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INSOLENCE starts in the Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library with two strange manuscripts misfiled under banking history. In effect the manuscripts attest the life of a woman determined to claim her place in a world programmed to relegate women to the kitchen, and bed, a world where non-conformists face the whip, literally—corporal punishment is within a man’s arsenal for disciplining all the women under his roof—or fire.
The epochal age of exploration, the epic of the New World, the Renaissance, the backdrop against which the novel unravels, playing a captivating role, coincides with the Spanish Inquisition’s reign of terror. To say the very least, not conforming supposes great dangers. None the less Francisca Pinelo will not conform.
She is determined to get a college education. At the time European universities are for men only. She marries a handsome nobleman with more hair than brains—impulsive enough for love at first sight, she is calculating—her handsome nobleman is her passport to the University of Salamanca. Impersonating her husband off she goes to Salamanca, but can she fool a dorm full of target-pissing scholars? Armor-smiths, we learn, have mastered artificial penile technology.
How did it go?
Not as expected. Salamanca had in store the revelation of a dark secret. Her mother was not her mother: the real mother was put to the stake for being educated, and Jew. Francisca Pinelo learns from autopsy-style reports how her mother’s vocal cords were severed, and the doodling on her face with acid, she learns in minute detail about her burning. Francisca Pinelo, the smart happy Catholic girl, is left without identity.
In her quest to reinvent herself, she sets out to rewrite history, her own idiosyncratic Estoria privada, and getting revenge. Avenging her mother confronts her to the Inquisition. Francisca Pinelo goes after the sadist commissar who kidnapped, tortured and killed her mother. Not an easy task. The commissar now is head of Intelligence, head of the espionage apparatus.
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The second manuscript, her Estoria Privada, chronicles the evolution of Spain over the centuries. Spain is her pretext for a world history, for no other country synthesizes the world better. Francisca Pinelo guides us through the rise of Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the advent of the Germanic Visigoths, the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and subsequent establishment of El-Andalus, Europe’s most advanced nation—according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and the eruption of a Christian resistance in the mountains of Asturias, leading to the birth of Castile. It ends with the much feared Judgement Day anticipated for the year 1000.
Such phenomenally ambitious task—in less than one hundred pages compress one thousand years of anecdotic history—can tip any writer off to the abyss, unless the writer has what in the first millennium was referred to as a very firm pair of rocks, or to put it in the succinct words of distinguished Georgetown Professor and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright: Cojones! Francisca Pinelo does, and does it with a timeless sense of humor, too. Her personal multilayered and multi-voiced history is hilariously irreverent.
INSOLENCE is written with bounce, and as Francisca Pinelo describes Machiavelli, no fat will you find in it. Mr. Guerrero’s short sharp sentences cut to the core. Perhaps is no exaggeration when the narrator’s agent describes INSOLENCE: a sizzling historical thriller, a true page turner.