An Echo of Heaven

A group of Mexicans sit in the desert, gazing up at the image of their new saint–a seductive woman with a smile like Betty Boop’s–projected onto an outdoor screen. The woman is Marie Kuraki, recruited to act the part of a “sorrowing mother,” to help unite the workers on a cooperative farm in a remote village in Mexico. By becoming a “saint,” Marie, an unbeliever in search of spiritual peace, reaches the end of a long journey induced by a series of personal above all, by the death of her two sons, which happened when one of them was pushing his brother in a wheelchair along a path above a cliff by the sea. To rebuild her life, Marie leaves her home in Japan to go to a commune in California, under the shy guidance of a guru called Little Father; then on to Mexico, where she falls briefly under the spell of the Dark Virgin of Guadalupe; and finally to a mountain village in the shadow of an Aztec pyramid. There she offers what’s left of her life to the local people, who come to venerate her, though her own faith remains as enigmatic as before. An Echo of Heaven presents an astonishingly fresh and penetrating portrait of a woman of independent character and strong physical appetites, looking for a way to understand the mystery of her life. It is a work by a Nobel Prize-winning writer at the height of his powers.