Ramifications
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
The memories we return to most frequently are the most inaccurate, the least faithful to reality...
This is the tragic realisation made by the narrator of Ramifications as he tries to make sense of the defining event of his childhood: the disappearance of his mother to join the Zapatista uprising that shook Mexico in 1994. Left behind with an emotionally distant father who is singularly unqualified to raise him, and an older sister who only wants to get on with being a teenager, he takes refuge in strange rituals that isolate him from his peers: favouring the left-hand side of his body, trying to tear leaves into perfect halves, obsessively shaping origami figures. Now, two decades older and withdrawn from the world, he folds and unfolds these memories, searching the creases for the truth of what happened to his mother, unaware that he is on the verge of a discovery that will destroy everything he believed he knew about his family.Award-winning Mexican author Daniel Saldaña París masterfully evokes a child’s attempts to interpret events beyond his understanding. Less a Bildungs-roman than a tale of arrested development, this story of a boy growing up in the aptly-named Educación neighbourhood of Mexico City is a rich and moving portrait of a life thwarted by machismo and secrecy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Mexican writer Par s's strange and elegant latest (after Among Strange Victims), the unnamed narrator toggles between past and present from the confines of his bed, contemplating his childhood, his father's death, his relationship with his older sister, and the disappearance of their mother. The despondent narrator claims to never leave his bed and holds onto the self-absorption of his childhood, when he cultivated an "egocentric theocracy" and felt he was god's "favorite human being." He was 10 when his mother, Teresa, walked out on the family in 1994, and afterward the narrator grew closer to his sister, Mariana, while obsessively searching for the letter Teresa had left their father. As an adult, the narrator finally discovers the letter, along with another sent from Chiapas, each of which only brings him more angst and confusion, as he remembers the rumors about her activity that circulated when he was a child (did his mother join the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas? Was she a murderer?), causing his social life to crumble as he spent hours in a closet he calls his "Zero Luminosity Capsule." Along the way, Par s brilliantly explores memory, masculinity, and familial drama in equal measure. The result is an affecting account of arrested development.
