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| Category: Fiction:Adventure |
(requires Adobe Reader)
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| About the Book | |
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This new-age fiction unfolds in the spaces between gringo and Latino, Mayan and Christian, and the living and the dead. In 2012 the Mayan calendar ends; some say the calendar and the universe end together. With a spiritual framework based on Mayan cosmology, 2012: Under the Witz Mountain takes you to the birthplace of mankind, the creation mountain Witz. It is a modern retelling of the Quiché creation story Popol Vuh, where brothers and lovers, animal spirits and ancestors, race together toward the end of time. The girl Filomena, youngest of the spirit ancestors under the mountain, is at the center of the storm as Hero twins Celio and Ahpú, called Hunter in his adopted Pennsylvania, are separated at birth and raised in different cultures. One taps sacred ceiba trees for copal incense, and the other taps maples, another form of the Mayan sacred substance Itz. The twins find themselves up against corrupt politicians, Mexican drug lords and U.S. Immigration agents as they struggle to find each other and, together, rescue their father Izek and shape the world to come. As 2012 approaches, worlds above and below the mountain begin to merge, and Filomena, an ancestor who had committed suicide, finds herself in an improbable romance. Will she and Izek find a second chance at life, a dream Izek vaguely remembers as a promise from God? Will the Itza water-witch Ixquel, stillborn and separated from her sister at birth, find the twin she left above the mountain? And will the twins Celio and Ahpú, running against time to rescue their father, be able to even save themselves? Through mountain caves and meth labs, rural shacks in the Guatemalan jungle, a governor’s mansion and the abandoned buildings where street children sleep, the novel chronicles the lives of a bee and a brook trout and a dog, brothers, sisters and lovers, a dead philandering priest and the corrupt politician trying to make him a saint, and small towns in two cultures, as the universe races toward completion. The divine plan, if there is a plan, is anything but clear.
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| About the Author | |
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Mike Weddle is a father and poet, physician and Benedictine oblate, medical missionary and novelist. He lives with his family in rural Maryland. Mike works with the Kaqchikel Maya in Guatemala. He was a finalist in the Gival Press Novel Awards, and has won awards for poetry and short fiction. |