Reading The Da Vinci Code

Religious allegory has become part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code succeeded because it made readers think that they’re smart.
Benjamin Murphy

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.
Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs


I had been resisting all along, but with the movie on the verge of being released, I finally succumbed to the hoopla and read The Da Vinci Code.

Is it a great book? Not even close.

Is it a good book? Well, that depends on a reader’s expectations.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think that, as a thriller, The Da Vinci Code works well. The motivations and the situations the characters are caught in—especially the annoyingly preppy Robert Langdon—are implausible. And what I most expect from a well-formulated thriller is for the action to take place in the realm of the possible. Such narratives require this illusion

The question then becomes, if the book doesn’t actually work at what it purports to be—a crime novel—how is it that Dan Brown was able to seize, and impressively retain, the world’s attention?

A great measure of The Da Vinci Code’s success, I believe, is due to the deciphering scheme embedded in the text. This, as my good friend Benjamin Murphy suggests, allows the reader to believe that he or she is actually playing an important role in solving the enigmas Robert Langdon and his companions encounter.

But it’s the premise, the prime engine of the plot—disguised as a subversive theological dilemma—which allows Brown to hold the reader in his clutches: the question of Jesus’ divinity versus his humanity. As a writer, Dan Brown understands, and perfectly, that there’s a great measure of voyeurism involved in reading something that many of us have been told, since childhood, should never be questioned or speculated upon.

And it is here, when Brown pushes the delicate boundaries of personal and collective faith, where the controversy arises.

The question the novelist poses—could Jesus have been married and produced offspring?—provoked the ire of those who believe that it’s disrespectful, if not sacrilegious, to consider such matters, even for the briefest of moments. This is because to pose the question, and then provide quick, simplistic answers, which Brown aptly does, constitutes a threat: it is a sharp object capable of causing a slight tear in that “fabric of reality” in which many clothe their faith.

Interestingly, Dan Brown exhibits compassion for those whose devotion depends on the unquestioned acceptance of Christ’s divinity. At one point, the central protagonist, Robert Langdon, asks, “What about those who are not blessed with absolute certainty?” And if we assume that the Harvard professor is the author’s alter ego, then Brown’s concern for how this “truth” would devastate the lives of those who cannot deal with doubt appears to be genuine.

Brown knows that faith is, indeed, a fragile thing. And then, as a writer, he proceeds to exploit the vulnerability that dwells at the heart of all spiritual belief systems.

Ultimately, and as usual, dogmatic Christians overreacted to what amounts to an insignificant threat to their faith. Sir Leigh Teabing, the character that seeks to set Christians straight by revealing the true nature of the Holy Grail, is on an impossible quest: he will never be able to prove his theories and, in the process, save the world from obscurantism. In Christianity, as is the case with every religion, allegory and truth have become one. No longer can historical fact be extricated from myth because of the intransigence of religious dogmatism: it is a steel ball that makes it impossible for original thoughts to leak out, or new ideas to penetrate.

Yes, the reaction of doctrinaire Christians was excessive—and to the point of absurdity, I’d say. If one reads The Da Vinci Code dispassionately, the notion of the existence of secret society of apostles of Mary Magdalene is categorically juvenile. Take, for instance, the idea that Walt Disney’s life work was to educate us—subliminally, of course—about the Holy Grail and the sacred feminine.

Think about it for a moment . . . Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a metaphor for Mary Magdalene and her followers.

Now, really, after Robert Langdon suggests this, how can we take the rest of The Da Vinci Code seriously?

So Long, Haunted House; or, The Failure to Catch Graham Greene’s Spirit

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson

We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in its place.
Daniel Boorstin

We left the bar and took a closer look at the house: an ugly square building with no character but its secrecy and its security. There were steel shutters on the already heavy doors and the windows were barred as well as shuttered. Only a hole, the size of a half-crown, in one of the doors gave us a view within. The house was certainly not empty—I could just make out in the obscurity two pictures and a cupboard. To me the house smelt of an old crime. A woman’s scream? ‘We have to see inside,’ I told Chuchu.
Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General


I rarely buy a tabloid newspaper. Virtually never, in fact. But the headline of the July 13 edition of Panamá’s Día a Día cast a spell on me: “Tumban la casa embrujada” (Haunted House Demolished). The cover photograph showed a man and his son walking over the rubble as they collected the rods that once helped hold the building in place. There’s money to be made selling haunted iron as scrap.

I had read about the ghostly dwelling years before I ever dreamed of living in Panamá. Graham Greene, one of my literary heroes, wrote about it in Getting to Know the General—the account of his relationship with Omar Torrijos and Panamá. The author of The Power and the Glory, among other outstanding novels, said that the house was alongside the Pan-American Highway, shortly after crossing the Bridge of the Americas, on the opposite side of the Canal from the nation’s capital. At the time of Greene’s writing, in the early 1980s, the building had reportedly been empty for more than forty years. People claimed that the place was inhabited by a woman’s spirit and that her screams and the rattling of chains could be heard at night.

Haunted houses have always fascinated me. In my most prevalent recurring dream I’m inside of one, trying my best to deal with the often benign, and sometimes terrifying, apparitions.

It should not be surprising, then, that only two months ago, while my wife and I were having dinner with Mónica Martínez and Alicia De León—two formers students from my days at FSU-Panama—our conversation strayed to the subject of haunted houses. I asked the young women if they knew of any such buildings in Panamá City.

“No,” they replied. “But there's one on the old road between Arraiján and La Chorrera. People say it’s haunted by the ghost of a woman.”

“I think that’s the one Graham Greene wrote about!” I exclaimed. I got my copy of Getting to Know the General and read out loud the passage in which the Englishman describes the house.

“Yes. That’s it,” the young women said.

When I first arrived in Panamá—four years ago—I’d ask every new acquaintance if they had heard about Graham Greene’s haunted house. Sadly, no one seemed to know a thing about it. Eventually I stopped asking and assumed that it had been the product of the writer’s fertile imagination. But a couple of days after Mónica and Alicia confirmed the house’s existence I made a resolution to ask them to take me there next time they were in Panamá, on vacation from their studies in the States.

But what would be the point now?

In Getting to Know the General, Greene tells how, after failing to enter the first time (the owner was not available), he became obsessed with the idea of going inside. After several other attempts, the Englishman finally got in and, after looking around, he left, disenchanted and doubting that the house was haunted. But after that, the writer was able to move on with his life.

I, on the other hand, am now condemned to be forever haunted by the photograph of a father and his son walking on a pile of rubble. But I was never interested in seeing the woman’s ghost. Not really. I just wanted to stand on the same doorstep and look through the same peephole that allowed Graham Greene’s imagination, at least for part of his stay in Panamá, to come alive. Maybe then I would have encountered a lingering trace of Greene’s literary ectoplasm, and then I would've danced through the mist in the hope that some of it would cling to me.

The Scruffy Dog Review Interview

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke


Many times I’ve been on the interviewing end, asking writers what I hope were provocative questions. But ever since the publication of Bernardo and the Virgin, I’ve had the opportunity to sit in the other chair. I have to say that it’s a lot of fun. What can be more exciting than talking about one’s obsessions, and presumably for a readership that interested in what one has to say?

I want to thank Brenda Birch of The Scruffy Dog Review for her thoughtful questions and for allowing me be part of this new and exciting literary magazine.

Below are a couple of questions and the replies I gave.

Your portrayal of Nicaragua as a country rich in cultural and religious communities conflicts with much of the world view of this country as being impoverished and underdeveloped. Tell us about the Nicaragua you know.

The Nicaragua I know and love beyond words can make you burst out laughing one minute, and then break your heart the next. Its history is a stark documentation of human suffering: revolutions, civil wars, foreign interventions, earthquakes, and hurricanes are but a few tragedies that have devastated the country during the last forty years alone. Add to that blatant political corruption, fifty percent unemployment, fifty percent illiteracy, a high infant mortality rate, and hunger. The effects are clearly visible in the lives and the faces of the poor.

Still, in spite of hardships that would break the spirit of the hardiest, Nicaraguans are compassionate, good humored and fun-loving people. The overwhelming majority are so generous that they’ll give you the shirt off their backs if they thought you were in need. What’s more, poverty has obligated them to become creative—as you travel about the country you’ll see the many ingenious ways in which they solve simple, daily problems. And although history has dealt them terrible cards, their faith in God—and la Virgen—is astounding. This has made Nicaragua’s human landscape, its culture, an extremely fertile place in which to mine beautiful, touching stories

Because of professional reasons, my wife and I live in Panama—a country that has been blessed with the healthiest economy in the region and has never experienced a serious natural disaster, a revolution, or a civil war. (My wife calls Panama “Latin America Lite.”) And although we’re happy here, we miss Nicaragua terribly. Nicaragua’s a marvelous place—the best kept secret in Latin America, I believe. I urge everyone to visit (and while you’re there make a pilgrimage to Cuapa, an unforgettable experience). But not everyone could adjust to living there. As my wife often says to people who want to know more about the country: “Nicaragua isn’t for sissies, but it’s got a lot of soul.”

Tell us a bit about your next book, The Saint of Santa Fe. When will it be available?

Actually, Elaine is shopping around my second novel, Meet Me Under the Ceiba. This work is based on an incident that took place in Nicaragua while I was writing Bernardo. It deals with the murder of a woman. I followed the press coverage and found her death a tragic, entangled mess—worthy of a novel. After finishing Bernardo I spoke to the victim’s sister and after only one interview I had the foundation of the story.

The Saint of Santa Fe is based on the disappearance—and certain death—of Father Hector Gallego, a Colombian priest who came to Panama in the late 1960s to work among the rural poor in Santa Fe de Veraguas, which was then an isolated mountain town. When he got there he encountered a feudal society where peasants lived as indentured servants, heavily indebted to the region’s cacique (the Latin American equivalent of Feudal Lord). Father Gallego helped liberate the campesinos in a constructive, non-violent fashion. He had once written in a church bulletin that he tried to model himself after the examples of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. But he paid for the changes he promoted with his life. His remains have yet to be found because those responsible for his abduction erected a wall of silence and were protected by Omar Torrijos, Panama’s dictator at the time who, along with the infamous Manuel Noriega, was directly involved. It’s a sad yet inspiring story. Every Panamanian is familiar with Hector Gallego’s sacrifice, and many believe that he was a saint. The final draft of The Saint of Santa Fe should be ready by October.

Now, the appearance of my next two novels depends on circumstances that are beyond my control. Publishing is a fickle business. Because of this, I choose instead to concentrate on my greatest obligation—which is to write, and write well.

The entire interview can be read at The Scruffy Dog Review.

An Interview with Virgil Suárez—Revisited

To do a really good interview, you have to be truly interested in the person.
Daisy Fuentes


As a follow-up to last week’s posting on Virgil Suárez, I’m revisiting an interview my students conducted with him during the Spring Semester of 2003, while I was teaching at Florida State University-Panama. In the course titled "Latino and Latina Literature in English,” we read and discussed Virgil’s fourth novel, Going Under. Many of the students’ questions refer specifically to this work. Once again, the time and effort Virgil allotted us
demonstrates his generous spirit.

Students: Is Xavier Cuevas, from your novel
Going Under, based on yourself or someone you know?

Virgil Suárez: He's a composite of many people I know. But he also shares some of the same feelings I've been having for many years.

S: What do you believe would happen to Xavier if he reached Cuba?

V: He'd be taken in for questioning, I guess. Then, he could become something that can be used as propaganda. I'm thinking here about what happened in the case of Elián González.

S: What type of research did you conduct to make Going Under seem realistic?

V: Very little. The only instance where I was worried about getting it right was for those scenes set in Key West. So I went there on several trips. Manuela's Casuelas was a restaurant I found on the way down to Cayo Hueso one day.

S: Does the American Dream generally blind Latinos?

V: It blinds everyone. Some folks make it, and many others don't. I say that the majority of people don't make it. On the positive side, though, I find that making it to the middle class by working hard might be perceived as the American Dream for most people, but not so for Latinos. Latinos tend to be more laid-back, we know how to take it easy and relax.

S: Are you, personally, longing to reconnect with your roots?

V: Sure. I'd love to return to Cuba one day. I know that I will probably return soon. At the end of this life's journey I'd love to be buried in my country.

S: When did you decide that you wanted to become a writer?

V: When I was fourteen or so. That's when I realized that I had ideas, and that I had things that I wanted to say. I became serious about doing this for a living when I found myself writing on a regular basis. I think it is also very important to read. My advice to any aspiring writer among you is to read everything you can get your hands on.

S: Do you ever get writer's block, and how do you deal with it?

V: No, I never do. But every once in a while I do stop writing to recharge my batteries. Often, I stop writing to make time to read more books. The more novels you read, the better at writing you will become.

S: How long did it take you to write Going Under?

V: A couple of years, with revisions. But I wrote in the first draft in less than a year.

S: Which is your favorite character in Going Under?

V: I liked Xavier's father quite a bit and, obviously, I had great fun with Sonny Manteca. I had so much fun with Sonny, in fact, that I am writing a whole new novel with him as the central character.

S: If you could change one thing about the novel what would it be?

V: That's one tough question! I guess I would have taken Xavier back into his childhood, talked more about his dreams and aspirations when he was younger. But I think that would have slowed down the pace of the novel.

S: Which culture do you identify more with, Cuban or American?

V: I identify with both equally, I think. I love Cuban stuff, but I also love American iconography and popular culture. I love traffic, cars, and people on the move.

Thank you all for your wonderful questions. Best, Virgil.