The Trace
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Mexican road novel of love, hate, drugs, and the Mexican Revolution.
The Trace is a masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico taken by a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution) and try to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son. With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of their relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons and desertcapes, on a journey through the the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the novel spinning out of control, with devastating consequences. . . . Poet Forrest Gander’s first novel As a Friend was acclaimed as “profound and relentlessly beautiful (Rikki Ducornet). With The Trace, Gander has accomplished another brilliant work, containing unforgettable poetic descriptions of Mexico and a story both violent and tender.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and translator Gander's second novel (after As a Friend) begins with a riveting opening scene depicting a gruesome beheading of a faceless character inside a grime-caked bathroom. What follows is seemingly incongruous tight, eloquently expressed chapters describing a distraught couple's road trip through the barren but seductive desert landscapes of Texas and Mexico, retracing the last steps legendary journalist Amrbose Bierce took before his unsolved death in 1913 while covering the Mexican Revolution. Though Dale and Hoa play at conducting research for Dale's book on Bierce, they mostly spend long hours in the car trying to bridge the crevasse that developed between them following their son's psych ward stint and disappearance. The pair's circumstances go from bad to worse when their rental car breaks down, leaving them panicked and stranded miles from nowhere in the blazing heat without water or cell signal. As in his previous works, Gander shows he is keenly aware of the loneliness that imbues human suffering and sets grief alight using beautiful, tense, haunting prose. As the well-paced plot creeps ever forward, the mysterious events at the beginning of the book are slowly revealed, resulting in an incendiary denouement that comes as a relief, but one not without each character's sacrifices. An intense read, with meditative poems between chapters to complete the package.
