love with her. So the time period of 1675-1725 in
Mexico was a natural place for my imagination to live. People don't think of
Mexico as having the allure of historical fiction that say, Regency England
does, but the passions of the time, the terrifying and inspiring history and
rich detail are incredible.
So Consuelo is
the descendant of Conversos?
As practically
everyone knows, the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492, at the time that the
Muslims were expelled as well. Persecution had gone on for centuries, of
course, but Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in an uneasy peace until the expulsion
edicts finally put an end to co-existing.
But not all Jews
left the only homes they had ever known. Having lived in Spain for four hundred
years, it was as much their country as America can be to any of us.
Contradictory edicts made it impossible to leave, mandatory to leave, requiring
conversion, denying the merits of the conversion, all with the drumbeat of
confiscation of wealth behind the acts. So not only were Jews required to leave
or convert, they often were prevented from exercising either choice. If they
were "lucky" they converted and eventually got out, often as
financial advisers, to the New World.
Two-hundred-and-fifty
years later, Consuelo would be a distant descendant of the original converts.
But the strain of the old religion ran deep, and families could still be forced
to "prove" their allegiance to the new religion. Any hint of
Judaizing, or secretly practicing their old religion, was ruthlessly ferreted
out by the Inquisition, which led Conversos to the practice of haciendo sábado, or "doing the
Sabbath." This involved ostentatiously working on Saturday so the
neighbors could see them, eating pork in public, and putting on other displays
of Christianity.
1711 was a tumultuous year in New Spain. The new Viceroy, Duke of Linares,
arrived ready to clean out corruption. Of course, that was a monumental and
thankless task as those with funds, long used to a free hand, opposed him at
every juncture. Throughout Europe the Enlightenment movement was growing, but
in Spain, both a cash-strapped king who had waged war with France, England, and
Holland, and the weakening Inquisition used their last gasps of power to stifle
any "new thinking." Those new thinkers, unflatteringly called novaderos,
looked to the rest of Europe for inspiration in the burgeoning sciences,
streamlined poetry and prose, and a new social order. In Mexico, ideological change was slower to
come, but the freedoms of being far from the source made for independent and at
time strange ways of thinking.
Consuelo is
caught between both worlds. She lives in fear of discovery, all the while not knowing
much about the beliefs of a secret Jew. She's a Catholic in her mind, but when
the consequences of her heritage come home to roost she is forced to make the
most difficult choices of her life.
What are some
things you'd like your readers to know about you?
1. People say writing is a painful, or
lonely process. I don't find that to be the case for me. In fact, it's
sometimes the only time I get to myself so I relish the solitude. And as for
painful, what's the opposite of painful? My big secret is that I find writing
physically pleasurable!
2. I tend to take up hopeless hobbies. I
play the violin as the acknowledged worst violinist in America. I'm small and
not terribly coordinated, so I took up Tae Kwon Do and got my black belt after
ten years, twice as long as it should take. I then embarked on belly dancing,
which at my age is funnier than I'd like to admit.
3. I never give up on what I want. I am
terminally optimistic, and will toil for years to achieve something if it's
important to me. And I never stop believing.
The Duel for Consuelo
www.claudiahlong.com/blog
