Nominated for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2024 This genre-bending amalgamation of memoir and cultural criticism is intriguing and highly reNominated for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction 2024 This genre-bending amalgamation of memoir and cultural criticism is intriguing and highly readable, but it also shows how we all perceive the world through our own frames - and we have to, because we only have our own experiences, which is why exercises in empathy are foundational for building more just societies. Villarreal explores her themes through the possible functions of magic as it relates to reality; for instance, both magic and trauma start in disbelief, magical thinking can be a coping strategy, fantastical stories can study truth without being limited to realism, memory and history are to a degree inventions, and magical practices can be metaphorical performances to express emotion. In a flowing style that oscillates between the author's own family history, from the abusive marriages of her grandmother, her father's struggles as a musician, and her own divorce, to thoughts about singers like Cobain and Selena as well as ponderings on various movies, books, and series. And it all fuses together excellently.
The quality of such a very personal work is not determined by whether you agree with the author or not, but the quality of the argument. And that's where I had some issues, because IMHO, some takes were pretty undercomplex. It's hard to maintain that in "Narcos", the horrible role of the US/the CIA in the drug war is omitted in order to other and exoticise the Latin American characters - on the contrary, CIA agent Stechner is an outright villain, his whole operation is shown as cynical, even more so in "Narcos: Mexico" (the author is Mexican-American, life at the borderlands is a central theme of the book). "Narcos: Mexico", starring Diego Luna, then plays no role in the book, but "Andor", also starring Diego Luna, where it's, in the context of the author's argument, easier to praise the Mexican actor as a hero who defied Disney stereotyping, while he played an exceptionally slick and not exactly politically correct Mexican drug lord in "Narcos: Mexico" (don't get me wrong, I always love Diego Luna).
At another point in the book, Villarreal condemns capitalist realism as opposed to socialist realism - as a German, so someone whose country produced both types of art during the German division, I was stunned by the claims made here, as art in the East was regulated, so artists weren't free to create as they deemed fit and HAD to stick to the limitations of socialist realism, which, you know, sucked. But because in the logic shown here, "capitalism = bad", these realities remain outside the frame. To name one last example, Kurt Cobain is shown here as a cipher, as a one-dimensional hero, not the messy human he was (and we all are), and, as Kurt himself always stressed out, the hero-worship is a kind of de-humanization, it turns him into a function, also a function of this text. Ironically, the text states Cobain's attitude without realizing that it plays into what he stood up against. And there are several other examples where the frame bends to the intended argument, IMHO.
Still, there are many very interesting thoughts in here, especially regarding the erasure of people and perspectives in the historical archives, and representation in stories and art as a type of power that transforms public discourse. Plus, it's just a pleasure to read....more
Shame on the International Booker for not nominating this (*rings bell: shame! shame! shame!*). The novel tells the fictionalized story of how the SpaShame on the International Booker for not nominating this (*rings bell: shame! shame! shame!*). The novel tells the fictionalized story of how the Spanish conquistadores around Hernán Cortés entered Tenochtitlán, which was the beginning of the end of the Aztec Empire under king Moctezuma II. Considering the historical facts around the Fall of Tenochtitlán, the whole set-up makes for a psychological chamber play, with two cultures struggling to interpret what is going on around them and the Aztec Empire under duress because of interior and exterior forces - but as this is literary fiction, Enrigue is not forced to follow through with how history played out. Also, until this day, the primary sources for the reconstruction of what happened are Cortes' letters to Charles V and other Spanish "eyewitnesses" - Enrigue, on the other hand, gives the indigenous side equal weight.
While the Spanish started out on an expedition to serve the interests of slave traders, they get more and more intoxicated by their territorial conquests and a sense of danger and adventure, losing grip on reality. Inside Tenochtitlán, Moctezuma has established a regime that also rests on ruthless power and bloodshed, and where hallucinogenics play an important role. Nevertheless, Enrigue manages to evoke a sense of wonder in the readers, as his atmospheric descriptions of sights, smells and sounds are the real stars of the text - this reader often felt like she had also sipped some of that hallucinogenic chocolate and is now stumbling through an disorienting, dangerous, and captivating landscape and a labyrinth-like palace. On the way, we encounter characters like Moctezuma's sister-wife, an enslaved woman who works as a translator, as well as a shipwrecked friar - mind you, only one of the characters is fully fictional (Caldera). At some point, it feels only natural that the story digresses into the fantastical. Will the Spanish make it out alive of the city?
Time implodes, history spirals, Ramón López Velarde enters a dream, glam rock is playing while Moctezuma gets high on mushrooms and sees Enrigue writing his story. Throughout, the language is modern and vivid. Interestingly, the original title is Tu sueño imperios han sido, so "your dream empires have been", which allows for the twist that our human empires have been dreams all along (and most of them probably fever dreams). The line relates to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream, a drama from the Spanish Golden Age, which also features an imprisoned king and questions of fate and the construction of reality.
This - while not quite as good as Binet's Civilizations - is daring, fun, intelligent literature: A fantastical rendering of colonial history, a very dark comedy, and, as every good historical novel, a commentary on the present. Great stuff.
Now Nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2023 Fernanda Melchor, author extraordinaire, goes literary journalism: This collecNow Nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature 2023 Fernanda Melchor, author extraordinaire, goes literary journalism: This collection assembles thirteen non-fiction texts, mostly written between 2002 and 2011, that paint a vivid picture of Melchor's hometown of Veracruz, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. In her foreword, she ponders the relation between fiction and non-fiction, especially regarding framing and perspectives, and what terms, in English and Spanish, try to encompass different approaches to the circumstance that all writing is ultimately subjective, that objectivity is a goal one might strife for, but that it is unattainable due to our imperfect human nature (which can also be an advantage, if the writer is aware of their biases and employs intelligent literary techniques). Be the theoretical framework as it may - I recently spent quite some time puzzling over aspects of literary journalism, so I'm quite over the topic at the moment - this collection shines with its intense descriptions and memorable scenes that chronicle the stories Veracruz consists of.
Starting off with a phenomenal text about young Fernanda who believes a drug trafficking plane to be a UFO during the time of a solar eclipse, the stories branch out in all directions: We get a fantastic text about refugees who hid on a ship and got off in Veracruz because they mistook it as Miami (hence the title), which leads to an unexpected moral conundrum. There's also an absorbing text about Evangelina Tejera Bosada, the former carnival queen of Veracruz who ended up killing her two young children. I also learnt about the lynching of Rodolfo Soler, a man the police didn't bring to justice and who, in a particularly gruesome act of vigilantism, was then burned alive by citizens of Veracruz. Femicides also play a crucial role, like that of Nayeli Reyes Santos, a federal judiciary who was abducted and dismembered by a drug cartel.
While I didn't find all texts equally captivating - I particularly liked the first half better than the second -, this is an outstanding portrayal of a specific place in a specific time, that highlights the ambivalence of a society, gives voice to victims and investigates the seedier, messier dynamics below the surface. As readers of Melchor know, she is a specialist when it comes to showing and pondering human cruelty, and this collection is no exception. What a great writer!...more
Lozano's novel is based on the destiny of real-life Mazatec (an indigenous people of Mexico) shaman María Sabina who performed healing ceremonies usinLozano's novel is based on the destiny of real-life Mazatec (an indigenous people of Mexico) shaman María Sabina who performed healing ceremonies using magic mushrooms and was consulted by the likes of Keith Richards, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan. Her fictional version Feliciana has to mourn the death of her teacher Paloma, and her storyline is interspersed by a second narrative arc that depicts the life of journalist Zoe who is assigned to report on Paloma's murder.
Lozano tells the life stories of both women and the gender-based violence and prejudice they encounter, but the most intriguing character clearly is Paloma, a muxe (third gender) healer who turns away from her occupation and trains Feliciana instead. Throughout, the text plays with ideas of stigmatization and intuition, the power of women and how non-male individuals are violated. The language has a very particular sound which is apparently reminiscent of traditional Mexican storytelling (unfortunately, I'm unfamiliar with Mexican narrative traditions).
What bothered me was the extensive narration about Zoe, the journalist who shares a similar familial constellation with Feliciana, which did not captivate me at all: I wanted to hear more about Paloma and her life as muxe, about her healing traditions and destiny. Feliciana's part was fine, but there was too much detail regarding minor characters that distracted me from her interior worlds. Still, the topic was certainly highly interesting and I'd love to read more about it....more
Now Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023 Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2022 This disturbing text packs a real punch: Set in thNow Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023 Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2022 This disturbing text packs a real punch: Set in the author's native Mexico, Melchor's narrator is 16-year-old Polo, a school drop-out who works as a gardener in a luxury residential complex called "Paradise" - when his boss teaches him how to pronounce it, he says "Paradais", hence the title. In Spanish, "paradise" would be "paraíso", but the place is indeed not a haven for the average Spanish-speaking person, but the golden few who can afford living in this fancy area with the "gringo" name (as Polo puts it). Our narrator feels exploited and humiliated by his work, so in the evenings, he meets up with blonde, rich outsider Franco, and they get drunk by the slimely-green water at the outskirts of Paradais, trying to numb their senses to their dull, hopeless lives.
This set-up usually suggests that the two who don't belong in the glitzy world of the rich and famous are the good ones, the ones to identify with, the ones down on their luck. But is this true? Both Polo and Franco are extremely mysogynistic, cruel and dangerous: Incel Franco (whom Polo only calls "the fat one", but the bodyshaming is the smallest transgression here) openly dreams about violently raping a neighbor, Polo (wrongly?) slut-shames his pregnant cousin, ponders joining a gang, and despises Franco while drinking on his dime. As the outside pressure on each one of them mounts, they hatch a sinister plan...
It wouldn't be wrong to say that Melchor writes about the state of Mexican society - especially the wealth gap and gang violence - but it would be to easy to read the text as strict social criticism, because Polo and Franco do have a degree of agency, and they use it in the worst way possible. While Franco seems fatalistic and maybe even suicidal, Polo denies all accountability for his actions and always blames others. They have the naivete of teenagers (and they are mere teenagers!), but the potential for violence of hardened criminals, and it remains unclear in how far the haze of alcohol and their inexperience contribute to their failure to properly understand their own deeds. The ending underlines once more that Polo is an extremely unreliable narrator.
This short book fascinates with a language that takes its power from the hate it breathes. It is unsettling to read, and the crowd that always longs for "sympathetic characters to identify with" should seriously skip this one and go back to Paulo Coelho or something, because "Paradais" is absolutely relentless. To be in Polo's head is suffocating and disorienting, and the whole construction of the story and the effects it achieves are great. Melchor is not here to play, and she is not here to pander to the expectations of readers - which is why the ending works so well.
You can listen to my interview with Frank Wynne, jury president of the International Booker 2022, here....more
Winner of the Dublin Literary Award 2021 Nominated for the Booker Prize 2019 Unfortunately, this novel illustrates the difference between well-intentioWinner of the Dublin Literary Award 2021 Nominated for the Booker Prize 2019 Unfortunately, this novel illustrates the difference between well-intentioned and well executed: Luiselli writes about the plight of migrants trying to cross the border between Mexico and the US, especially children making this dangerous passage through the desert in hopes of being re-united with family members who work in the States. So this author has a message, and an important one, and there is nothing wrong with selling a message to readers per se, but Luiselli is trying way too hard, thus over-constructing her text by throwing in all kinds of ideas as well as narrative strands and sometimes forcing connections that simply make no sense.
The main storyline is about a patchwork family in the process of falling apart: Each parent brought one child into the marriage - a boy and a girl - and the grown-ups used to work together on a soundscape project, trying to record the languages spoken in NYC. Now the husband (they remain unnamed) wants to do a project about the removal of the Apaches, so the family makes a road trip to former Apacheria. The wife wants to do a project about the children who get lost in the desert and is also trying to help a woman to find her two kids who disappeared while trying to cross the border. Oh yes, and the boy and the girl are afraid they will lose each other when their parents separate.
This is symbolism overload, and the composition is based on comparing apples to oranges. In their respective projects, the husband and the wife aim to record the "echoes" of the lost children and of the Apaches. I do not know how many books Joshua Whitehead, Terese Marie Mailhot et al. have to write until people stop pushing the destructive narrative of the "vanishing Indian" - Native Americans are still a vital part of North America, but they only appear as a vanished people in this story, firmly stuck in the past, a narrative device without a voice, defined by an alleged absence. The fact that one of the children has a Mexican Indian great-grandmother (this info is buried deep in the text) just feels like another idea that adds to the over-construction of the story.
The children who cross the border also don't get to speak in this text, they are represented through stories: In the news, in books, in the imagination. Once they are looked at, but to what end? The point here is to document and record their absence - that's the idea the author had, and it remains an idea in the text as well ((view spoiler)[at one point, the boy and the girl run through the desert and sense the lost children's presence - this part is very well written, but it also shows how silly their mother's project is (hide spoiler)]). And does it make sense to compare the Native American genocide to migrant children trying to cross the border to siblings being torn apart by divorce, because people get "lost"? I think it's a mess, to say the least (genocide and migration and divorce? Really? Really??).
What makes it even harder to read is that the characters are difficult to accept: The children sometimes don't sound ike children, and it remains abstract why the parents want to separate. Often, they read like caricatures of leftist intellectuals (this novel has literary cross-references abound), which makes the reader feel sorry for the children. Oh yeah, and the book is too long.
I wish I could have loved this, because migration is such an important topic, and the racism of the current US administration needs to be fought, but this book does not have the heart and the power it would have needed to succeed....more
Nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2019 In this dystopia, there are three border walls between Mexico and the US, the cartels are Nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2019 In this dystopia, there are three border walls between Mexico and the US, the cartels are holding scientists hostage to make them artificially reproduce strange extinct animals, and the shrunken heads of the local Aranaña tribe are in high demand in the world of organized crime on both sides of the border - yes, it's weird, and that's just the beginning. Enter Esteban Bellacosa, freelance South Texas construction equipment locator and man of all trades. He is a widower who lost his daughter to famine, and his brother has been kidnapped by a cartel who intends to turn him into, well, a shrunken head that can be monetized. Then, journalist Paco Herbert sends Bellacosa to a decadent underground dinner to find out about the reproduced species that are consumed there, and Bellacosa first sees the title-giving Trufflepig, a fictitious (!) animal out of an Aranaña myth that the scientists have brought to life. And then, Bellacosa gets kidnapped by a shady border patrolman and the scientist-hostages hook him up to a Trufflepig so that the animal might reflect his subconsciousness - the narrative goes on it that vein.
So yes, Flores makes Jeff VanderMeer appear like a realist writer - this is absolutely outrageous, and you have to give Flores kudos for throwing something that unusual and wild in our faces. There is a noirish feel about Bellacosa, the lone wolf, and Herbert, the hardboiled investigative journalist. Unlike Bellacosa, I've never been on peyote, but this text sure is delirious, disorienting and hallucinatory. The whole novel is gritty and the narrative moves in unexpected ways, which sometimes can become ennervating and unnecessarily hard to follow.
So while there is plenty so see and to experience in this Southern rollercoaster of a novel, it was frequently too disparate for my taste - when a story arc explodes into my face, this narrative decision must be beneficial to the overall text, but many moves and shifts in this book seemed slightly gratuitous to me, just there to say "hey, I'm edgy". Nevertheless, this is an interesting novel, and Flores is the kind of author who will have a hard time writing a boring book....more
Winner of the Whiting Award for Nonfiction 2017 "When I was in school, I spent all this time studying international relations, immigration, border secuWinner of the Whiting Award for Nonfiction 2017 "When I was in school, I spent all this time studying international relations, immigration, border security. I was always reading about policy and economics, looking at all these complex academic ways of addressing this big unsolvable problem. When I made the decision to apply for this job, I had the idea that I'd see things in the patrol that would somehow unlock the border for me, you know? I thought I'd come up with all sorts of answers. And then working here, you see so much, you have all these experiences. But I don't know how to put it into context, I don't know where I fit in it all. I've got more questions than ever before."
This quote from the book is part of a conversation Francisco Cantú, the author of this memoir, had with one of his fellow Border Patrol agents. After graduating with a B.A. in International Relations, Cantú decided to experience the realities of law enforcement at the Mexico-United States border for himself - much to the dismay of his concerned mother, a former Arizona park ranger: "You grew up near the border, living with me in the deserts and national parks. The border is in our blood for Christ's sake - your great-grandparents brought my father across the border from Mexico when he was just a little boy."
As a grandson of immigrants, Cantú was now directly confronted with the plight of migrants seeking a better life, many of them dying during their dangerous passage through the desert, the cartels, trafficking drugs and people, the local inhabitants and farmers who are fearing both cartel violence and raids by hungry and desperate migrants, and the psychological toll the dangerous work of patrolling the "unnatural divide" takes on his colleagues and him. Faced with a multitude of dangerous and bloody stories, the "big unsolvable problem" of the border starts to weigh Cantú down. Instead of making peace with the wolf, as his patron saint Francis of Assisi (after whom his mother named him) did, a wolf starts to haunt Cantú's dreams: "I dreamed of a cave littered with body parts, a landscape devoid of color and light. I saw a wolf circling in the darkness and felt its paws heavy on my chest, its breath hot on my face. I awoke (...). Then, for several minutes, I stared into the mirror trying to recognize myself."
What makes this text so strong is that Cantú manages to give a nuanced account, presenting the factual and the emotional without getting carried away on neither side. He puts all of his knowledge to work in order to make sense of the border as a concept and as an actual phenomenon: His family background, the historical, sociological and psychological research on the impact of the border and the violence that occurs there, as well as his experiences as a border patrol agent and as a friend of a deported Mexican. On the level of language, factual accounts, stories, studies, and highly poetic bits are intertwined, and the change of style and tone add to the depiction of the border as a contradictory and multi-layered reality that can be encircled, but never fully grasped (Cantú left the Border Patrol and got an MFA in Creative Writing).
The title "The Line Becomes River" hints at the fact that the Rio Grande forms part of the Mexico-United States border, the fluidity of the water somehow mocking the character of the border as a fixed barrier: "As I swam toward a bend in the canyon, the river became increasingly shallow. In a patch of sunlight, two longnose gars, relics of the Paleozoic era, hovered in the silted water. I stood to walk along the adjacent shorelines, crossing the river time and again as each bank came to an end, until finally, for one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape trembled and breathed as one."
Francisco Cantú already won the 2017 Whiting Award for Nonfiction for this book, and it is pretty easy to see why: Cantú does not only discuss a very current topic and shatters disgusting racist stereotypes, he also does not fall into the trap of turning his memoir into a pamphlet against the madman in the White House (who is not mentioned with one syllable throughout the whole text). It is the factuality and nuance of the book that make this account credible and moving....more
Loading...
