"Traveling is a 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 is a short list 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 an amazing 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: the 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. Read more > >
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, opens with a 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 town so hot and dry, popular myth has it 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." Read more > >
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht is an astonishing novel, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Tavelling is a hazard as boundaries shift with the conflicts and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state. Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and his death alone in a remote village. Read more > >