“A welcome gathering of centrifugal works by one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary writers.” three novels
wanted, through any job necessary, was to be able to afford a flat, not just a room, and then to settle in it and invite friends to dinner.” In the book’s second part, however, we find she has moved even further from her objective—living in London, subletting a couch from the friend of a friend for 80 pounds per month, and working as a copy editor at a Tatler-like society magazine. All the while, the narrator notices and reflects on everything: university and office life; racism and anti-immigrant sentiment (readers learn, rather offhandedly, that she is a person of color); the rise of Boris Johnson to prime minister; the hulking remains of Grenfell Tower, where 72 largely immigrant residents were killed by fire. A prismatic portrait of British life and millennial angst emerges, with echoes of Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney, but the presiding spirit of the novel is Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own provides the epigraph and the inspiration. Scintillating prose and sly social observation make this novel a tart pleasure.
THREE NOVELS
Herrera, Yuri Trans. by Dillman, Lisa And Other Stories (376 pp.) $25.95 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-913505-24-0
doors and stories and a shit-ton of cement to their houses, one with more tile than the other.” A welcome gathering of centrifugal works by one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary writers.
THE BOOK OF MAGIC
Hoffman, Alice Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-1-982151-48-5 In the conclusion to Hoffman’s Practical Magic series, a present-day family of witches and healers wages a final battle against the curse that has plagued them since 1680. Thanks to an ancestor’s bitter curse, anyone who’s been in love with and/or been loved by an Owens family member for the last 300 years has met death and tragedy
The Mexican postmodernist, heir in equal parts to Cormac McCarthy and Juan Rulfo, delivers a hallucinatory study of his country in this omnibus. Herrera shuns proper names of people and places: Mexico City is the “Big Chilango,” characters bear names such as the Artist, the Witch, and Mr. Q. His ghostly landscapes are reminiscent of Rulfo’s in the iconic novel Pedro Páramo, but his characters are even more ethereal. Many are up to no good, delivering packages whose contents we can only guess at, trying to avoid falling into vast sinkholes and the jails of La Migra. The bad guys speak as if in a Peckinpah film; says one, before putting a hole in a wobbly drunk, “I don’t think you heard a thing. You know why? Because dead men have very poor hearing.” One of Herrera’s central preoccupations is with finding a language to convey the strangeness of our time and, failing that, falling into silence. That language can be knotted and slangy, as when a character called the Girl says in the first novel, Kingdom Cons, “It’s amped here, singer, it’s trick as shit; man, it’s all sauce; it’s wicked, slick, I mean this place is tight; people here come from everywhere and everybody’s down.” The other two novels in this loosely knit trilogy, Signs Preceding the End of the World and The Transmigration of Bodies (the latter a neat play on the Catholic concept of the transmigration of souls and playing again on the dangerous border between two nameless nations), are published in the order in which Herrera wrote them. They’re even more powerful read together, with their nightmare scenes of a Mexican boy who, as in the Civil War, steps in to do military service in the U.S. for a rich kid and of nouveau-drug-rich people who remain in their poor neighborhood: “they just added locks and |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 august 2021
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