AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A new book coming out next week takes its plot straight from the headlines. Writer John Vaillant has penned a fictional story about a very real occurrence - people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse says it's an extraordinary feat of literary ventriloquism.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Fifteen people are hiding in a water tank truck. They've paid a human smuggler about $2,000 to get them across the border. On the other side they're hoping to find freedom from strangulating poverty, or politics, or both. The truck has a sign painted on it, but agua, the word for water, has been altered. Someone's put a J in front of it and an R at the end, so now it reads, Jaguar. Soon the truck stalls in the desert somewhere in southern Arizona. The smugglers leave, promising they'll come back with a mechanic, but hours go by, then days. Sealed into the truck by the smugglers, the passengers can't get out and a merciless dehydration sets in.
How do we know all this? One of the passengers, a former student named Hector, has picked up the cell phone of his injured companion Caesar. Hector's sending text messages and sound files to a woman, a friend of Caesar's, with an American area code.
Hello, I'm sorry to bother you, but since yesterday we're in this truck with no one coming. We need water and a doctor and a torch for cutting metal.
Once you accept the premise that the cell battery can last for more than a day or so, the story takes off. And before too long, Hector's narrating his own history and that of his family. He goes back to his grandfather in the mountains of Oaxaca, a man who believed in the myth of a totem animal, the Jaguar, who connected the family to nature, past and future. So agua becomes jaguar and the horrors of a single passage over the border blossom into a human history of sorrow and suffering, all of it beginning with the thirst to be free.
CORNISH: The book is "The Jaguar's Children" by John Vaillant. Alan Cheuse is our reviewer.