I first spotted John Phillip Santos sitting in the lobby of a San Antonio hotel. I had no idea who he was, but his appearance made me take notice. Santos was dressed in a tuxedo shirt and jeans, wore freshly polished cowboy boots on his feet and had a tan blazer laid across his lap. He has a long mane of peppered gray hair, dark at the temples. I didn’t know who he was yet, but he sure wasn’t a tourist or business traveler. Santos definitely had an intriguing aura. As he sat in the wingback chair, looking lost in a deep stream of thought, I took another glance and headed to my meeting.
I was in town for an independent book store conference. As the morning meetings wound down, the host introduced the guest author for the day’s lunch. Santos walked in, and I immediately recognized him as the man from the lobby. While the attendees politely poked at their caesar salads, Santos described the the flow of humanity- how the area we were sitting in had previously been occupied by many different people, different countries and cultures, and would almost certainly switch hands again. Nothing lasts forever.
While he spoke, I flipped through the first pages of the book. Before the first chapter Santos provides the reader with an 18th century Spanish map of south Texas, a family photo from the 1940s and two genealogical charts hand-drawn by his Uncle Lico. I could feel the weight of this history before reading a word.
Like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Santos’ book provides ornate and fantastic descriptions of familial legacies. Mingling along side the memoir are hundreds of tributaries- topics that branch off from the main current, ending in small and silent pools of esoteric knowledge.
In The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, Santos draws wisdom and advice from disparate sources: eastern mystics, historical texts, and 60’s psych rock legend Roky Erikson. In addition, Santos speaks with a historian from the future (adding a science fiction element to the story that would seem oddly out of place in hands less skilled than Santos’). Cenote Siete, translated to ‘Jungle Spring Seven’, is a distant future relative of Santos, a time traveler and voice of wisdom from an era when most of humanity has left the physical plane , instead occupying a body-less realm called ‘La Zona Perfecta.’
Farthest Home was a surprise find for me, one of those books that seeks you out instead of the other way around. I am definitely grateful. It is one of the most beautifully written and engrossing books I’ve read all year. Santos will be speaking at BookPeople on Wednesday, May 19th at 7PM and I couldn’t recommend it more. However, if you find yourself here that night by some sheer fluke of fate, don’t be too surprised. Some things just work that way.
BookPeople 
I am sorry I had to be out of town for Santos’ reading at Bookpeople. I recently finished Farthest Home. It touched me on many levels. In Farthest Home, Santos not only crosses the physical boundaries between Mexico and the US, between NYC and San Antonio, and between the new world and the old, but also masterfully crosses arbitrary borders between past, present, and future, between insiders and outsiders, and — most controversially — between non-fiction and fiction. In doing so, Santos ably reminds the reader that we humans have imposed these arbitrary boundaries on all manner of borderless phenomenon. At tmes, I am made uncomfortable by this, because I know we cling to our self-made categories for the stability, order, and –yes–the sense of identity they give to us, even though such divisions also come at a high price. Santos reminds us that we all pay this price, not just those that we marginalize over the border. In a sometimes spiritual, sometimes very funny, and always thoughtful way, Santos demonstrates that we have chosen these borders, and are free to choose to cross them, and maybe, just maybe, someday tear them down. I highly recommend this book.
Very well put, Rhonda.