SLEEPING TONGUE by Franco Félix
After an accident that ultimately turned out to be fatal, Ana María spent three years going in and out of a clinic in Hermosillo, the city where the last of her lives ended. After her death, the secret biography of her past revealed one of her firsts: she lived in Mexico City, had a husband, four children, and abandoned everything. The threads that link both existences are told in this novel that is at the same time a hagiography of loss, a love letter, a kaleidoscope of mourning, a search and a discovery.
Mourning is so difficult to overcome precisely because it invokes the absence of a story. sleeping tongue it is an act-reflex against orphanhood, the mental journey of a son looking for his dead mother. In a whimsical and metamorphic way, as memory is, the narrative is populated with apparently trivial anecdotes —her mother’s fixation with Australia— as well as with digressions about time and language. But nothing is free in the author’s writing, his ability to generate images —a mob of kangaroos fleeing from the fire to later drown in the sea— transmits the narrative, linking the most critical moments in history with those domestic miniatures that give body and personality to a life.
Felix’s look is that of a proverbial dilettante for whom no event is indifferent. The Tasmanian devil and Wittgenstein, Freddy Krueger and Rosario Castellanos, Buddhism and the movie The Fly, a neighborhood thanatology group called Las Clepsydras and the bird clock that marked the hours with various squawks in the House of Floating Faces: a world that he doesn’t take anything seriously and that, on the other hand, he conceives every phenomenon that shakes the iris with the amazement of an unrepeatable miracle.
PORNOGRAPHY FOR FIREMANIACS by Wenceslao Bruciaga
Pedro Blaster, Charliee Sebastian and Jeff “Pliers” Peralta are the names of three actors immersed in the raucous circuit of gay porn in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. Its apparent stability of exhibitionist glamour, economic security or sex at will, is disturbed by the unexpected wave of suicides that seems to affect other fellow actors in the industry like a discreet epidemic, already reeling from the accelerated generational changes and technologies that give rise to new ways of conceiving relationships, attraction, power, drugs, sex and love between men.
In this fast-paced novel, Wenceslao Bruciaga leads us into the bowels of the San Francisco gay porn underworld, offering by contrast a broader questioning of what we understand as normality. With a writing as precise as it is overflowing, he shakes the moral certainties (and of all kinds) of the readers, with this funny and pornographic novel, which without a doubt will not leave unscathed whoever passes through the stories narrated here.
FERAL by Gabriela Jauregui
On day 0 or The Worst Day, Diana receives a call: Eugenia, her friend, her sister, was murdered.
The life of the commune, the space formed by four friends and inhabited by their itinerant extended circles, comes to us like the echo of an explosion through the investigation of some archivists from the future. «Below, we know that our file is first of all a promise», they write while telling us the story of the four friends: Diana and her visions, prophetic or symptomatic, like lightning bolts of language; Saratoga, who can extract music from the world with the slightest touch; Yunuen and her constant search to give shape and coherence to a reality in permanent dissolution and Eugenia, who ended her journey in Teotihuacán, where she worked on an archaeological excavation while engaging in a community struggle against another type of lethal excavation : extractivism.
In the first novel of Gabriela Jauregui, language generates a space of turbulence and tension between the past of a domesticated language and the feral and unrestrained possibility of the future. Feral is a journey through the tunnels of time from where the knowledge that explains the ruins of our present is built. A knowledge that must be reconstructed and recounted because, as the archivists say, «one day this archive will be a garden».
THE BOYS FROM HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD by Robert Kolker
Magnificent work on a generation come down.
Don and Mimi Galvin embody like no other the naive and enthusiastic spirit of the United States of their day. Young and full of dreams and ambitions, the future is an open horizon for them. The children were not long in coming: Donald was born in 1945, the first of the twelve that the couple would have over the course of two decades. Athletic, intelligent, talented, attractive, and happily ensconced in their idyllic home on Hidden Valley Road, the Galvins would call themselves the perfect American family. Until one day, after a series of strange behaviors, Donald is diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the years to come, as many as five more of the Hidden Valley Road boys will develop the disease, and the threat will always hang over the heads of the rest. Despite the fact that her unique case will come to the attention of the National Institute of Mental Health, Mimi will spend half her life trying to maintain the impeccable façade of a model and impeccable family, while behind closed doors the misfortune and horror only increase: crisis nervousness, episodes of uncontrolled violence, abominable secrets…
The Hidden Valley Road Boys is a portentous chronicle with a narrative pulse so strong and addictive that it reads like a novel: a family saga filled with love, suffering, and hope that unfolds alongside not only the great episodes of 20th-century American history, but also advances in the vision, understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. Kolker’s book is an exciting read that tells us about the tragedy of a family devoured by schizophrenia at a time when no one really knew what it was: not doctors, not researchers, much less the Galvins.
