I set this aside after about 25 pages but am glad I came back to it. A story of crossing the Mexican/American border and of crossing other boundaries mythic and real. The narrator also offers a newcomer’s view of the excesses and flatness of life in America. A big story packed into just over 100 pages.
This book was a life saver because I was struggling to finish anything non-audiobook for honestly a couple of weeks.
This was short and intense. One of those reads that has me thinking "this would make a good movie." But the writing is excellent, so it would be missing a big part of what makes it special.
There's an event that strains credulity (maybe?? rich people be rich peopling), but I went along with it for the purposes of the story. It's about the Mexico-US border, nationalism, desperation, family, and maybe more than anything else - language and translation.
I feel like there's a layer or two or more of this story that went right over my head. :)
There are some interesting aspects of craft here, and it appears the translation has done a marvelous job of bringing Herrera to the English only speaking world, however, the book is too short, imo. It didn't have enough time to expand on its ideas and turn them into lasting contributions. It also hardly qualifies (to me) as a novel. This is a long short story with some flourishes of language and circumstance. I'll continue to read Herrera because there is enough here to make me interested but he's hardly on track to becoming a favorite of the short form: see Cesar Aira.
