The Tree of Red Stars (Criticism)

Criticism

Joyce Hart

Hart has degrees in English literature and creative writing and focuses her writing on literary themes. In this essay, Hart examines the connections between the protagonist Magda and the character Gabriela. Although the two women appear to live worlds apart, the author has built a very strong relationship between them.

In Tessa Bridal's The Tree of Red Stars, Magda, the protagonist of the story, grows up in the midst of many female characters. Those closest to her include Emilia, a young girl Magda's age, whom the protagonist has known since elementary school. Emilia has a gentle soul that attracts Magda to her. It is through her that Magda learns to see people as creatures with emotions, people who need to be nurtured, whereas Magda had tended to view the people around her as mysterious puzzles or strange machines that she would like to take apart to better understand how they work. Emilia is a caretaker, whereas Magda is a scientist. Magda is also an adventurer, often including Emilia in her escapades, with Emilia usually giving in but reluctantly so.

Another childhood friend who influences Magda's early life is Cora, whose exotic family culture lures both Magda and Emilia to want to get to know her. They are awed by Cora's strong connection with her father, something neither Magda nor Emilia enjoys. They soon learn, however, that because of her father's overprotection, Cora remains somewhat a prisoner in her home, denied the free rein that Magda and Emilia enjoy to casually play in the river or to pull childish pranks. It is from Cora that Magda learns a new form of defiance, as Cora slowly moves away from her father's control, deceiving him in order to establish her own identity. Magda also celebrates Cora's decision to elope with a young lover of her choice rather than to marry a man whom her parents have chosen for her.

These girls share Magda's childhood with her on an almost daily basis. They live in her neighborhood, enjoying the same easy lifestyle of comfort afforded by wealth. That neighborhood is many miles away from the Cerro, the tallest hill in Uruguay, abandoned by all but a few soldiers who are stationed at the museum on the summit and "by the city's poorest residents, who lived on the hillside in houses made from the city's leftovers." It is on this hill that Gabriela lives in a house made of cardboard and newspapers, a drastically different environment from that in which Magda lives. However, despite the disparate economics that influence their lives, there are strong similarities that drive Magda toward Gabriela, that make her want to get to know her.

Gabriela is introduced in the first chapter of the novel and is described first by the color of her hair, the only other "redheaded young woman" in the story besides Magda; and, next, there is mention of the fact that she is "driving a rather fine horse," which stands in stark difference to the normally "tough and dusty" horses that other people from the Cerro drive, thus immediately setting Gabriela in a somewhat elevated position. Gabriela is also said to have physical features that "in a different time and place would have made her a movie star." The fact that, immediately following her introduction, Magda devises a plan in which she and Emilia will hide in the back of the young woman's wagon in order to go back to the Cerro to see where Gabriela lives makes the reader aware that this redheaded eighteen-year-old holds great significance.

Gabriela, although still a teen, brings a child with her when she visits Magda's mother. The child is still a very young baby, and Bridal emphasizes that not only is Magda interested in Gabriela, she is also fascinated with the little baby boy that Gabriela carries. In many ways, Gabriela represents exactly the opposite of Magda's potential. Gabriela is the mistress of a married man. She will give birth to several children over the course of the story. For Gabriela, being the mistress of a man of money and social standing might be the most that she can wish for. Her options in the Uruguayan society, during the time of the novel, are slight.

Magda, on the other hand, will fall in love with a neighborhood boy, with whom she will never have children. Her only other sexual relations will be protected, it is subtly suggested, as the issue of condoms is somewhat obliquely mentioned. Magda also not only has the option of going to college, but it is assumed from childhood that she will eventually attain a degree. Magda's options are multiple, given to her because of her family's connections and high standing in a society that at one time was considered one of the most successful welfare states in the world. It is therefore through a comparison of Magda and Gabriela that Bridal characterizes the political, social, and economic changes that have occurred in Uruguay between the early decades of the twentieth century and those of the 1950s through the 1970s, the setting when most of the drama of this novel takes place. The disparity that exists between Magda and Gabriela is the stimulus of the student riots, the labor strikes, and, ultimately, the revolution, the main focus of the story.

However, there is more than just the obvious dissimilarities between Magda and Gabriela. As already mentioned, they both have red hair, a simple fact that could easily be overlooked except that it is so emphasized. Gabriela's red hair is multiplied by her children, a fact that Magda uses later in the story to help her pinpoint Gabriela's whereabouts. She revisits the Cerro but cannot remember where Gabriela lives. Then she notices the redheaded children. She uses the color of their hair as a beacon. In the beginning of the story, it is Magda's red hair that is referred to as a beacon, one that might catch the eye of the soldiers, whom Gabriela fears. So it is with the color of their hair that Bridal first creates a link. Next, it is with a plate that Magda made in school, while quite young, for her mother. Magda's mother gave it away but told Magda that it had broken and had to be discarded. When Magda visits Gabriela, she finds the plate hanging on the wall. Gabriela is proud of the plate, whereas Magda's mother was ashamed of it. Through the plate, Bridal deepens the connection between Magda and Gabriela. With the color of hair, she establishes a sort of sisterhood between them. With the plate, Gabriela takes on a somewhat maternal role.

Magda and Gabriela also share a love of Marco. Once established in the army, Marco provides health benefits to Gabriela and her children. He also helps her children obtain an education. It is through Gabriela that Marco, in turn, understands on a personal level the elements of poverty. They both share political philosophies and are both involved in the revolution.

Magda's love of Marco is on a different level. She is attracted to him physically and emotionally. She is in awe of his intelligence and his commitment. Although it takes Magda a while to recognize her love of Marco, Gabriela notices it immediately. "The two of you are meant for one another," she tells Magda, upon Magda's admission that she loves him. However, she warns Magda that Marco "has a mission" and that such men "are difficult to love." In this role, Gabriela acts as older sister to Magda. She is mature enough to understand love and to recognize not only Marco's personality but also his passion. It is Gabriela who also predicts (and in that way warns Magda) that Marco will never have children and that "a piece of his lifeline is missing." She also tells Magda that his love is very strong.

Although Magda's visits to Gabriela's house cease as she matures into a woman, Gabriela's presence remains throughout the story. While working for the USIS as a translator, Magda is called to the home of Dan Mitrione. While there, acting in her capacity as spy for the Tupamaros, Magda over-hears Mitrione discussing techniques of torture and his suggestions of using poor people to practice the new methods on. Later, she discovers photographs of people who have been his victims, and it is through these pictures that she learns that Gabriela has been murdered by Mitrione and his men. Prior to this, Magda had somewhat halfheartedly become involved with the Tupamaros. Once she discovers that Gabriela has suffered a horrendous death, her commitment changes. At first she is outraged and extremely passionate, wanting to kill Mitrione with her own hands. Later, she tempers her emotions, but Gabriela sustains the personal image in her mind, the image that makes Magda willing to sacrifice her own life in order to create changes in her government and in her country.

There is one more poignant scene in this novel that includes Gabriela, and it is through this scene that Magda demonstrates her deep love of Gabriela. With the help of Emilia and Gabriela's oldest son, Magda locates Gabriela's body and takes it to Caupolicán, Magda's family ranch in the wilderness. Here she reburies her friend, paying her the highest compliment that is possible, given the circumstances. Caupolicán is a place of great beauty and peace for Magda. It represents the part of Uruguay that she most loves. Magda has committed herself to this land, promising her beloved grandmother that she will care for the land in a way that no one else in her family understands. By burying Gabriela here, Magda relays the message to Gabriela's son that she will also care for his mother, giving her peace in her death that she could not give her while she was living.

For Magda, Gabriela was someone to be admired. She was beautiful and self-determining. She was like a goddess of motherhood, fruitful and giving. She was also mature and understanding, qualities that were not dependent on social status, education, or money. However, Gabriela also represented suffering, both from the daily hardships of poverty and from the extreme inhumane conditions of warfare. It was because of these details of her life that she brought Magda out of her sheltered cocoon of privileged prejudice and taught her about the world of inequality and lack of opportunity. Despite the cultured differences of their childhoods and their consequential roles as adults, in the end they shared very similar perspectives on life.

It was through Gabriela that Magda learned to give without expecting anything in return. It was also through her that Magda comprehended that although money provided certain comforts, it was not the highest goal to reach for. Love and friendship went much further. Had Magda not jumped onto that wagon and ridden with Gabriela to the Cerro, poverty might have remained a distant cliché, something talked about but never fully understood. Through Gabriela, in some ways her exact opposite, Magda found herself.

Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on The Tree of Red Stars, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at several colleges in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly explores the ways in which Magda's gender and social class make her the ideal narrator for the story that she tells.

The triumph of Tessa Bridal's 1997 novel, The Tree of Red Stars, is not that it introduces contemporary American readers to the political upheaval in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the political situation surrounding the events of the book is somewhat under-explained, left to function as a frightening shadow and not really examined in much detail. Like much in totalitarian countries, the political dynamic that drives the actions of the characters in this novel is shrouded behind a veil of lies and destroyed evidence. Read as a novel about Uruguayan history, this book can only hope to sensitize readers to the signs of what a government is like when it is in the process of turning against its citizens. However, the book is of even more immediate relevance to readers than that. It presents a universal story of how individuals are drawn into revolutionary causes. The natural process that the novel's protagonist, Magdalena Ortega Grey, undergoes is parallel to a political maturation that readers around the world can relate to in their own lives.

At first glance, Magda might seem to be a weak choice to be the narrator of a novel about social upheaval. She comes from a wealthy family, and her parents and extended family make certain that she is trained in the bourgeois values that fit upper-middle-class Uruguayan society. Because of her elevated social status, it would have been very easy to ruin the novel by portraying Magda's concerns falsely.

In every social movement that entails fighting for the rights of the oppressed, there are purists who have a difficult time accepting outsiders who have benefited from the rules made by the oppressors. The rich, according to them, could never experience the social outrage needed of true revolutionaries. Doubtlessly, many who have suffered from brutal regimes like the one described in this book would dismiss Magda. Bridal gives an example of this thinking in Laura, the girl who gives up her only boots when Magda is fleeing from the police. While mocking Magda's wealth, Laura sarcastically and correctly guesses that the rich girl's parents would never let her come to the area of town where Laura lives. She sees Magda as someone who is dabbling in revolution but is free to flee back to her own sheltered world when things turn bad. Magda, in fact, seems to feel the same way about herself: at the end of the story, when her grandmother tries to convince her that the best way to help free Marco is to go to Europe and publicize the events in Uruguay, Magda feels that leaving the country would be a cowardly act of abandonment.

While a wealthy character in a novel about revolution might be accused of being superficial, there is also the danger that a writer might be tempted to use a wealthy protagonist to overstate the revolutionary cause. A protagonist from the ranks of the oppressed might not allow a writer to bring out the vibrancy of the situation. An impoverished narrator would be familiar with the tactics that are used to keep all of her or his peers from revolting, but such characters would show less dramatic change when taking up the cause. Oppressed people tend to take a world-weary, jaded view toward their own situations, having gradually grown familiar with oppression on a daily basis. For a child raised in privilege, however, the moment of suddenly becoming aware of evil comes as a great shock. It is easy for novelists to shake up their readers by exposing governmental repression to the book's bourgeois protagonist (which, to some extent, actually is the structure of The Tree of Red Stars) who then becomes a zealous convert to political activism.

Wisely, Bridal manages to make Magda a credible observer and participant, showing her commitment to political change to be something that, despite her upbringing, she is in fact able to feel sincerely. Used as she is here, the character of an upper-middle-class girl can be an excellent tool for showing readers what is involved in many levels of a society in turmoil.

For one thing, Magda's social position makes her an outsider from the revolution, which is started by the poor. She is only vaguely aware of its existence as a child, putting together the pieces that explain it to her throughout the course of the novel. As a structural technique, Magda's growing awareness of the problems of Uruguay's poor follow the standard "fish out of water" pattern: just as some stories follow a person from a foreign land, or, more recently, an extraterrestrial, learning about a new culture, so Magda's observations about the revolutionary movement are used to introduce the details of the revolution to the book's readership.

Perhaps the greatest benefit that Magda's position offers to the book's narrative structure is that it gives her access to many different aspects of Uruguayan society. Throughout the course of the novel, Magda becomes familiar with people of her own social class but also with poor people such as Gabriella and with the revolutionaries of the Tupamaros movement. If Bridal had written Magda as a member of a poorer class, her options for social interaction would have been limited. One of the privileges of wealth is that it is used, in most cases, to shut out those of poorer classes. Bridal shows this in the way that Cora is raised in seclusion, locked away from the rest of the world for her own protection because of her family's experiences as Jews in Europe in the forties. Though the protective shield they throw around her is notably extreme, it is a reflection of the way that all Uruguayan families shelter children of their class. The distinction between the middle class's security and the lower class's defenselessness is actually made clear in the book's very first chapter. When Magda and Emilia disappear to the poor section of town, search parties are formed, and the residents of the Cerro rush to return them home before the situation becomes violent, whereas a few pages later, when Gabriela's baby is missing in the middle-class neighborhood, there is nothing she can do but cry. The social position of Magda's family allows her to cross over into the homes and lives of the poor, but a poor person does not have equal access into the homes of the rich.

If the protagonist of The Tree of Red Stars had been poor, Bridal would not have had the means for showing readers how the ruling class thinks. She does this in the form of Magda's gossipy aunts, who consider themselves to be the bearers of traditional standards. In addition, Magda has the opportunity to travel to America as an exchange student and observe firsthand what life is like in a consumer society, where the government is left to carry on unquestioned. Her superb education, including special tutors whom only a few Uruguayans would be able to afford, gains Magda entry into a government position that will eventually expose her to the reality of torture as it is viewed by the torturers: as some sort of game. She lives in the area of town known for its embassies, a fact that in itself gives her a global perspective from her earliest childhood. One final aspect of her social position is her grandmother, a strong-willed landowner, who has ties to the country that are deeper than those of temporary political alliances.

These are the reasons why Magda's social class makes her uniquely qualified to tell this story. The ways in which her social class affects the book's plot are, on the other hand, discussed openly within the novel. An early example of this comes when she is escaping the riot that breaks out during Che Guevara's speech. The young revolutionaries who rescue her, while mocking her for being from a rich family, also recognize how helpless she is in the unfamiliar situation of police brutality and protect her. Much later, after she is released from jail, Magda's family has the means to send her out of Montevideo and, eventually, out of the country. She is sent to Europe with an heirloom worth a half million dollars and the skill to earn a living in a strange land. If Magda had come from a poor family, Bridal would have had to take her down different paths.

While examining how this novel's narrator allows Bridal to tell a story that could easily have turned too sensationalistic, angry, or superficial, it is important to note the significance of the narrator's gender. Using a girl to tell the story may not even have been a conscious choice: it is quite likely that Bridal did not write about a girl in Uruguay as a storytelling strategy but simply because that is what she knew best and understood. Still, the book makes much about the roles of women and men in the society that it examines, and viewing mid-century Uruguay through the eyes of a maturing woman allows this book to explore its subject to its fullest.

At the time of this novel, change was sweeping through Uruguayan society, redefining gender relationships. This change in gender politics preceded the political revolution and may have been responsible for it to no measurable degree. Regardless of the historical accuracy of the role of women's liberation in bringing about social revolution, the fact that Bridal made such splendid use of their convergence is a mark of extremely intelligent writing. The first third of the book is not explicitly about revolution: it is dedicated to Magda and Emilia's girlhood adventures, and the role models who shaped their views of who they were and could be.

The Uruguay of Magda's youth is a traditional Latin American society, with a double standard regarding sexuality. Men, such as Francisca's husband in the book, are expected to have both a wife and a mistress, while women, like Magda's older cousin Sofía, have their reputations carefully guarded, so that they will not lose their value as material for marriage. This logical inconsistency is obvious to Magda and Emilia, who joke about it.

As the girls grow, they see the double standard change. One force for social change is the progressivism of other countries, particularly America. Magda's aunts pretend to be shocked at the behavior of Miss Newman, an American woman who wears pants and objects openly and violently to the Uruguayan "tradition" of men shouting sexual suggestions at women in the street. Their pretense at disapproving is betrayed by the fact that they talk so much about her, betraying a fascination with Miss Newman's fiery self-assurance.

Though Miss Newman is only a shadowy, vague, talked-about character, Emilia's mother Lilita is quite real in the novel and a strong influence on both girls' lives: she tells Magda outright that she hates men because she is jealous of their freedom. Sofía, chastised because she has been seen in public with a boy, openly flaunts her sexuality, daring Magda's father to beat her again and again if he wants, vowing that the beatings will not change her behavior.

It is easy to see how these role models from the early part of the book influence Magda's behavior in the later chapters. Without them, and the numerous skirmishes against social expectations that Magda and Emilia go through as girls, there would be little point to the novel relating their childhood exploits. As it is, the daily struggle for women to earn a place in society foreshadows the struggle of the poor that turns into a life-or-death struggle by the book's end.

Novels told in the first person are limited by the experiences of their narrators. In addition to its other virtues, The Tree of Red Stars has a narrator who has access to a variety of social situations and the drive to explore them. Ultimately, the aspects that make Magda a useful narrative tool trip her up, leading her into situations that endanger the lives of those she loves. She is so uniquely adventurous and capable that Emilia and Marco are unable to keep up with her and are trapped in webs that she has escaped. For readers, the world of this novel would not be as fully realized if it were witnessed through the eyes of any other character.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Tree of Red Stars, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the key images in the novel, examines the political context in which they appear, and offers some thoughts about the relevance of the story to the contemporary political world.

Bridal's The Tree of Red Stars is a novel of almost infinite delicacy that also possesses the force of a sudden, hard punch in the stomach. Its poetic richness includes a few key images — especially the tree and the river — that encapsulate the essence of the novel, while the plot gives much food for thought about the phenomenon of terrorism and the relations between Latin America and the United States.

It is the images that remain indelibly imprinted in the mind long after the reader has finished the novel. The most prominent is that of the old poinsettia tree, which is the "tree of red stars" of the title. This is a reference to the fact that in winter the tree flowers red. Magda thinks it looks like "a hundred small fires holding the cold at bay." This image of the tree that flowers red reverberates at so many levels that it comes to embrace the totality of human life, in pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, even life and death. It carries the subtlest themes of the novel.

As a young girl, Magda spends many hours sitting in the branches of the poinsettia tree, spending many of those hours with her friend Emilia. The tree is Magda's favorite place, and it is associated in her mind with many of the most important things that have happened in her life, especially the time when she and Emilia "started our journey together into young adulthood." Significantly, these events are often heralded when the tree begins to produce its red flowers. It is in winter, for example, when Magda and Emilia spot from the tree their future friend and Tupamaros comrade, Cora. It is also when the tree flowers red that they first see Ramiro, Cora's future husband, also a future member of the Tupamaros.

What is the significance of the image? The color red is traditionally the color of passion, and it is also the color of blood. The red blossom of the tree therefore symbolizes love and suffering (passion also means suffering, as in the passion of Christ on the cross). This suffering is both mental and physical. Love and suffering are inextricably linked as the two qualities that dominate Magda's life and the lives of the other main characters. It is Magda's love for the beggar Gabriela, and her outrage at the woman's cruel death by torture, that deepens her involvement with the Tupamaros. During Magda's imprisonment, it is her love for the men whom she can hear being tortured in the cell above that sustains both her and the men (as she finds out when she encounters one of them many years later on the riverbank). It is Marco's love for Magda that precipitates his arrest and his premature death, seven long years later, from the injuries inflicted by torture. It is Magda's love for him that motivates her to go into exile to fight for his release. The love of Ramiro and Cora is also presented in romantic terms. Theirs is an ideal, passionate love that endures separation and torture. In every case, love and suffering of the most extreme kind are linked.

The significance of the image of the redflowering tree does not end there. The young girls perceive the flowers as they gaze upwards from their perch in the lower branches. For Magda, it appears as if the red blossoms are stars in the heavens. After one incident in which she overhears a quarrel between her cousin and her mother, she and Emilia take refuge in the poinsettia tree and happen to look up, where they see that "One perfect star had bloomed a bright, piercing red." This evocative image suggests that if love, suffering (passion), and blood are inextricably mixed, as the two maturing girls will shortly discover, those qualities are also exalted, raised up and woven into the very fabric and heart of life. They express a kind of unshakable, eternal, even glorious perfection, for which the appropriate image can only be a bright red star shining in the heavens.

It might also not be superfluous to mention Magda's comment that whatever sex education she ever had came as a consequence of sitting in the tree, since from her perch she was able to eavesdrop on the conversations of her two older female cousins. The quarrel between Magda's mother and Sofía, which immediately precedes Magda's moment of epiphany when she sees the "red stars," is over sexual matters, and Sofía dares to raise the previously forbidden topic of female sexuality and female sexual needs. This suggests yet another layer of meaning for the color red, since the emergence of sexuality is inseparable from the female menstrual cycle, which is itself a marker of the passage from childhood to adulthood. Since one of the novel's themes is Magda's coming-of-age, and she directly associates this with the hours spent in the poinsettia tree, there is clearly an association between the physical emergence into womanhood and the condition of exalted love and suffering that the "red stars" represent.

By making the tree of red stars such a significant symbol in the novel, Bridal also taps into a complex of mythological and religious associations conjured up by the tree image. With its roots in the earth and its branches reaching heavenwards, the tree is an apt symbol for human and cosmic life and has been used as such for millennia in Western and Eastern sacred art. In Christian mythology, the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden is linked to the tree (the wooden cross) on which Christ was crucified. Bridal's red-flowering poinsettia tree provides a close secular equivalent. (In Christian art, the color red is always associated with Christ's passion.) There is also a legend that on the night Christ was born, trees bore fruit and flowers blossomed. Not for nothing, then, from the point of view of the symbolism of the novel, does the poinsettia tree bloom red in early winter — the time of Christ's birth.

If the tree of red stars symbolizes the nobility of love endured through physical and mental suffering, another recurring image in the novel, that of water, represents cleansing and healing. It is associated with the Río de la Plata, the river in Montevideo that Magda has loved since she was a child. She, Emilia, and Marco would often walk along its banks to lighten their cares: "Something about the river's changeable colors and the music of its movement against sand and rock soothed and comforted." At the end of the novel, as Magda walks with Marco along the riverbank, she comments, "It would take time, but the river would heal me, as I had known it would throughout those lonely years of exile." The image of the healing river is also contained in Magda's unforgettable, if distressing, account of the time during her imprisonment when bodily fluids emanating from the men being tortured drip through the wooden ceiling of her cell. Overcoming her natural revulsion at the odor, she comes to regard the liquids as holy, part of a sacred idealism that she reveres. She mops up the liquid with scraps of toilet paper, imagining the faces of the tortured men and repeating their names. Then she shreds the paper slowly, one scrap at a time, and washes it down the sink: "I imagined those scraps being borne down to the river; water to water returned."

The use of the image of the healing river, like the tree image, touches on a vein of religious practice and symbolism common to East and West. Hindu pilgrims, for example, bathe in the waters of the sacred river Ganges as a purification rite. In Christian scriptures, water is used as an image of healing in the New Testament's Revelation, in which John is shown a vision of the new Jerusalem, the redeemed holy city. He sees "the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city" (Rev. 22: 1 – 2). Bridal's Río de la Plata is a secular version of this holy, healing river.

These two powerful images, of the tree and water, cannot be fully appreciated, however, apart from the political context in which they occur. Although it might be tempting to feel that political events in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s have little relevance for today, closer examination suggests otherwise. While the United States is currently engaged in a global war on terrorism, it is sobering to note that The Tree of Red Stars might also be called "The Making of a Terrorist." It might also be noted that perhaps never before have terrorists been presented in such a sympathetic light. Magda, Marco, Ramiro, and Cora are all deeply appealing figures. They are idealistic, concerned for justice, and remain true to their cause despite torture and death. Yet terrorists they certainly are. Magda is instrumental in the kidnapping of Dan Mitrione, the man she believes to be a FBI agent responsible for training people in the use of torture. Mitrione is then murdered by the Tupamaros.

Mitrione is not a fictional character. He was head of the U.S.-funded Office of Public Safety in Montevideo from 1969 to 1970 and was in charge of a program that trained Uruguayan police officers in counterterrorism methods. These practices included methods of torture, which was widely practiced by the Uruguayan government. In this respect, although it would be comforting to report that Bridal's description of the death by torture of the beggar woman Gabriela is a fictional flourish to enhance the drama of the story, unfortunately this is not so. The Uruguayan government really did test their methods of torture on beggars snatched from the outskirts of Montevideo. It is one of Bridal's most moving achievements that in the character of Gabriela she gives a face to those poor forgotten wretches who were treated like vermin to be experimented on and then disposed of when they had served their purpose.

The military government of Uruguay that crushed the Tupamaros in 1972 was supported by the United States. With the Cold War against the communist Soviet Union at its height, the United States opposed revolutionary socialist movements such as the Tupamaros because it did not want to see left-wing governments established in South America. Unfortunately, the Uruguayan government during the 1970s happened to be one of the most brutal regimes in the world. It had the highest per capita rate of political prisoners in the world (about sixty thousand people, or 2 percent of the population), and torture was practiced as a routine measure. In addition to being brutally tortured, Tupamaros leaders were kept in solitary confinement for more than a decade.

Supporters of American policy might argue (as they do in different circumstances today) that in a war on terrorism, one cannot be too fussy about who one's friends are. Critics, on the other hand, might say (again, as they do today), that in a war on terrorism, it is all the more important to uphold the principles one claims to be defending, and therefore one must be extremely careful about the regimes one supports. In terms of the novel, resentment of what is perceived as American interference in Uruguayan affairs is a prominent theme among the characters who support the Tupamaros, such as Marco and Emilia's mother, Lilita. It is expressed even before the revolutionary movement gathers momentum. Marco, for example, believes that American financial control of many Uruguayan institutions amounts to exploitation masquerading as help. Once again, as with the question of what is an appropriate response to terrorism, this is not a dead issue. Perceptions similar to Marco's about the nature of American involvement overseas are common today in many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Many Americans may regard such suspicions as unjust, insisting that America's purpose in the world is to defend democracy and promote economic growth. In the novel, this point of view is given a voice in the character of Magda's mother, who does not share Marco's anti-Americanism. She believes that the United States genuinely wishes to help Uruguay.

Seen in this light, The Tree of Red Stars not only delves deeply into the spiritual dimensions of suffering and love in a context of political oppression, it also raises issues that remain important for anyone seeking to understand today's complex political world.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on The Tree of Red Stars, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Isabel Allende wrote her famous work The House of the Spirits in 1985. It was her first book and was originally published in Spain. In it, she tells the story of a Chilean family, focusing on three women — a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother — as they struggle to keep their family together during chaotic times. The story is part fiction and part truth, as Allende herself suffered from political oppression while she lived in Chile. Her writing style is highly praised, and she is often referred to as a gifted storyteller.
• Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan, wrote his Piano Stories in 1993. This is a collection of tales written in the style of magic realism. The tone of his writing is quite different from that of Bridal, but for a male perspective and another take on creativity from a fellow Uruguayan, his book offers an interesting read. Hernandez is one of the favorite writers of fellow author Gabriel García Márquez.
• Cane River (2001) by Lalita Tademy is a family saga that traces the lives of four generations of women born into slavery. The stories are a combination of oral family history and the author's imagination as she pieces together the details of her own Louisiana matriarchal family. The story begins at the early days of slavery, continues through the Civil War, and ends during the fight for civil rights. Tademy, who was a successful corporate executive, quit her job to write this story because she became obsessed with researching her roots. The book includes photographs and reprints of actual documents to attest to its authenticity.
• Rosy Shand wrote the novel The Gravity of Sunlight (2001) about life in Uganda, Africa, during Idi Amin's rise to power. Through the telling of the lives of two couples, their successes and failures in love, Shand examines cultural and political conflicts in that country.
• Coming of Age in Mississippi (1997) by Anne Moody relates the true story of a young woman living through the 1960s and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in the South. The story relates Moody's difficulties in trying to gain a successful education as well as to help others achieve the right to vote in the oppressive political environment of the Deep South.