Before
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."—Alvaro Mutis
Part bildungsroman, part ghost story, part revenge novel, Before tells the story of a woman who returns to the landscape of her childhood to overcome the fear that held her captive as a girl. This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes.
Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's leading writers, has published nearly twenty novels. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft, won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award.
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In Mexican poet Boullosa's (Texas) second novel, a ghost recounts the hauntings of her childhood in order to conquer fear. When the narrator is a young girl, one of her classmates invites her into the school's hen coop, where the girls begin to hear strange footsteps approaching. These footsteps follow the narrator after the classmate's sudden death and are accompanied by other odd situations: her scissors mysteriously slaughter a turtle, a tree moves away from her to deny her shade, and ink marks on a jacket turns into live spiders. All the while, the narrator has to grapple with the fact that she is growing up in a terrifying world with a family who cannot understand her, providing an altogether fresh take on the coming-of-age story. Boullosa's prose, constructing a monologue that tracks the narrator's consciousness (complete with lengthy comical tangents), comes to life on the page as the narrator's eerie childhood becomes more and more frightening and devastating. Boullosa manages to merge humor with panic seamlessly in this short novel, and though readers know that the narrator is a ghost, the suspense over how that came to be makes this a thrilling story.
