Wicked games; The Scroll of Seduction A Novel Gioconda Belli, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman Rayo/HarperCollins: 326 pp., $24.95 HOME EDITION

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Kirsch, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 17.09.2006
• Subjects: Belli, Gioconda (1948- ); Books-titles; Dillman, Lisa; Novels; Scroll of Seduction, The
• ISSN: 0458-3035

[Juana] is not the only heroine in "The Scroll of Seduction." [Gioconda Belli] invents the modern-day character of Lucia, a beguiling 17-year-old from an unnamed Latin American country who is orphaned when her wealthy parents die in an airplane crash and ends up at a convent school in Madrid. Lucia meets a middle-aged historian named Manuel de Sandoval y Rojas when he moonlights as a guide and conducts her on a tour of El Escorial, the magnificent 16th century palace- museum-monastery northwest of the capital. He soon recruits Lucia to participate in a strange and ultimately spooky exercise: Manuel dresses Lucia in a red velvet gown like one Juana might have worn and succeeds in conjuring up Juana herself. "A voice within me spoke out, completing Manuel's story, making comments and observations," Lucia reports. "I felt seduced and captivated by the same sort of fascination that makes us follow the complicated thread of convoluted dreams." Juana the Mad, in fact, is made out to be a proto-feminist. When [Philippe] asks the legislative council called the Cortes to crown him as the reigning monarch of Castile in place of Juana, she protests that she is the only rightful successor to Queen Isabella: "It infuriated me to see so many men in that room sitting around, deciding my fate, as if some natural order had invested them with more wisdom than mine or that of my own mother when she elected to name me her heir." Later, to protest her plight, Juana locks herself in her room and refuses to eat, bathe, change her clothes or attend Mass, a gesture that was seen as evidence of insanity. But Juana herself offers a very different explanation: "Again I expressed my resistance using my weapon of last resort: my body."