Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. Signs Preceding the End of the World is a masterpiece, haunting and arresting, spare and poetic, a condensed epic about immigration. Lust and crime and a lack of condoms all feature in this brilliant novella about living in a city filled with the dead, and where no one can distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.Ī response to the violence of contemporary Mexico, with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolaño and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noir tragedy and a tribute to those bodies-loved, sanctified and defiled-that violent crime has touched. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city’s underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Hilarious and horrifying, Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies is a gritty, feverish novella, written in dazzling prose that is both bawdy and poetic. Two astonishing novellas, by ‘Mexico’s greatest novelist’, in one volume.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |