The Medicine Man

The original title of this collection of exotic short fiction was El Diosero, which translates more accurately as ""god maker,"" and the protagonist of the title story is just that--a Caribe Indian who forms and destroys earthen god figures as imagination and necessity prompt him. The author, inspired by his travels to Chiapas, blends literary fiction with an anthropological view, painting vivid pictures of jungle and village scenes among the more obscure indigenous peoples of Mexico. A baby is christened Becycle after a passing doctor's bicycle, people are driven mad (or to their deaths) by an ""uncle"" who may be either a local spirit or a local hallucinogenic plant, a handsome young murderer is punished by being forced to marry a crone. One story features the author, mystified by one cultural curiosity after another, being told, ""It's easier for us to understand your world than it is for city people to come to know our simple minds."" True, but it is Gonzalez's insights into this world that have made this work a minor classic for half a century in Mexico. He is also a keen and poetic observer--he describes a famished village as preternaturally silent: lacking corn, its inhabitants lack tortillas, and thus ""the perpetual sound of hand slapping of the women had become silent in the huts of the Coras."" The film version of El Diosero won a first place at Cannes in 1955, yet the book is only now appearing in English. This slim but fascinating volume sheds a good deal of light, in absorbing detail, on the lives of remote Mexican tribes, many of which are on the verge of extinction. (Apr.)