A welcome gathering of centrifugal works by one of Mexico’s most accomplished contemporary writers.
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 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.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913505-24-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.
What happens when a midlist author steals a manuscript and publishes it as her own?
June Hayward and Athena Liu went to Yale together, moved to D.C. after graduation, and are both writers, but the similarities end there. While June has had little success since publication and is struggling to write her second novel, Athena has become a darling of the publishing industry, much to June’s frustration. When Athena suddenly dies, June, almost accidentally, walks off with her latest manuscript, a novel about the World War I Chinese Labour Corps. June edits the novel and passes it off as her own, and no one seems the wiser, but once the novel becomes a smash success, cracks begin to form. When June faces social media accusations and staggering writer’s block, she can’t shake the feeling that someone knows the truth about what she’s done. This satirical take on racism and success in the publishing industry at times veers into the realm of the unbelievable, but, on the whole, witnessing June’s constant casual racism and flimsy justifications for her actions is somehow cathartic. Yes, publishing is like this; finally someone has written it out. At times, the novel feels so much like a social media feed that it’s impossible to stop reading—what new drama is waiting to unfold. and who will win out in the end? An incredibly meta novel, with commentary on everything from trade reviews to Twitter, the ultimate message is clear from the start, which can lead to a lack of nuance. Kuang, however, does manage to leave some questions unanswered: fodder, perhaps, for a new tweetstorm.
A quick, biting critique of the publishing industry.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780063250833
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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