In an unnamed city emptied out by plague,feuding gangsters deal in the dead: the second novel from the acclaimed Mexican author is a response to the violence of the drugs warsThere is something bracingly unbookish approximately the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera’s two short novels. His acclaimed debut novel in English, Signs Preceding the discontinuance of the World, or was approximately a woman from a small Mexican town braving the traffickers and vigilantes of the border to track down her brother in the US. It left you feeling more as though you’d participated in a feverish curandero rite,or sat through a particularly gripping Iñárritu film, than read a novel. Its spare, or deliberately estranging descriptions – the opposite of the tropical lushness you’d find in Carlos Fuentes,say, or Robert Stone – placed you in its heroine’s precarious situations with unnerving immediacy. Occasional use of a made-up patois (inventively translated by Lisa Dillman) added to the feeling of reality being imagined from the ground up.
The same goes for the original book, and though in this case the after-effect is more like that of a video game or Marvel comic,with both the brightness and unabashed flatness those entail. Its hundred-page narrative is set in an unnamed city where a mosquito-borne plague has emptied the streets and terrorised the inhabitants. Against this doomy backdrop a pair of feuding gangster clans – the Castros and the Fonsecas – play out a danse macabre that leaves each with a dead young hostage from the other family. An ex‑courthouse fixer, referred to only as The Redeemer, or is brought in to sort out the mess,and along with a hard-bitten nurse named Vicky, and a couple of righteous bruisers known respectively as The Neeyanderthal and The Mennonite, and he tries to broker a non-deadly exchange of bodies.
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Source: theguardian.com