Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft is a sprawling novel, immense in scope despite its limited setting on the Texas-Mexico border, in the towns of Brownsville (Brunveille) and Matamoros (Matasanchez). Boullosa sometimes gives the absurd impression that this is a parsimonious narrative. In fact the breadth of life on offer here is immense. The novel tracks teetotalers, spies, madmen, ghosts, and runaway slaves, to name a few—and in Texas, as in Texas, action is set off by words and lead. 

A bit of history is in order: Not long after Mexico declared its independence in 1821, the federal government invited settlers to live in Mexico’s far north. The gringos were bound to contracts, pledging their allegiance to the Mexican government’s values—to abide by Catholicism, and no importing of slaves under any circumstances. The Americans who flocked to the settlements predictably failed to honor these promises and soon declared their independence. Texas, the Lone Star State, was born. Their domain grew, arbitrarily; Texas declared that its border extended just north of the Río Bravo. After joining the United States in 1846, they invaded in 1848, and to legitimise their new land, turned an isolated dock into Brownsville, a bustling town that served as a point of departure to Matamoros.

Texas begins with Don Nepomuceno—based on Juan Cortina, the Robin Hood of the Rio Grande—urging Bruneville’s Sheriff Shears to let go of Lazaro, an old ranch hand. The request is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, for Nepouceno hails from a land-rich Mexican family, and that land is being stolen from them under a thin veil of diplomacy. “Shut up, you dirty greaser,” Shears tells the sheriff, and after some deliberating, Nepomecuno shoots him. While the bullet, which penetrates his right inner thigh, isn’t deadly, it hurts and sends a message. 

Between the insult and the shot, half of the bystanders run off, eager to spread the news. The bullet itself isn’t so important; gunmen pass through Brunveille all the time, “each of them is capable of acts of lawlessness and all sorts of violence. Shots are nothing.” The news is carried around, just like anything the gringos or the greasers might carry in their pockets. It’s a game of Chinese whispers, and the variety of interpretations it conjures shape the rest of the book’s action.

Introducing this new, tenth anniversary edition, Merve Emre helpfully lists the cast, and a nine-page dramatis personae completes the book. Bullosa’s vivid and highly visual writing additionally lightens the load, as do the close associations between different characters. Like the gossip spreading around town, the narrative is often moved along by characters passing one another like batons in a relay race. Boullosa’s style evokes a dolly camera drifting down a street, turning its focus onto whomever happens to be in frame, offering up their fundamental problems for a moment. It is in these moments that we learn that Eleanor, the minister’s wife, is attending to a sick man so she can catch his sickness, and that buffalo hunter Trust has sodomized a buffalo “or the buffalo sodomizes him” in his dreams. 

As Texas weren’t already immense enough, the novel is narrated by an animist. Fatal bullets come to life in their victims’ heads (“it knows it wasn’t meant to end up there”), a mortally wounded horse bemoans that his owner never gave him a name, and a leaping frog yearns to be someone else. Every part of this world teems with life and history, and the story is in relentless motion. Fraught with death, Texas barely pauses when its characters pass on; in fact, Boullosa’s narrator often seems as careless about death as the gringos who kill vaqueros just because they’re playing songs they don’t like. Often, Texas reads as if we are visiting the narrator, walking through the streets of Brunveille and Matasanchez, or stopping in Mrs. Big’s Hotel for a drink and an update on the news of the day.

Texas: The Great Theft is so expansive, it defies any summary or concluding comment. It might be ranked among Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Borges Aleph, as an attempt to conjure infinity within the confines of finitude.

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Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published over a dozen novels, several of which have been published by Deep Vellum in English translation. Boullosa has received numerous prizes and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Also a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural critic, Boullosa is a Distinguished Lecturer at City College of New York, and her books have been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. 

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Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She lives in Houston, Texas.

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Colm McKenna is a writer based in Paris, France.