Author(s): Yuri Herrera; Lisa Dillman (Translator)

Novel | Read our reviews! | Mexico

The Mexico we hear of in the news--the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence--is rich soil for Herrera's moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer Lobo inKingdom Cons who loves the drug lord's own daughter, Makina who crosses borders to find her brother inSigns Preceding the End of the World, and the Redeemer, a hard-boiled hero looking to broker peace between feuding families during a pandemic inThe Transmigration of Bodies.

These three novels get to the heart of the matter in a truly original way. They are storytelling that is at once timely and timeless.

'Language itself seems to be invested with a strange demiurgic force. Herrera's style - both precise and elusive, specific and elliptical - is uncannily well suited to depict the in-between state his characters inhabit.' Tony Wood, LRB ---- '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 Paramo, 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. [...] The [three novels are] even more powerful read together. A welcome gathering of centrifugal works by one of Mexico's most accomplished contemporary writers.' Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Author Biography: Yuri Herrera's first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and was chosen by The Guardian in 2019 as one of 'The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century'. Herrera has gone on to become one of the best-loved, and best-selling, Mexican authors published in translation. A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire was his fourth book, and his first of non-fiction. He lives in New Orleans.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW of Signs Preceding the End of the World

The precise, spare beauty of Herrera’s writing gives this story of a young Mexican woman’s illegal crossing into the United States in search of her brother, with whom contact has been lost, both a vivid immediacy and a mythological depth. Her journey takes place both in the actual world and several conceptual kilometres below its surface. In the opening paragraph a sinkhole swallows a man, a car and a dog, and we know that the book is about death as much as it is about the problems of living. Makina is her village’s telephonist, able to convey messages in three languages, and it is her ability to translate and carry, as well as her openness, assertiveness and compounded innocence and worldliness, that qualifies her for the crossing into the ‘other world’ of the United States. After paying her respects to the ‘top dogs’ whose assistance and protection she needs, Makina crosses the ‘Big Chilango’ (both the Rio Grande and the river that separates the living from the dead in mythologies around the world) and makes her way into the world on the other side, past demonic guards and assisted by the agents of the ‘top dogs’ she has propitiated. “It is very lonely here but there’s lots of stuff,” observes Makina of the US (after)life. When Makina finds her brother he has been greatly changed by his new life, and has all but forgotten his life before his crossing (as the dead forget their lives), and Makina too feels her old identity slip away (she is even handed forged papers with a new name) and her memory of the village fading. Here, at its most intensely mythological, the book is also the most intensely political: the crossing into the US ‘land of opportunity’ is a kind of death. - THOMAS

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STELLA'S REVIEW of Kingdom Cons:
I’ve been late to come to Herrera’s work, and now I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get there. Herrera is a revelation. He has been feted as Mexico’s greatest living novelist and his third novel Signs Preceding the End of the World was awarded Best Translated Book Award in 2016, beating stiff and outstanding competition from Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The first novella in his ‘Border Trilogy’, Kingdom Cons has just been translated into English. Unusually, in the English translations, the last has come first and the first last. Loosely a trilogy, all the books (the second being The Transmigration of Bodies) deal with borders, physical, psychological and metaphysical. Kingdom Cons is fable-like in its construction, telling the story of the Artist, a wandering musician who sings songs for his supper, and the King, the Capo, the head of a palace, bejewelled and all powerful. The novella opens in the cantinas of Mexico where Lobo is singing popular ballads of humour and humility for a few coins. When a drunkard refuses to pay for his song, the King intervenes and the Artist finds himself taken into a powerful world of passion, violence and high-stakes jealousy. The world of the drug cartel is subtly played out in this tale; the story could as easily be any time or situation where inequalities thrive and those that play hardest and fastest climb to the top, only to watch with increasing paranoia for the knife to come. Lobo’s place in the palace is a lowly one, a place that protects him in its powerlessness but also leaves him vulnerable, yet he is increasingly intrigued by the machinations and power of the court. Accepted by the King initially as a harmless distraction, he later becomes an object of annoyance. His relationships with others in the power structure become increasingly complex, and his dangerous obsession with a beautiful, damaged young woman, the Commoner, compromise his former inconsequential existence. As defections occur and the King’s position becomes precarious, the tension mounts. When Lobo is sent on a mission to spy, he inadvertently makes a mistake, one that could crush him. Herrera’s ability to take you into this maelstrom of epic emotion and action is measured, holding you both aloft and completely compelled. His work deserves a second and close reading. In these slim volumes, he conjures up worlds and ideas that sideswipe you: dynamic and intelligent, they will hit you in both the gut and the mind. 

{STELLA}