Clearly magic

“GOD knows memory is a dangerous thing,” muses Peruvian patriarch Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua in Marie Arana’s sumptuous, often erotic and wholly enchanting novel “Cellophane.” “Better to forge ahead into a virgin future, better to go without a backward glance.” As a child, his fortune was told by a trained monkey, who delivered a tiny scroll of paper in exchange for a 50-centavo coin, and Don Victor has been haunted by the enigmatic words ever since: “Let go -- he read the words over and over -- and gain the world.”

The author sets us down in the rain forest of Peru in 1952. Don Victor, who has grown up with a gift for engineering and a mad passion for papermaking, presides over a remote hacienda called Floralinda, where he raises hemp and uses it to manufacture paper of all kinds. As the novel opens, Don Victor has achieved his greatest triumph: He has unlocked the secret of making cellophane “as diaphanous as Fata Morgana’s veil.” The transformation of vegetable life into shimmering rainbow-colored sheets seems so magical to the locals that they have dubbed him “the shapechanger.”

But some darker magic is at work too, and it seems that the prediction of the monkey fortuneteller is coming to pass as “a plague of truth” descends on Floralinda. Suddenly and shockingly, everyone on the hacienda, including Don Victor himself, is moved to confess his or her darkest secrets. The confessions are joyous, spontaneous and utterly shattering -- “an enchantment, a bewitchery ... a burst of candor, springing free from a careful mind.”

“Cellophane,” of course, owes a debt to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. For example, though Don Victor has recruited a priest to set up a plantation chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Copacabana, he prefers the ministrations of the local curandero, a native shaman whose concoctions and incantations send the don on soaring flights into the spirit universe.

The story veers back and forth in time, emitting a kaleidoscope of images -- some titillating, some terrifying -- from which we cannot avert our gaze: Dona Mariana, the dignified matriarch of Floralinda, is marked with a birth defect -- “a strange growth that looked for all the world like a hand with five fingers, except that it had no bone” -- whose origin will be explained by her own dark secret. A spinster aunt, seduced and abandoned by a Norwegian photographer, carries the love token he left behind, a shrunken cougar’s head. A beloved child is torn to pieces by a gypsy cart whose wheels are adorned with flashing knives.

“Much has happened since you were last here,” Dona Mariana tells an American cartographer who has returned to the hacienda after a long absence. “Back then we were fighting off flies. Now we are fighting off demons.”

Still, the magic is rather less important in this novel than the realism. Arana, editor of the Washington Post Book World and author of the acclaimed memoir “American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood,” wants to explore “the erratic labyrinths of the human heart,” and her powerful, compassionate insights into human behavior are what drive the plot, not the arcane secrets of the spirit universe. No sorcery is needed to illustrate the dilemma of a family whose members are made to confess outrageous and uncomfortable secrets to one another. “What does one do,” the author wonders, “with information one would rather not have?” And she offers an explanation of sorts: “Each new generation had to ride its own gyre of forgiveness -- first the shock, then the outrage, then the understanding that we are all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.”

“Cellophane” is populated with eccentric characters, including love-smitten husbands and wives (love-smitten, that is, but not necessarily with each other), a larcenous army general, the seductive daughter of the chief of a tribe of headhunters, and that priest, whose rituals are aimed at exorcising his own erotic impulses as much as the satanic forces that have afflicted Floralinda. Each unlikely encounter brings us ever closer to a realization of the fate so obscurely foretold by the monkey.

At the same time, Arana enlivens her tale with rollicking good humor and tasteful ribaldry. A woman’s enticing figure is notable for the “two stupendous attributes, bobbing spiritedly between her arms.” And in the course of revealing one of the scandalous secrets of Don Victor’s tumultuous family saga -- his father was shot to death by the cuckolded husband of his mistress -- Arana pauses to explain that the dead man had been “availing himself of her much lauded capacities for ‘oyster love’ -- a ravishing, exhausting sexual practice that involved a good deal of scooping and slurping.”

The compulsion to confess, as it turns out, only sets the confessors afire with renewed romantic longing and sexual yearning. Don Victor prevails on the curandero to rid him of the ghosts of his many former lovers, but the exercise proves futile: “The memories of old loves were now indeed gone, leaving much room for Don Victor to contemplate a new one.”

When he tips his hat to the schoolmistress who is the new object of his affection, “twenty-four yellow winged butterflies flew from beneath it, fleet as quicksilver, soaring toward the sun.” No magic is necessary to explain the phenomenon -- he’d been out collecting butterflies before setting off in pursuit of the young woman. But Arana celebrates the transformative power of storytelling when she shows how the incident is made over into the stuff of folklore by the villagers: “When he reached the teacher, she whirled around to look at him and -- wahhh! -- his brains flew out of his ears.”

Transformation is the essence of “Cellophane.” Papermaking is certainly symbolic of it, a metamorphosis so powerful it seems like the work of a magician or an alchemist. Paper, we learn, can be made out of any sort of vegetable matter at all -- grass, rice, dried orange rinds, peanut hulls, corncobs, roses. The end product, Arana tells us, is nothing less than “portable life“-- which goes a long way toward explaining why Don Victor is obsessed by it: “Human death was heart-breaking, ugly, demoralizing, but pass a plant’s corpse through a thresher, baptize it in a vat, flagellate it until it was free of all defect, purify it with tinctures, dry it in a warm wind, and you could watch its soul lift into a new incarnation -- move toward purpose again.”

A certain ironic humor is at play throughout the pages of “Cellophane.” “My life is a long trail of paper,” Don Victor says. “That’s all.” But surely Arana is also speaking for herself. As a book review editor, her days are spent amid mountains of newly published books. And yet she well knows that the words on a printed page can glimmer and shine like a sheet of cellophane. Her book is a superb example of the magic that a gifted storyteller can work with ink and paper. *