A funny thing about being in Mexico: although I’m not taking a class or working with a tutor at this time, just being here is giving a boost to a longtime project, that of reading Isabel Allende’s novel El Cuaderno de Maya in the original Spanish. I started reading it in 2013, I think, and I often joke that Allende has published three books in the time it’s taking me to work my way through this one. It’s the truth.

We own the English translation (Maya’s Notebook), and I could read it in a couple of days, but I worry that that would sap my motivation, and so I plod along in Spanish. Usually I read a couple pages at a time, once or twice a week, just enough to keep ahead of my weekly meeting with my Spanish teacher. Our hour is mostly spent in my reading a paragraph aloud in Spanish, then translating it into English, then our discussing any questions or mistranslations, and going off on various tangents of language, culture, or literature. Then we repeat. It is an excellent way to learn the language. Guillermo brought in a couple different novels; one by Junot Diaz was just confusing, but when I’d read the first couple of paragraphs of Maya (which you can read here, or in English here), I was so captivated by the character’s voice that I didn’t want to stop. So we knew that that was the one.

Last summer, I set myself the goal of finishing the novel by the end of 2015, but could not keep up the necessary pace of 2-3 pages per day. But here in Mexico, I am motoring through at a pace of 10-12 pages at a sitting and have read about 80 pages in the past couple of weeks. It’s just so much easier now. I love her writing, and I can’t wait to find out what happens. And I have time. And Allende’s language is all around me.

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