In particular, texts tagged along as missionaries fanned out to proselytize across the New World. When it came to converting indigenous people to Christianity, religious texts were a powerful weapon in missionaries’ arsenals, and psalms, confessions, and other liturgical texts—written in Spanish, Latin, and scores of indigenous languages—were printed in Europe and shipped across the ocean to New Spain. This land, encompassing present-day Mexico and other portions of Central and South America, was an epicenter of conversion efforts, and it soon became a hub for the printed word, too.
It’s easy to imagine how books could become casualties of a life that was itinerant by design. “Missionaries’ whole mission was to go out and constantly be on the move, and the books were, as well,” says Melissa Moreton, an instructor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. Before they did, monasteries and convents often made a bold claim to ownership. With a scalding tool, they seared distinctive marks onto the pages.
On the evidence of Figures in a Landscape, Theroux’s powerful persona is, oddly, not matched by an equal vox. Open a Burgess, or a Greene or a Naipaul collection of such picked-up pieces and you know at once, from the voice, who’s writing. There are several highly entertaining essays here, and some quotably arresting lines, but the voice is elusive, unfixed and dissonant – an echo of the divisions within.
Yes, there’s the sense of a literary feminist time-capsule, capturing a key moment of generational societal shift. What’s less expected, and a bonus, is that the women (questioning, raging, joking, contemplating) often sound so current. Granted, it’s a selective, largely bohemian group. But you’re still left with the feeling, not only of how women were then, but also how modern women still are – as Smith says, just, well, talking.