‘Maximilian’s Garden’ Has Latino Setting

Huntington Beach author Nina Vida’s latest book is an historical novel that deals with past and present Mexico and has a Mexican-American judge from Los Angeles as its contemporary heroine.

But despite her Spanish-sounding name, the Huntington Beach author of “Maximilian’s Garden” (Bantam; $4.95) is actually an Anglo of Russian-Jewish heritage.

Vida, who grew up in East Los Angeles in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s and later learned to speak fluent Spanish, said “Maximilian’s Garden” is “kind of unusual: There are very few Mexican-American novels in the mainstream.”

She said she did not feel intimidated being an Anglo writing what she calls a mainstream Latino novel.

“Actually, all my books deal with the history of some people,” she said. “I’m used to doing research, and I’m very confident. But my fear is the Chicanos feel they should be writing the mainstream book that gets out there, and here I am a non-Chicano writing about Chicanas and Chicanos and getting in the mainstream. I may be overly sensitive about it. I’m hoping they look at the book and not who wrote it. Let that stand.”

The book seems to be standing on its own quite well indeed.

Vida learned last week that “Maximilian’s Garden” has been sold to Diana Publishers in Mexico City, which will translate it into Spanish.

“That was a very big plus because Mexico hardly ever buys American books,” she said. “They’re just not interested in our books.”

In this country, the opposite is true. Vida said few Latino books are published by American publishing houses. Arte Publico is one small prestigious press that publishes Latino writers, she said, “but it is very difficult for the Chicano writer to get through to mainstream publishers.”

Of “Maximilian’s Garden,” Vida said, “I hope this is a beginning for Hispanic novelists in the mainstream.”

To research her novel, Vida devoured Mexican history books and traveled extensively, making four trips to Mexico and one to Guatemala during the two years she spent writing it.

Vida said she did not originally set out to write the book she did.

“I was going to write a different book about a woman judge and a murder trial. She was not Mexican. She could have been just an Anglo Presbyterian. All of a sudden, she’s sitting on the bench and here she is a Chicana,” she said.

“That just opened up the whole thing: Who is she? How did she accomplish what she’s accomplished? What brought her here? Who are these people? What is the Mexican past?

“I realized then I had something very exciting to write about.”

“Maximilian’s Garden” begins with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dolores (Dee) Guadalupe Sorenson hearing the sanity phase of a murder trial.

The murderer, a wealthy investment banker who picked up prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard and left their mutilated bodies strewn along the center divider of the Hollywood Freeway, escapes from his holding cell and leaves a threatening epithet written in lipstick on the judge’s living room wall.

While the murderer is loose, Sorenson goes to Mexico on vacation with her sister. While there, she meets a Mexican soap opera star who is the great-great-grandaughter of Maximilian, who became Napoleon III’s puppet emperor of Mexico in 1864.

With her heroine plunged into the political morass of present-day Mexico, Vida then begins to pull in the strands of Mexico’s past, showing “what brought us up to the present.”

Explains the author: “It’s like an onion: You keep peeling away the layers, getting at the heart of what Mexico really is.”

Author Honored: Author Elizabeth George of Huntington Beach has received the 1990 Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere, France’s top prize for detective-mystery-suspense fiction.

The author of a series of British mysteries received the award for her 1988 first novel, “A Great Deliverance,” which was published in France in March.

George said she was amused by “the irony of an American woman writing a British novel and beating out the French authors for the prize.”

The French title for her novel: “Enquete Dans Le Brouillard.”

“Translated, that becomes ‘Inquest in the Fog,’ which is amusing since there is no fog in the book,” said George, who received a telegram from her British publisher notifying her of the award. She also received flowers from her New York publisher, Bantam.

George’s next British mystery, “Well Schooled in Murder,” will be out in late June.

Literary Contest: The winners of UC Irvine’s Chicano Literary Contest were honored last Saturday at Santa Ana High School’s Little Theater.

First-place winners were Carolos Nicolas Flores of Laredo, Tex. (short story), Maria Dolores Bolivar of La Jolla (poetry) and David Melendez of Los Angeles (theater). First-place winners received cash prize of $400; second place received $250 and third place, $150.

The contest, sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is designed to promote and broaden the dissemination of Chicano literature. More than 120 submissions in all three categories were received.