Pages of Mourning

Starred review from March 11, 2024
In the inventive and thrilling latest from Mexican writer Gerard Morrison (Myth of Pterygium), a novelist wrestles with the disappearance of his mother decades earlier. Aureliano Segundo Mas regularly makes a point of dismissing the magical realism genre, especially when others point out that he shares the first name of the hero from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story unspools in 2017 Mexico City, where Aureliano works on his novel No Magic Realism, which centers on Oedipa, a character loosely based on his mother, Evelina, and her disappearance during the 1980s cartel wars. Adding to Aureliano’s heavy heart is the recent suicide of his editor and friend Chris, who was helpfully ruthless with his red pen. Rose, Aureliano’s godmother and patron, senses his writer’s block and gives him the manuscript of her own failed novel about Evelina. The pages link his mother to the drug trade and imagine her eventual return to the abandoned desert town of Comala, which is also the name of the town where Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo takes place. Gerard Morrison brilliantly interweaves Aureliano’s personal story of loss within the larger context of the devastation caused by drug trade violence, and what begins as a critique of magical realism turns into a begrudging acceptance of its enduring power, as Aureliano is visited by Chris’s ghost and the reader comes to realize the joke is on the novel’s stubborn protagonist (magical realism “helps people in this country think about death,” another writer tells him). It’s an impressive achievement.