Fun times and Choices???

I really enjoyed Malintzin’s Choices. But it also had its problems. It was perhaps the quickest read that I have ever worked through. Townsend’s style is, I think, the reason for my enjoyment. For a historical work it is unusual. She combines academic techniques from ethnography, anthropology, and history and produces a book that reads somewhat like a novel. I admit, there were times in this book when I was a little shocked at the claims she makes…the weather at a given time is probably unrecoverable and her “setting the stage” so to speak is probably not the best way to win friends and influence in academia. But I’m not sure if I would like anyone who would disparage her book for simply this. Refreshing breezes need to occasionally blow…
I do have some mixed feelings about this book. My initial reaction was WOW, what s smooth read. I remember my initial reaction to someone who attempted a similar approach but bizarrely gave it up and definitely fell short (Ramon Gutierrez) and I was angry that a book could claim so much from the letters of a friar. I am worried that I am running away with a “fun” read and being un-critical. Now comparing both books in my mind I think the sources make all the difference. Townsend actually uses work that looks at the lives of the Nahua and Maya before the arrival of the “men from the boats.” I like that this book makes the conquest more of a process, but does it through a lack of effort. What I mean by this is that Townsend shows us how the Conquest was a process, intricately connecting events, people, and intellectual processes, before and after the grand narrative poured down by men like Cortes and Diaz.
But there are problems too. This book is the inverse of the conquest as seen through Cortes and Diaz, but I don’t think Townsend is able to break away from their paradigm. Where are the choices? We get a nice foundation for the opening up of a new reading of the conquest, but then it is simply trying to find Malintzin in the sources. Not that there is anything wrong with this approach, it just doesn’t seem to effectively reveal her “choices”. I feel like I get glimpses of Malintzin, but she has been “anthropologized” (kind of like a transformer) into something more evocative of a desire for liberation than one who lived her life in prospect and made decisions.