"Traveling is brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” --Cesare Pavese
Here are two of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the last ten years that, in many ways, embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is a unique and haunting work. Makina is given a note from her mother to take to an older brother who has disappeared into the North. Along the way, Makina encounters ambiguous helpers: a thug who mysteriously owes her mother, the trading of favors with a coyote, the strangers who pull her along the road, the rivers and mountain passes, and then the cities themselves, full of mazes, flags, and shops until she arrives at a place to discover her brother, changed utterly.
Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, opens with spare, compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August, Juan travels to Comala, a hot and dry town; a popular myth is that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells her his mother is dead, Eduviges shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak."
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
