Country of Toó

I don't tend to have the best luck with translated works, but that doesn't stop me from giving them a chance from time to time. I wasn't able to get past that odd ~extra degree of separation~ feeling though, and reading this book felt like it was resisting me.

There's obviously a ton of local nuances and references that are going to go over my head because I'm not familiar with Guatemala or contemporary Mayan communities, but I could follow the general conflicts and points of contention between the haves and have-nots, indigenous vs. industrialists, etc. What really tripped me up is that multiple characters seemed to have more than one name, and the narration was pretty liberal about switching between them. There were times I thought I was following two different people, only to later realize that it was just one. Maybe that was an intentional stylistic choice that worked better in the native Spanish, but it made things challenging to follow.

Other major events are sometimes handled "off-screen" and depictions of violence are described so quickly in so few words that I wasn't always sure what had actually happened. I'm thinking specifically of a protest-turned-mass-shooting (I think that's what happened?) that abruptly pivots to a subsequent funeral a few days later that I reread the passage twice, feeling like I had missed something.

I'm not trying to place blame on the translator or even the original author. Maybe this book just wasn't meant for me and I'm at peace with that.