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Reviewed by:
  • The King and Queen of Comezón by Denise Chávez
  • Lydia Presley
Denise Chávez, The King and Queen of Comezón. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2014. 328pp. Paper, $19.95.

In her newest novel, The King and Queen of Comezón, Denise Chávez explores longing and an itch for something more through the lives of Arnulfo Olivárez and his family, along with the citizens of Comezón, a small border town in New Mexico. At one moment her characters’ braided stories evoke tears, the next roaring laughter.

Chávez, well known for her ability to tell a good story peppered with intriguing characters, translates “Comezón” as “an itch,” a longing for something just beyond the reach of the people who live within its borders. We are welcomed into the novel on Cinco de Mayo by Arnulfo Olivárez, Comezón’s “King,” who claims the town is indeed “Itch, New Mexico. Homeplace of living history . . . birthplace of legends . . . México before the signing of the Gadsden Purchase, yes it is, or it was” (16). Arnulfo is an aging patriarch, secretly dying of lung cancer and trying to manage his failing body as he watches his beloved home subjected to time’s alterations. He struggles with identity, often indulging in protracted introspection, longing to master his life at its close, longing to give and receive love, feats he’s failed to master.

Olivárez’s family is filled with vivid characters, from his wife, Emilia, who struggles with her own failing health while longing for her husband’s attention, to his daughter, Juliana, born with a physical [End Page 276] disability, making it impossible for her to care for herself, and her beautiful half-sister, Lucinda, the Cinco de Mayo Queen, who longs for nothing more than to escape the Olivárez household, yet still desires the family she cannot have. Added to this mix is Isá, the family’s maid and Emilia’s friend, a woman who resents having to care for Juliana, resents Arnulfo, but dotes on Lucinda, Arnulfo’s daughter “by that other woman,” whom Emilia has raised (60).

The King and Queen of Comezón’s cast also includes El Padre Manolito, a priest who desires Juliana, whom he cannot have. Chávez writes that “everyone was smitten by the Julianas of the world, and though they seemed to revere and honor the Lucindas, it was truly the Julianas they adored” (13). And there is Rey Suárez, a bartender with a heart of gold, the owner of El Mil Recuerdos, the place of a thousand memories, whose business provides a “local hangout with not much happening in the usual sense of happening on the Texas-New Mexico-México border,” yet “en otro sentido, in another sense, it was the only place in Comezón that was really happening” (62). Numerous other townspeople figure in these characters’ lives and enliven the narrative.

Chávez’s story spans the months between the celebrations of Cinco de Mayo and El Día de la Independencia (Mexican Independence Day). At the end, Arnulfo reflects on these months, fathoming that a “comezón exists in most everyone’s heart and memory—which is really the same thing—a lost love, a never-found love, a love rejected or accepted, a love known but then strayed, a found love not known, a place, a thing, a goal, tangible or not, a lover alive or not, dreamed or not, a phantom always loved” (321). It is this longing for love in all her characters that cries out to be heard throughout Chávez’s novel, begging for an ear to listen, even if just for a moment—all the space in which some of them have to speak. [End Page 277]

Lydia Presley
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
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