The Conquest

The Conquest bounces between these two stories: Sara tries to decide what she really wants from her career and lost love, while Helen plays very modern games with gender and identity in order to pursue her agenda. Both women realize that the path to the objects of their desire can warp what they think they want, but the two stories haven't much else in common.

Karl is the weakest character in the book; the reader might wonder why Sara invests so much in a bland, fairly ordinary man with whom she has so little in common. Well, there's the sex, of course. The great strength of The Conquest is its sensuality. Whether Ms. Murray is describing the fine Japanese paper and Moroccan leather Sara uses in book restoration or the luxurious, decadent meals Helen discovers in the richest courts in Italy, she is contagious in her enjoyment of every gleam, every drop, every stroke. The characters often report that they are practically unconscious from pleasure, addled and woozy from their various indulgences. Their very hunger is seductive and the reader will have no trouble giving in and going along.

In The Conquest's complex story-within-a-story, Sara Gonzalez, an old book restorer for the Getty Museum, becomes obsessed with her current project, which awakens bittersweet memories of her mother. She is charged with the restoration and classification of a Renaissance manuscript about an Aztec woman taken to Europe by the explorer Cortez as a present for the Pope. Although the manuscript is allegedly by a monk, Sara believes that the Aztec woman herself wrote it, and she digs untiringly into old letters, and faded, melding manuscripts seeking any scrap of evidence that would corroborate her theory. Her research keeps her working late into the night, seriously harming her relationship with her long-time boyfriend, Karl.

The secondary story is the tale told in the ancient book, which Sara dubs "The Conquest." The young Aztec woman relates the pain and rage of seeing her people conquered and their culture destroyed, and her determination to revenge the Aztec nation by killing the invader's king, as she promised her dying father. She maneuvers herself through the courts of Europe, waiting for the moment to strike. But then, she learns how much she likes to live. Surrounded by the beautiful and voluptuous, she is unable to keep the rage to kill alive in her heart, and many long years pass. She makes occasional, half-hearted attempts to fulfill her mission, but finally, more European than Aztec, devotes her life to her love, the beautiful Catherina (Collins, 22).

Sara's love is more complex. What does she really value most? Karl is in training to be an astronaut - a career he is passionately dedicated to, and which does not allow a lot of leeway. He must live where the program is, or else. Sara also loves her career. Stories have been her refuge since her difficult, painful childhood. Her mother's stories of their pre-Hispanic heritage haunt her, as does the memory of the ...