Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
3.5 Stars

TL;DR

Another thought-provoking, character-driven literary fiction read from Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  My go-to author always surprises me with many tidbits of Mexican culture, people and places that come alive – this time in more ways than one.  Again there is a dual protagonist in search of an elusive third character who is seen mostly in the negative until the end.  There’s an excellent discussion of PTSD and CPTSD, codependent relationships and boundaries.  Nazi occultism, racism and colonization in Mexico, gender and sexuality, and other social issues are examined.  The underlying theme, though, is about overcoming fear to find true power in authenticity and grounding.  

I remain agnostic on the actual ending of the book, between the protags.  I’m okay with it either way.  Not my decision to make.

Ultimately I can't give it a higher rating because I kept getting pulled out of the story by exposition, repetition, and things that felt too conveniently written.

***

I look forward to reading whatever Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes.  I eagerly read this one as soon as it became available (to me), shortly after finishing Velvet Was the Night, which is now an all-time favorite.  I’m glad I bought that one in hard copy.  The author seems to have almost lifted that successful narrative framework and reused it in Silver Nitrate, overlaying a somewhat jumbled magical system over it with confusing results.  The two stories track directly, right down to the true identity of the ancillary character's elusive rich relative.

While  Silver Nitrate also resonated deeply with me, and gave me quite a lot to think about, I really struggled with it.  Up until the 70% mark I thought this would be the first time this outstanding author would write a dud.  And I wouldn’t be mad.  Because it’s still a better book of literary fiction than most people will ever write.  But it did feel repetitive and often stretching disbelief.  This author does magical realism much better, I think, than hocus pocus.  The Beautiful Ones struck the perfect note IMO.

All of that overly complicated occult stuff is just mumbo jumbo for self-loathing people who wish they were special.  That’s why Nazis were into it. This is a book about weirdos trying to do spells in order to temporarily override natural processes.  I find all of that truly odd.

What I really did not expect was the thorough and accurate portrayals of both PTSD and CPTSD in Tristan and Montsterrat, respectively.  

I find the other characters in Moreno-Garcia’s books consistently relatable, or I wouldn’t bother reading them.  But this was the first time I found one of her characters personally identifiable:  Montserrat.  She has a very consistently authentic CPTSD personality type in which I immediately recognized myself.  I felt extraordinarily seen in an unexpected way as a person living with mental illness.  That meant a lot to me.

As a person living with PTSD and CPTSD since I was 7 years old, I was very pleasantly surprised by the rep of the two MCs in this book.  Living with both conditions since childhood, and as an author myself, that aspect of the book was a breath of fresh air and caught me quite by surprise.    I would recommend something that I have found to be very close to the “spell magic” attempted herein, every bit as powerful and profound as that stuff (which I do not believe in and wasn't scared of) appears to be.  I have created magic in my life by writing as described below.

But instead of whatever strange goals these cultists have, the goal you can achieve here is being happy and feeling good in your life:  The A-B-C worksheet.  https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-processing-therapist.pdf  It’s on Page 62 of that pdf.  Page 61 has a helpful diagram.  

You might think of it as the Abracadabra worksheet, because real magic is super simple in my experience. You take a few minutes, half an hour tops, to be honest with yourself and rewrite your trauma.  Nothing about manifesting devil dogs or spinning lightning webs, only the emotional stuff and whatever you already saw when you went through the looking glass in your trauma.  

Once you work through that, there’s less desire for the weirdness.  You take the part of your life that feels stuck in your body, that’s wrecking your head, and you rewrite it with the words of your choice, just as Montserrat instinctively know to do in Silver Nitrate.  And the power magically appears in your body as soon as you write it.

Know how she learned that?  Because she grew up disabled and latchkey, like me. When there’s nowhere to go but through the darkness, you push to where you want to be.  After you’re already there, you don’t reach for the devil’s hand and follow.

While this book is ostensibly about two people who are into movies for different reasons (one an introverted sound technician, the other a vain, egocentric actor) who discover a racist cult using a film to cast spells, it’s definitely not a thriller.  It’s another book of literary fiction, like the other ones this author writes.  It’s about people and society, feelings.  It's about queer people from the wrong side of the tracks, who bond as children.

So those who are looking for a fast pace, or want it to be about the plot, will probably be disappointed.  Even for me as a literary reader there was maybe some extra dallying in the valley this time.  I was at the 70 percent mark thinking if there weren't so much synchronicity to my own life I would DNF.  And I quite enjoy the side trips.

All of her characters are relatable and draw me into the story.

However there were a few things that kept drawing me out of Silver Nitrate.  I wasn't bothered by the minutiae of her fandom OCD, because that's par for the course with that character's CPTSD personality.  The hocus pocus didn't scare me, the exposition was too convenient, the narrative seemed too formulaic from Velvet..  There's an info dump in a letter that seriously killed the boner in my brain.  I was surprised her editor left it in.  I was bouncing back and forth between feeling validated by the PTSD/CPSTD characters and annoyed.  It was jarring.  Also there's a running idea about clairvoyance involving sharp headaches that runs directly contrary to personal experience, and that's strongly reinforced throughout.  Not only does that contradict my personal experience, it's not what others have described to me in similar situations.  And I've seen my share of the dead people, so IDK.  The part where there's a silence you can't explain, or a fuller darkness, that sort of thing, yes.  But the information coming with pain, opposite.  And that's emphasized.

Trouble befalls Tristan and Abel, and not Montserrat, once they start dabbling in the dark things.  She doesn’t suffer in her life, because Montserrat doesn’t suffer from the same shortcomings that all of the others do:  self-loathing, and thus greed to take what someone else has/is.  

Montserrat is the only really honest one, happy with who she is and what she does.  She is the only one who wants nothing for herself, only for her sister.  She doesn’t do her work in the sound booth for money.  She’s placating her OCD, scratching that itch that I personally know all too well.  It’s part of CPTSD.  It started in early childhood and has never stopped.  But she’s otherwise grounded within herself in a way that the others aren’t.

**SPOILER** So when she rejects the deal Ewers offers her at the end, to become recognized as a hotshot editor, it isn’t that she’s some wizard superhero or whatever.  It’s that she can see that it’s all a lie.  It’s very simple.  He has nothing to offer in real life, and he never did.  How could she possibly trust him?  What is he without her anyway?  What does she need him for, when she’s never relied on anyone but herself, even as a child?  This is very evident to an old lady surviving with CPTSD.

Alcoholic, neglectful parents often have latchkey children who parent themselves.  When you spend enough time working real hard, all by yourself, and not getting rewarded – like Montserrat and I have – they can’t take that away from you.  You can’t cheat an honest survivor, basically.  It’s the same reason the elderly shaman gives Ewers a hard bounce when she feels/sees his two murders.  There was an automatic rightness to that tiny bit of the book that kept me reading on when I really wasn’t liking it overall. **END SPOILER**

I don’t generally read books with magic systems that need to be cleverly revealed.  I never read things with dragons, where people have names with ravens in them.  All of that starts feeling pretentious and pulling me out of the story right quick.  It feels like it’s for people who don’t like who they are, wish they were special instead of honing their specialties.

But this is a very skilled author.  And she deftly addresses the idea that a lot of occultism is for phonies and grifters preying on people who either (a) believe they were born special, or (b) will pay to become special.  That’s why it appeals to the colonizer mentality.  And the usual suspects are in the house:  Guido List, Aleister Crowley, and all the wannabes.  As Montserrat observes, they’re like magpies, these people, thieves at heart.

One thing I thought was funny was the references to Atlantis.  Atlantis is presumed to be both Aryan and thus infallible in this story.  My understanding of it is the opposite, that it was Aztlan, more of an Aztec offshoot civilization in the first place.  I’m not disagreeing with the author’s premise, that it’s a common Eurocentric conceit to believe that Atlantis was Greek/European. and aliens must have intervened in any complex indigenous technology.  There’s a reason the Spaniards destroyed all of the ancient Mayan codices pronto, before anybody else could make sense of them.

But also, if the Atlanteans were such infallible wizards, where are they now, tough guy?  LOL  Right?  I’m not saying they didn’t have highly advanced technology.  Only that they knew enough to destroy themselves.  

Also, there are still Mayans now.  They still speak Mayan languages, in Mayan villages.  Just not like back in the day. And they absolutely had advanced technologies that our current hotshot scientists still can't explain, like the sound phenomena at ball courts and temples.   We don't even know what-all they had back then, or what other cultures existed exactly.  There could be a whole "hidden in plain sight" thing, just saying.

The Atlanteans weren't super sorcerers because they were just people, like everybody else.  Because that’s how life works.  Because nobody is any different than anybody else, and they never were.  No one civilization is inherently greater or worse than any other, except in the eye of the beholder.  It’s all pretense, delusion, and stray emotion.  Moreno-Garcia makes that point very well in the book.

Despite being a big, pink weirdo, I’ve been honored with invitations to different indigenous events including pipe ceremonies and a sweat lodge.  Different things have happened.  I’ve seen and experienced things that I couldn’t understand or explain even if it were allowed, which a lot of the time it isn’t.  

There was never one second that I didn’t know for sure I had every resource I needed from the Earth.  The only fear I ever experienced was that which was already inside of me, what I brought to the table in the first place.  I saw and experienced things every bit as magical and amazing as referenced in this book, but nothing vaguely terrifying or “evil.”  It's a completely different concept.

Indigenous Mexicans know how to do their ofrendas.  If the Navajo need to smudge, they already know when and how to do it.  Nobody else needs to worry about any of this weird stuff mentioned in the book.  Such things are not real, which is why this book failed to scare me a la <i>Harry Potter</i>.  

What’s real would actually blow your mind.  But you’d have to give up the wizard fantasies to find out.  You’ll never be invited to learn while on this self-hatred tip.  People only need to learn these weird, complicated parlor tricks because they don't feel good enough.  And there are much easier ways to feel better about your life, like the A-B-C worksheet I posted above.  

I'm still not sorry I read this book.  But it's not her best.  Read this one if you're a movie buff.  It was cool to learn about chaneques.