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Heavens on Earth
Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth . As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose. Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.
408 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2007
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379 people want to read
About the author
Carmen Boullosa
79 books177 followersCarmen Boullosa (b. September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura --and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 9, 2021
I am ready to write an entire thesis about Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa, translated by Shelby Vincent. Unfortunately, I don't have the funding, so I'll have to settle for an in-depth review. In this book we have 3 timelines. Lear lives in L'Atántide, a utopian society made of air, years after the earth was destroyed by climate change. She is working to translate the writings of Don Hernando, a 1500s indigenous scholar living in New Spain; writings which were first translated by 20th century Mexico City anthropologist Estela. All three tell their stories in their own ways, in this meta, twisting story about language and its role in humanity's survival.
The book examines how the past is reproduced, erased, and recorded, and what it means to preserve the past. Can you strangle the future by destroying the past? When is it vital and when toxic to hold tight to the past? Can its words be translated—or is every attempt to recreate just a rewriting, an appropriation, a retelling, that will always be different than the original? And is preservation worthwhile if it's solely for preservation's sake—if we learn nothing from it? In New Spain, we watch as the indigenous are forced into re-education, their history rewritten by the Spanish. In the era of L'Atlántide, Lear fights as her community tries to restrict language and conversation, hoping that if they can erase the history of earth's destruction, they can avoid corruption moving forward. And Estela struggles as her city plunges into blatant violence and corruption rooted in the failure to learn from the past, to engage with it meaningfully rather than just on a surface level.
Lear explores whether it is language that makes us human, and Don Hernando throws doubt on whether we should be allowed to judge who is human and who is not at all. Is it death that makes us human—that roots us in time, in history? Tied to all of this is the dynamics of power and the reckless, relentless steamroller of greed and consumption that attempts to erase Indian culture and ambition, that leads to the destruction of the earth itself. It is a call-to-action in the sense that it forces us to actually think about how we call for change. A complicit silent dreaming, the innocent dream of returning to a pure future, is naive; we have to engage with the past, with its darkness, in order to not strangle our future. In order to have a chance, we can't idolize the past, and we also can't erase it.
Boullosa explores all of this in a way that had me scribbling down notes in the margins. It's really a masterwork, and one that I'll have to reread—I kept catching things that made it clear that nothing was unintentional, that everything was carefully placed. The writing is beautiful and the questions raised are fascinating, and Boullosa does it as a complete master. If I ever get the chance to write an academic thesis again, this book should be ready.
Content warnings for colorism, domestic abuse, racism, anti-indigenous prejudice and reeducation, torture, violence, infant death, homophobia, fatphobia, cannibalism, and mentions of sexual assault.
The book examines how the past is reproduced, erased, and recorded, and what it means to preserve the past. Can you strangle the future by destroying the past? When is it vital and when toxic to hold tight to the past? Can its words be translated—or is every attempt to recreate just a rewriting, an appropriation, a retelling, that will always be different than the original? And is preservation worthwhile if it's solely for preservation's sake—if we learn nothing from it? In New Spain, we watch as the indigenous are forced into re-education, their history rewritten by the Spanish. In the era of L'Atlántide, Lear fights as her community tries to restrict language and conversation, hoping that if they can erase the history of earth's destruction, they can avoid corruption moving forward. And Estela struggles as her city plunges into blatant violence and corruption rooted in the failure to learn from the past, to engage with it meaningfully rather than just on a surface level.
Lear explores whether it is language that makes us human, and Don Hernando throws doubt on whether we should be allowed to judge who is human and who is not at all. Is it death that makes us human—that roots us in time, in history? Tied to all of this is the dynamics of power and the reckless, relentless steamroller of greed and consumption that attempts to erase Indian culture and ambition, that leads to the destruction of the earth itself. It is a call-to-action in the sense that it forces us to actually think about how we call for change. A complicit silent dreaming, the innocent dream of returning to a pure future, is naive; we have to engage with the past, with its darkness, in order to not strangle our future. In order to have a chance, we can't idolize the past, and we also can't erase it.
Boullosa explores all of this in a way that had me scribbling down notes in the margins. It's really a masterwork, and one that I'll have to reread—I kept catching things that made it clear that nothing was unintentional, that everything was carefully placed. The writing is beautiful and the questions raised are fascinating, and Boullosa does it as a complete master. If I ever get the chance to write an academic thesis again, this book should be ready.
Content warnings for colorism, domestic abuse, racism, anti-indigenous prejudice and reeducation, torture, violence, infant death, homophobia, fatphobia, cannibalism, and mentions of sexual assault.
July 2, 2017
In the generation after the Spanish took control of what is now Mexico from the people for whom the country is named (the Mexica, who we know as the Aztecs), the Franciscans opened a school to educate the children of the indigenous nobility. Many of the students became highly educated, and it is to them and to the great Francisco Fray Bernardino de Sahagun that owe most of what we know about the Mexica. Carmen Boullosa in this novel, invented a manuscript written by one of the students whose name we know, Hernando de Rivas. So far, so good. But Boullosa has embarked on a thoroughly modernist game here, so she adds to the Rivas annotations by Estela, a modern writer. And then the annotated manuscript falls into the hands of yet another narrator, a student in the future named Learo. The Rivas sections, which form the basis of the novel, are the most interesting, as Rivas struggles between his identities as a Mexican, as a Christian; at times Boullosa has him hiding the manuscript he is writing from prying eyes. The Learo sections are the most difficult, sometimes veering oddly in the direction of Atlantis--clearly meant as a nod to the utopianism of the first Franciscans in Mexico. And there are no doubt reams of comments to be written about the intertextuality of these references--in Boullosa's own words, the novel references "the prohibition of memory that will take us to the abolition of language, the repercussions of which the reader will witness." The problem is that Rivas has most of the good lines and the energy, as though Boullosa lost focus when writing from the perspective of her own time and the future. And the novel has one of my least favorite tropes of the historical novel, the invention of a sex life for an historical figure (admittedly one who is barely known). One wonders how powerful a novel Boullosa might have written had she not preoccupied herself with all those layers of intertextuality that actually make this a much harder and less moving read than it had to be.
December 12, 2017
La novela Cielos de la tierra, escrita por Carmen Boullosa, explica las historias de tres protagonistas diferentes, cada uno en su propio lugar y tiempo en la historia. Aunque a veces puedes estar confundido, el relato explica muy bien las historias de Hernando, Estela y Lear a través de manuscritos personales escritos por cada individuo respectivamente. Estas tres historias separadas, que de otra manera no estarían conectadas, están unidas por estas transcripciones escritas que se mantienen vivas a lo largo de la historia, mostrando la importancia general de la literatura y su capacidad para resistir las dificultades y problemas del tiempo.
La historia muestra bien que los problemas culturales, aunque no siempre sean los mismos, pueden ser muy evidentes a través de diferentes siglos. Este libro es difícil de leer, y esa sería uno de mis principales puntos negativos sobre la obra de Boullosa. Disfruté de la novela porque trata diferentes temas que varían desde la colonización histórica de las Américas hasta el final de nuestro mundo actual y la búsqueda de una nueva calidad de vida en el espacio. Le doy a este libro 4 de 5 estrellas porque creo que es una pieza valiosa de literatura, ofrece al lector una experiencia de lectura agradable y emocionante, pero le falta un poco de la simplicidad que lo haría más fácil de leer. Sin embargo, en general, recomendaría este libro a un amigo o colega.
Robert Carter
La historia muestra bien que los problemas culturales, aunque no siempre sean los mismos, pueden ser muy evidentes a través de diferentes siglos. Este libro es difícil de leer, y esa sería uno de mis principales puntos negativos sobre la obra de Boullosa. Disfruté de la novela porque trata diferentes temas que varían desde la colonización histórica de las Américas hasta el final de nuestro mundo actual y la búsqueda de una nueva calidad de vida en el espacio. Le doy a este libro 4 de 5 estrellas porque creo que es una pieza valiosa de literatura, ofrece al lector una experiencia de lectura agradable y emocionante, pero le falta un poco de la simplicidad que lo haría más fácil de leer. Sin embargo, en general, recomendaría este libro a un amigo o colega.
Robert Carter
May 20, 2019
i've had this book for two years and just got around to reading it because its a bit longer than novels I typically read these days at almost 400 pages. But damn, so good. I love how the stories unfurls as a meditation on language and the mediation that occurs as a result of translation. Also, Boullosa creates some of the most unsettling imagery for a post apocalyptic narrative I've encountered in prose, evoking equal parts body horror with a focus on post humanism and transcendent moments of natural beauty through descriptions of the air infrastructure humans reside in at the time of the novel's present. Really recommend this, and definitely gonna check out other Boullosa books and keep working on my spanish to revisit it in the original version some time.
April 13, 2024
I almost gave up a few times as this was complex and layered, and it felt like Cloud Atlas via James Joyce and was too non linear to keep my attention for long. But worth the effort, and I liked the span of time it covers in a unique way.
August 14, 2017
A pure masterpiece, and the greatest novel of México City I've ever read.
August 6, 2025
I’m trying to work out how I feel about this novel - in some ways it was deeply strange and difficult to understand, but in other ways I think it was fascinating and I’m definitely glad I read it. There are 3 strands - the first is from Hernando, a 16th century Aztec priest who is writing about life under the new colonial system as a Franciscan monk but born into an Aztec family; there is Estela, a woman living in 1970s Mexico City who is translating Hernando’s manuscript from Latin into Spanish; and finally we have Lear, who is a quasi-human being living in a utopian post-apocalyptic society up in the sky, sometime in the future. Lear is transcribing the manuscript from Estela and Hernando into her futuristic record keeping system. I found Lear’s sections to be the most intriguing and the clearest to read; and Estela the most difficult to understand - she goes off on so many tangents and I couldn’t follow the point of her inserts very well at all. Hernando was somewhere in the middle, with tangents but an interesting thread within it. All of the strands are preoccupied with the art of translating/transcribing the written word and in using words as memory or proof of history - in Lear’s time, words are under threat of extinction, and it soon becomes clear that that has far greater ramifications for the soul than first imagined; in Hernando’s world, the Aztec language and way of life has been obliterated to make way for the colonizing force, which also, through racism, denies opportunity to those of Mexican origin such as Hernando, despite his eventual devotion to Christianity. Estela feels that she and her generation didn’t fight against colonialism and are thus ‘silenced’ - there’s a lot of playing with ideas of reality and what is real versus not, and the role language and words have in making or denying reality, or even in making us human. I liked the ideas even if I found it difficult to follow at times; and I liked that it was very culturally imbued with Mexico - and my thanks to the translator’s note as this was also very interesting and really helped me to make sense of my thoughts about the novel after I finished it. And secondly, grateful to the fantastic huge bookshop in Kuala Lumpur where I stumbled across this copy to buy.
June 26, 2015
Tres personajes que terminan siendo expulsados de su mundo, parecerían que no tienen mucho en común, pero si lo tienen. Las reflexiones de Ekfloros keston de Learo sobre la importancia del lenguaje se me hicieron muy interesantes. Con la palabra nos podemos herir ciertamente, pero también podemos enamorar. Sin el lenguaje no somos nada. Muchas frases del libro me gustaron, pero termino con esta que se me hace muy actual con los problemas que estamos viviendo en la ciudad.
"Pero nuestro peligro era muy otro. La villa de México había decidido arrasar con el Colegio de Santa Cruz, como si nuestros conocimientos exacerbaran su gana incontenible de destruir. Le abríamos el apetito a su maldad, a sus malos humores."
"Pero nuestro peligro era muy otro. La villa de México había decidido arrasar con el Colegio de Santa Cruz, como si nuestros conocimientos exacerbaran su gana incontenible de destruir. Le abríamos el apetito a su maldad, a sus malos humores."
August 9, 2024
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.
Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Deeply, deeply examines our modern-US obsession with The Past. Every excursion into The Past requires acts of translation. You and I, reading and writing on our devices, pushing our words into strangers' faces as a matter of course (possibly detrimentally to discourse) can't know what anyone in The Past really meant to say. We can see the words. We can, but mostly won't bother to, study the time and thus learn some cultural facts that help us get a hint. But, like the radical fascist folk who assert their politicosocial ideas as representing those of the US "founders," we're translating words, not recovering facts. Author Boullosa uses multiple narrators in multiple timelines to examine the role of History and Tradition as anchors, as dead weights, and as foundations. What even is The Past, a key question for each narrator. The same events look hugely different to people with different perspectives.
I am usually a bit iffy on this narrative technique. In this case, I lapped it up because Estela in the present, Learo in the future, and Don Hernando in the past each explore this story's central thesis, the nature of narrative in shaping culture, without resorting to speeches. No one says, "if they/we had only known" or the equivalent. They tell us, their readers, the reality they live in as seen from their differing levels of privilege granted to each one's identity. Fair warning, there is frank...but uncelebrated...homophobia, colorism, and racism. They are facts of the past and present. The future, well...we won't know for a while, will we?
The narrative conceit is of a manuscript written in Latin when the Conquest was within living memory. Its author's a gay man in Holy Orders; not so shocking an idea for the time. It falls into the hands of a present-day scholar, Estela, who translates it (into Spanish). She is living in the failing Western country, Mexico. She annotates the manuscript with an academic eye on the roots of the present-day struggles in the clueless past, intending to make it public. Somehow the manuscript reaches Learo living in a wildly posthuman, post-scarcity future where The Past is not discussed, not heeded, not mined for clues or used as either guide or horrible warning. Learo's narrative is, unsurprisingly, polyphonic with Don Hernando's account of how the Conquest violently and cruelly mangled the memories and the bodies of the dwellers in "New Spain," an utterly invented and brutally enforced culture. As is always the case in examples of conquest, the ordinary person is required to graft a new identity onto their lifelong one, an intimate violation of self that begets more and more violence.
It is a stunning psychic violence that pollutes every facet of the future.
Yet without an honest reckoning with it, the present is unmoored, is prone to equal, congruent violence. The future that creates is...chilling. I'll say, for fear of spoilers, what Author Boullosa says: this novel explores "the prohibition of memory that will take us to the abolition of language, the repercussions of which the reader will witness."
"Repercussions" might be the best-translated word Shelby Vincent chose.
This novel, in its translation from Spanish to English, offers a far more trenchant riposte to foolhardy US politicosocial "essentialism" than a dozen more "factual" analyses could. A story does something an analysis can't: Personalizes the reverberations of actions taken or not taken, of salvations offered and denied. How we read this novel, in English, is already a thing apart from how it was written in Spanish. Its echoes of Anglophone sensation Cloud Atlas will be seen by the myriads of y'all who read (and mostly loved) that timeweaving narrative. More recently we had the multiversal Everything Everywhere All at Once pursuing the layering of causality in its own specially fraught way. The topic is a delightfully rich one, offering many opportunities to contemplate the story, its message, its execution, and its presentation in an enhanced framework. The effort of following the story through its curlicues and oddly bent pathways is richly repaid.
What effort you make at translation is always a life-altering thing. Reader be aware. You will leave a different soul than the one you entered as.
The Publisher Says: Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.
Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Deeply, deeply examines our modern-US obsession with The Past. Every excursion into The Past requires acts of translation. You and I, reading and writing on our devices, pushing our words into strangers' faces as a matter of course (possibly detrimentally to discourse) can't know what anyone in The Past really meant to say. We can see the words. We can, but mostly won't bother to, study the time and thus learn some cultural facts that help us get a hint. But, like the radical fascist folk who assert their politicosocial ideas as representing those of the US "founders," we're translating words, not recovering facts. Author Boullosa uses multiple narrators in multiple timelines to examine the role of History and Tradition as anchors, as dead weights, and as foundations. What even is The Past, a key question for each narrator. The same events look hugely different to people with different perspectives.
I am usually a bit iffy on this narrative technique. In this case, I lapped it up because Estela in the present, Learo in the future, and Don Hernando in the past each explore this story's central thesis, the nature of narrative in shaping culture, without resorting to speeches. No one says, "if they/we had only known" or the equivalent. They tell us, their readers, the reality they live in as seen from their differing levels of privilege granted to each one's identity. Fair warning, there is frank...but uncelebrated...homophobia, colorism, and racism. They are facts of the past and present. The future, well...we won't know for a while, will we?
The narrative conceit is of a manuscript written in Latin when the Conquest was within living memory. Its author's a gay man in Holy Orders; not so shocking an idea for the time. It falls into the hands of a present-day scholar, Estela, who translates it (into Spanish). She is living in the failing Western country, Mexico. She annotates the manuscript with an academic eye on the roots of the present-day struggles in the clueless past, intending to make it public. Somehow the manuscript reaches Learo living in a wildly posthuman, post-scarcity future where The Past is not discussed, not heeded, not mined for clues or used as either guide or horrible warning. Learo's narrative is, unsurprisingly, polyphonic with Don Hernando's account of how the Conquest violently and cruelly mangled the memories and the bodies of the dwellers in "New Spain," an utterly invented and brutally enforced culture. As is always the case in examples of conquest, the ordinary person is required to graft a new identity onto their lifelong one, an intimate violation of self that begets more and more violence.
It is a stunning psychic violence that pollutes every facet of the future.
Yet without an honest reckoning with it, the present is unmoored, is prone to equal, congruent violence. The future that creates is...chilling. I'll say, for fear of spoilers, what Author Boullosa says: this novel explores "the prohibition of memory that will take us to the abolition of language, the repercussions of which the reader will witness."
"Repercussions" might be the best-translated word Shelby Vincent chose.
This novel, in its translation from Spanish to English, offers a far more trenchant riposte to foolhardy US politicosocial "essentialism" than a dozen more "factual" analyses could. A story does something an analysis can't: Personalizes the reverberations of actions taken or not taken, of salvations offered and denied. How we read this novel, in English, is already a thing apart from how it was written in Spanish. Its echoes of Anglophone sensation Cloud Atlas will be seen by the myriads of y'all who read (and mostly loved) that timeweaving narrative. More recently we had the multiversal Everything Everywhere All at Once pursuing the layering of causality in its own specially fraught way. The topic is a delightfully rich one, offering many opportunities to contemplate the story, its message, its execution, and its presentation in an enhanced framework. The effort of following the story through its curlicues and oddly bent pathways is richly repaid.
What effort you make at translation is always a life-altering thing. Reader be aware. You will leave a different soul than the one you entered as.
January 25, 2018
La novela recurre a un interesante artificio narrativo, muy similar al de “Claridad tan obscura” del escritor peruano Carlos Herrera, novela en la cual los sobrevivientes de una catástrofe mundial, encerrados en un ignoto refugio, reflexionan en torno a diversos temas, mientras que uno de ellos encuentra una biografía novelada del misionero jesuita Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. La situación original se convierte en un pretexto para la lectura/narración de la biografía, la cual se convierte en el tema principal de la novela.
En “Cielos de la Tierra”, hay tres momentos (pasado, presente y futuro) narrados desde el punto de vista de algún personaje. El pasado consiste nada menos que en el período de tiempo inmediato a la conquista de México, narrado por un cronista singular, un indio noble llamada Hernando de Rivas, perteneciente a la primera (y acaso última) generación de estudiantes del Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, interesante pero fallido experimento de asimilación cultural: a Hernando de Rivas se le imparte la mejor educación posible, que no puede aprovechar de ninguna manera por su condición de indígena. Sus alocuciones en latín, por ejemplo, son tomadas como meros ejercicios mnemotécnicos, sonidos que podría hacer una urraca o un perico. El presente, apenas dibuja a una investigadora que ha rescatado para la posteridad el manuscrito de Hernando de Rivas.
¿Y el futuro? Un mundo devastado en su superficie, en el cual se sitúa la Atlántida, llamada a veces l´Atlantide, en la cual mora Lear, la última depositaria y lectora del manuscrito de Hernando de Rivas. Un futuro lleno de tecnologías a veces incomprensibles, y que en un principio parece un mero decorado, una piedra de toque desde la cual leer el texto de Hernando de Rivas. Pero hacia la mitad de la novela, Lear y su mundo futuro cobran un singular protagonismo: se suscita una suerte de revolución que se basa nada menos que en la abolición del lenguaje y la memoria. Y en este punto, la novela, publicada en 1997, deviene en premonitoria: Lear observará con horror y desesperanza que sus coetáneos caen en un estado peor que la barbarie, puesto que sin lenguaje ni memoria, la actividad cerebral deviene en mera reacción. La descripción que se hace de esta nueva humanidad, precisamente, no parece diferir de nuestra creciente ansiedad en torno a las redes sociales y al uso perpetuo de aparatos como los smartphones. La comunicación reducida a gruñidos y gestos, incluso signos simplificados similares a los “emoticones”, la existencia convertida en una mera expectativa de estímulos externos, y la sensación de impotencia de Lear frente a esta transformación (similar, por cierto, a la desazón de Hernando de Rivas frente al ocaso de su mundo), hacen de “Los cielos de la Tierra” una novela de sorprendente actualidad. (publicada en "Crónicas de Futuria" https://danielsalvo.wordpress.com/)
En “Cielos de la Tierra”, hay tres momentos (pasado, presente y futuro) narrados desde el punto de vista de algún personaje. El pasado consiste nada menos que en el período de tiempo inmediato a la conquista de México, narrado por un cronista singular, un indio noble llamada Hernando de Rivas, perteneciente a la primera (y acaso última) generación de estudiantes del Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, interesante pero fallido experimento de asimilación cultural: a Hernando de Rivas se le imparte la mejor educación posible, que no puede aprovechar de ninguna manera por su condición de indígena. Sus alocuciones en latín, por ejemplo, son tomadas como meros ejercicios mnemotécnicos, sonidos que podría hacer una urraca o un perico. El presente, apenas dibuja a una investigadora que ha rescatado para la posteridad el manuscrito de Hernando de Rivas.
¿Y el futuro? Un mundo devastado en su superficie, en el cual se sitúa la Atlántida, llamada a veces l´Atlantide, en la cual mora Lear, la última depositaria y lectora del manuscrito de Hernando de Rivas. Un futuro lleno de tecnologías a veces incomprensibles, y que en un principio parece un mero decorado, una piedra de toque desde la cual leer el texto de Hernando de Rivas. Pero hacia la mitad de la novela, Lear y su mundo futuro cobran un singular protagonismo: se suscita una suerte de revolución que se basa nada menos que en la abolición del lenguaje y la memoria. Y en este punto, la novela, publicada en 1997, deviene en premonitoria: Lear observará con horror y desesperanza que sus coetáneos caen en un estado peor que la barbarie, puesto que sin lenguaje ni memoria, la actividad cerebral deviene en mera reacción. La descripción que se hace de esta nueva humanidad, precisamente, no parece diferir de nuestra creciente ansiedad en torno a las redes sociales y al uso perpetuo de aparatos como los smartphones. La comunicación reducida a gruñidos y gestos, incluso signos simplificados similares a los “emoticones”, la existencia convertida en una mera expectativa de estímulos externos, y la sensación de impotencia de Lear frente a esta transformación (similar, por cierto, a la desazón de Hernando de Rivas frente al ocaso de su mundo), hacen de “Los cielos de la Tierra” una novela de sorprendente actualidad. (publicada en "Crónicas de Futuria" https://danielsalvo.wordpress.com/)
March 24, 2019
Will take me a while to process. Certainly about the challenges of try to create a utopia or at least an improved society. As well as the importance of language, human connection and community. And that people without history can lose everything. Mostly a story between 1500s Mexico and the far future with some current day mixed in to highlight that a lot of the problems in the past and current are because of the treatment of the Indians in Mexico. The future’s challenges are not directly related to that but in rejecting everything from the time of man, it falls apart too. One quibble-would have been more interesting if future had been non-gendered.
February 7, 2020
Very intriguing and interesting, but I have to admit that due to my language limitations I missed a lot of the details. A story within a story within a story. The memoir of a 16th Century Indian turned Franciscan monk is found by a Mexican woman in the 1990s. She translates it from the Latin, with a long personal introduction or her life story. In turn this is being translated by a post holocaust survivor in a paradise going bad in Atlantic, who intersperses the collapse of her civilization and the end of humanity with the translation of the memoir(s).
April 18, 2022
I wanted to like this book, but I think I was just reading it at the wrong time. Maybe if I wasn't distracted by work, I would have been able to see the connections between the three narrators. Given the fact that I am in the middle of writing my dissertation and don't have the mental energy for complex literature right now, I just didn't connect with the book.
May 23, 2024
I understood the literary references and the idea behind the author’s purpose, but unfortunately I found it very difficult to really connect with the story line. To me it was dry and mechanical. It makes me sad that I didn’t enjoy it more because I see so many amazing reviews, but I simply can’t make myself lie about it.
February 3, 2020
This has been favorably compared to Cloud Atlas and I can see why. It is weaker in some very important aspects, but the structure and themes are similar. If you liked Cloud Atlas, this might be right up your alley.
November 21, 2020
"No lo sé. Llevo mese consagrada a tu adoración, a tu búsqueda y en tu enterramiento, palografiando tus palabras y paleografiándote, girando alrededor de tu olor como la mosca gira sobre el cuerpo del caballo."
January 2, 2018
Important book about language and society and power. Super surreal and lots of layers.
October 16, 2019
Solo leí 70 páginas pero parece interesante si no cautivador
February 13, 2021
very creative choice of narratives and voices
July 10, 2022
terrible, pretencioso a más no poder, tedioso y sin sentido en muchos tramos
June 16, 2025
INSANELY SMART !! Timely (though it was written 25 years ago) an absolute must read!
July 12, 2020
Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation. ― Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains
Three narrators (+1?) tell stories that span 500-plus years, each, whether by way of translation or through loss, in a language not their own. What does it mean to have a native tongue? What does it mean that the victors get to write the history? A nuanced look at the effects of colonialism on culture, language, identity.
Three narrators (+1?) tell stories that span 500-plus years, each, whether by way of translation or through loss, in a language not their own. What does it mean to have a native tongue? What does it mean that the victors get to write the history? A nuanced look at the effects of colonialism on culture, language, identity.
September 1, 2015
No me gustó nada, me deje ir por ver que era de Alfaguara.
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