Translated by Lisa DillmanTwo astonishing novellas, by Mexicos greatest novelist, in one volume. Hilarious and horrifying, Yuri Herreras The Transmigration of Bodies is a gritty, feverish novella, written in dazzling prose that is both bawdy and poetic.
A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the citys underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage. Lust and crime and a lack of condoms all feature in this brilliant novella about living in a city filled with the dead, and where no one can distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.A response to the violence of contemporary Mexico, with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolao and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noir tragedy and a tribute to those bodiesloved, sanctified and defiledthat violent crime has touched. Signs Preceding the End of the World is a masterpiece, haunting and arresting, spare and poetic, a condensed epic about immigration. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when theres no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messagesone from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.
