'Signs Preceding the End of the World' by Yuri Herrera

The precise, spare beauty of Herrera’s writing gives this story of a young Mexican woman’s illegal crossing into the United States in search of her brother, with whom contact has been lost, both a vivid immediacy and a mythological depth. Her journey takes place both in the actual world and several conceptual kilometres below its surface. In the opening paragraph a sinkhole swallows a man, a car and a dog, and we know that the book is about death as much as it is about the problems of living. Makina is her village’s telephonist, able to convey messages in three languages, and it is her ability to translate and carry, as well as her openness, assertiveness and compounded innocence and worldliness, that qualifies her for the crossing into the ‘other world’ of the United States. After paying her respects to the ‘top dogs’ whose assistance and protection she needs, Makina crosses the ‘Big Chilango’ (both the Rio Grande and the river that separates the living from the dead in mythologies around the world) and makes her way into the world on the other side, past demonic guards and assisted by the agents of the ‘top dogs’ she has propitiated. “It is very lonely here but there’s lots of stuff,” observes Makina of the US (after)life. When Makina finds her brother he has been greatly changed by his new life, and has all but forgotten his life before his crossing (as the dead forget their lives), and Makina too feels her old identity slip away (she is even handed forged papers with a new name) and her memory of the village fading. Here, at its most intensely mythological, the book is also the most intensely political: the crossing into the US ‘land of opportunity’ is a kind of death.

May 2015