Warwick's Reviews > Signs Preceding the End of the World

A stark, stylish novella which reads like a modern Mexican katabasis – a descent into the underworld that is also a journey over the border into the US. Herrera's prose style and his narrative framing (the story begins with a sinkhole opening in a Mexican village, and ends with a charged descent into a basement) invite mythic comparisons, with our protagonist Makina like a supercool latter-day Ishtar, who travelled to see her sister in hell, removing one item of clothing at each of the seven gates. Makina, travelling to find her own sibling, is similarly stripped of what she brings with her, though whether she is going to hell or not is very much at issue. (view spoiler)[Then again, Mesopotamia is a long way from Mexico, so perhaps we should really be thinking about Quetzlcoatl's descent to the underworld. I don't know anything about it, unfortunately. (hide spoiler)]

And yet despite all this metaphorical layering – with which reviewers have a tendency to get too carried away – the book is, for me, at its most satisfying as a purely literal treatment of the Mexico–US border, and Makina is wonderful character just on her own terms. Laconic and resourceful, dealing coolly with changing and often frightening circumstances, she's a figure you don't see that frequently in fiction, and I would happily have spent ten times as long in her company. The language in which she is described has, like all the language in this book, a certain flexible, lapidary quality, like the liminal patois spoken across the illicit borderland:

More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue […] Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things.

The book is full of such ‘new things’, a challenge that has drawn great inventiveness and creativity from the English translator Lisa Dillman. That ‘anglo’ above is a rendering of the Spanish gabacho, a word that originally meant Pyrenean, but which in Mexican slang means something like ‘gringo’, though perhaps not quite so pejorative. A more delightful coinage of Herrera's (at least I think it's his) is his use of desgranar ‘to shell (a nut etc.)’ as a female-agentive version of ‘fuck’. Dillman translates this with neat literalness as ‘shuck’ (‘she’d been reckless and gone and shucked him as she had others on a couple of trips to the Little Town…’), which has the added bonus of rhyming felicitously. (Under a different review, someone was lamenting recently that such a word for the opposite of penetration does not exist in English, and pointed me to an article proposing ‘circlusion’ – well, here's a suggestion that's a little simpler and admirably suited.) It well expresses not just Makina's casual attitude to sex, but her complete refusal ever to be an object of anything – she is All Subject.

More notorious is Herrera's invention of jarchar, a multi-purpose verb of movement covering ‘leave’, ‘go’, ‘travel’, ‘come’, which derives from a term used of Mozarabic poetry – Dillman talks about this one directly in an afterword. Her translation, ‘to verse’, works perfectly in my opinion. On a very few occasions, there are hints of translationese in the form of not-quite-appropriate set phrases (‘A few houses had already been sent packing to the underworld’), but on the whole I thought the translation was extremely sensitive and atmospheric.

Indeed it's amazing just how much atmosphere and resonance such a short book can generate – I read it in less than an hour, but it will be with me for some time. Recommended reading for the Underground.