Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
It’s 2017 and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after 43 docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a lucrative fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose. When Aureliano was very young, his mother left without reason or trace. Aureliano is attempting to write a novel that mirrors his mother’s unexplained disappearance while shattering Magical Realism as a genre in the process. It doesn’t help though, that he’s named after the protagonist of a touchstone of the Magical Realist canon, and raised in the mythical town of Comala.
Aureliano searches for insight and closure from his father and from Rose, who grappled with his mother’s disappearance through a failed novel of her own. Their stories lead back to the 1980’s and the burgeoning drug trade, as Rose and Aureliano’s mother journey as young runaways throughout the Mexican countryside. Meanwhile, Aureliano’s addictions and the overwhelming burden of the past threaten his tenuous position at the fellowship, just as a deadly earthquake strikes Mexico City on the exact same date as a legendary earthquake struck in 1985.
Pages of Mourning is a daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death. Monumental, lyrical, and engrossing, Pages of Mourning is a towering accomplishment by one of the most exciting new writers at work today.
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