Pages of Mourning

Starred review from March 11, 2024
In the inventive and thrilling latest from Mexican writer Gerard Morrison (Myth of Pterygium), a novelist wrestles with the disappearance of his mother decades earlier. Aureliano Segundo Mas regularly makes a point of dismissing the magical realism genre, especially when others point out that he shares the first name of the hero from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story unspools in 2017 Mexico City, where Aureliano works on his novel No Magic Realism, which centers on Oedipa, a character loosely based on his mother, Evelina, and her disappearance during the 1980s cartel wars. Adding to Aureliano’s heavy heart is the recent suicide of his editor and friend Chris, who was helpfully ruthless with his red pen. Rose, Aureliano’s godmother and patron, senses his writer’s block and gives him the manuscript of her own failed novel about Evelina. The pages link his mother to the drug trade and imagine her eventual return to the abandoned desert town of Comala, which is also the name of the town where Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo takes place. Gerard Morrison brilliantly interweaves Aureliano’s personal story of loss within the larger context of the devastation caused by drug trade violence, and what begins as a critique of magical realism turns into a begrudging acceptance of its enduring power, as Aureliano is visited by Chris’s ghost and the reader comes to realize the joke is on the novel’s stubborn protagonist (magical realism “helps people in this country think about death,” another writer tells him). It’s an impressive achievement.

March 15, 2024
An alcoholic writer who recently returned to Mexico City grapples with despair in the wake of loss. Skipping along on many of the same thematic touchstones as Morrison's debut novel, Myth of Pterygium (2022), this follow-up marinates in its literary navel-gazing while simultaneously amplifying its pedestrian horrors. This weird dissonance can distract from the genuinely moving human suffering. Our narrator (mostly) is Aureliano M�s, a 30-something writing student who has come back from New York City at the behest of his Aunt Rose, an influential novelist who has used her influence to secure him a writing fellowship and a mentor. When we meet him, he's daydreaming about day drinking with his writing pal Chris at their old Brooklyn watering hole, but reality soon sinks in. There are reasons behind Aureliano's misery, but they're doled out in such fragments and delivered with such emotional gravitas that their actual impact on the page seems diminished. He claims a deep desire to write the novel that obliterates magical realism from the Mexican canon, but the defining fact of Aureliano's life is his deepening alcoholism. There's some humor here--Chris's cleareyed dissections of his output being one, while Aureliano's award is named the Under the Volcano Fellowship, nodding to Malcolm Lowry's mezcal-soaked tragedy. Mostly it comes from a place of terrible pain, though, as Aureliano tries to reconcile the absence of his mother, long since disappeared, with literary balms. Between blackouts, we also get a large chunk of Rose's failed novel about her early life with Aureliano's mother, an unapologetic confession from his father, and the prototypical absence of resolution. One might think that sudden violence, two earthquakes, and the ravages of drink would breathe some much-needed life into the tale, but alas, no. We leave our man in much the same place we found him--searching for answers that never come. A bleary-eyed ramble through generational grief, inherited hurt, and the collateral damage that nobody expects.

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Starred review from June 7, 2024

There is no magic in this novel, just realism, despite the protagonist's name being Aureliano M�s II, after one of the central characters in Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Aureliano, a writer on a quest to create "the Great Mexican Novel," hasn't seen his mother, Evelina, since she left the family when he was a child; she was never heard from again. Aureliano soon becomes fixated on learning what happened to his mother, so he crisscrosses Mexico to talk to those who met Evelina. During his engaging journey, he uncovers the family business of growing cannabis and competing with the drug cartels. Consumed by this new knowledge as well as still-unanswered questions about his mother, Aureliano falls into in an alcohol-induced haze while Mexico is turned upside down by devastating earthquakes. Aureliano, like the families of the many people who are disappeared in Mexico, never gets closure about his mother's vanishing, and he begins to ponder the role of magic realism as a means to understanding. VERDICT Riveting, gripping, and atmospheric, the latest from award-winning, Mexico City-based Morrison (The Wait) takes readers on a whirlwind trip across his homeland. Macondo, the magical utopia of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is an object of desire that remains elusive in Morrison's gritty tale of violence and love.--Lisa Rohrbaugh

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