EATING ASHES

A younger brother’s death by suicide in Madrid haunts the immigrant narrator of this second novel by award-winning Mexican writer Navarro.

An unnamed protagonist and her brother, Diego, live with their grandparents in Mexico City. When only a girl herself, she was charged with her brother’s care by their mother, who left in search of work and a better life in Spain. Though their mother promised to send for them soon, it’s nine years before they join her in Madrid. A teenager by this point, bullied in school, Diego takes refuge in the music of Vampire Weekend, while the narrator works a series of poorly paid caretaking and cleaning jobs. Navarro writes with authority and sympathy about the stress of being an immigrant, including loneliness, exhaustion, poor working conditions, and the strain of constantly feeling foreign and unwelcome. The novel starts with Diego’s death by suicide, and continues in a series of layered flashbacks. While Navarro is broadly interested in themes of immigration and the colonial legacy, the novel is firmly rooted in the specific, palpable lives of her characters, which she renders with nuance and honesty. When Diego turns moody and withdrawn, steals money, and skips class, his sister thinks: “I understood Diego. Ever since we got to Spain we’d been like amputees with no diagnosis. Like we were missing something, but everyone denied it....What could have possibly been amputated? Well, Mexico, I thought. They’ve cut off our Mexico.” But Mexico itself is violent and unsafe, as she sees firsthand after returning with her brother’s ashes. It provided a “sense of belonging, but at the same time of being a crab in a bucket climbing onto the backs of the others, trying to get out.”

A sensitive portrayal of sibling love, grief, and the trauma of dislocation.