Ramifications

by Daniel Saldaña París, Christine McSweeney (Translator)

A thirty-two-year old man can’t get out of bed or leave his apartment. All he can do is recall his life so far, dissect it, write it, gathering all the memories around what would mark his existence forever: his mother’s departure in the summer of 1994, when he was only ten, so that she could join the Zapatista uprising that was shaking up the whole country. Her mysterious escape from one day to the next only worsens with his clumsy father’s secrecy, silence and awkwardness, a man unable to carry the responsibilities for his son and teenage daughter. This worsens with the boy’s erratic investigations to uncover the reasons for his mother’s decision to leave. All he can do is create an anguish-filled parallel world: he will unsuccessfully seek refuge in his origami obsession, or in his sensory deprivation tank in which he locks himself up to see if he can erase his existence. Finally, with the help of Rata, a young delinquent dating his sister, he will undertake a voyage of discovery to the darkest corners of his Mexico City, where he will meet the face of gratuitous cruelty, as well as the selfless kindness of strangers.

In his second novel, Daniel Saldaña París has created a bone chilling, exact portrait of a hypersensitive childhood that must torture and repeat itself in the mind of the protagonist.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Book Club, Spanish Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary

197 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2018

About the author

DANIEL SALDAÑA PARÍS (Ciudad de México, 1984) escribe narrativa y poesía. Es autor del libro de poemas La máquina autobiográfica (Bonobos Editores, 2012) y de la novela En medio de extrañas víctimas (Sexto Piso, 2013). Ha sido becario del FONCA en los programas Jóvenes Creadores (2006-2007) y Residencias Artísticas (2012), así como de la Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas (2007-2009). En 2012 antologó y prologó Doce en punto. Poesía chilena reciente y Un nuevo modo. Antología de narrativa mexicana actual, ambos publicados por la UNAM. En 2014 fue escritor en residencia en Ledig House-OMI International Arts Center (Nueva York).


Fue elegido por el Hay Festival, el British Council y Conaculta como uno de los 20 escritores menores de 40 años para representar a México en la Feria del Libro de Londres en 2015.

Reviews

[Milly Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por qué este es de mis mejores libros de la vida:

1. Porque está hermosamente escrito, tanto que desarma.
2. Porque lo escribe un mexicano (tan joven) y habla sobre mexicanos.
3. Porque es tan melancólico que duele.
4. Porque no acaba hasta el último renglón, hasta el último punto, y entre tanto, no te deja respirar.
5. Porque hace mucho, mucho tiempo, que no tiemblo y lloro tanto con un libro.

[João Tordo · Rating 5 out of 5]

an amazing 2nd novel from mexican writer Saldaña Paris. Much more personal and melancholic than the first, it delves deep into the psyche of a tormented kid & his relationship to his family, especially his departed mother. A must read.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two and a half years on, my existence is, like his [my father’s] during those months [when he was dying from cancer], restricted by the width of a bed. From here, in the tangle of my sweat stained sheets, accompanied only by these notes – by these notebooks in which I scribble as a form of salvation, and these words I weave together in search of meaning – I’m able to understand the infinite pleasure my father must have experienced on discovering, after a lifetime of work, the sweet honey of immobility.

Charco Press is an Edinburgh-based small UK press – they focus on “finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”.

This is the fifth book of their fourth year of publication – the first this year by an author new to the press, the Mexican author, Daniel Saldaña París. It is translated by Christina MacSweeney (another first timer for Charco) and edited by Fionn Petch (who has translated or joint translated some of my favourite Charco Books, particularly their two Luis Sagasti publications “Fireflies” and “A Musical Offering”).

The book is narrated in the first person in 2017 by a man largely confined (through lethargy and the weight of memory) to is parents old bed in his apartment in a run-down area of Mexico City. The bed was about the only piece of furniture he kept after (with his largely estranged older sister) selling his parents’ house in 2015, following the death of their father from cancer.

21 years previously in July 1994 when he was ten his mother left home suddenly, seemingly to join the Zapista uprising in Chiapas (the signing of the NAFTA treaty having driven the final wedge between his banker father and revolutionary-minded mother). Later, in September that year, she died – and the distance the young narrator had from his sister and father seems to be something from which he never fully recovers.

Particularly as a ten year old, and particularly after his mother’s initial disappearance he takes an uneasy refuge in a series of interests and ideas from before her disappearance: his hobby of origami, the threat of a bogeyman, his love of Choose your Own Adventure stories; and these expand into a wider world view – an obsession with symmetry and later with left hemispheres, hiding in his wardrobe in what he christens a Zero Luminosity Capsule.

These rituals and eccentricities (as well as his mother’s reputation as a Chiapas sympathiser and possible terrorist) only serve to alienate him from his schoolfriends; while at the same time their collective inability to process his mother’s death destroys what little was left of the relationship between him, his sister and his father (relationships only uneasily restored in forced circumstances 22 years later).

And as he looks back its clear, imagery around folding, symmetry and hiding return – not just to shape his thoughts but even his actions. A folder and an unfolded death certificate plays a crucial role; he sleeps on the left hand side of his parents bed; the bed itself something of a hideaway from the world.

A key theme to the book is memory/remembering – the narrator is, from his bed, writing the book we are reading; the attempt to put the past behind him by exploring it and understanding it, simultaneously drawing himself further into his own lethargy and solitude. There are many strong passages as the narrator considers this:

Writing about the past is, as I’m beginning to realise, writing inward not forward.

Remembrance is destructive. Not just in terms of the memory … but also for the subject who remembers … The memory and the subject wipe each other out in the exercise of remembering, until the memory becomes an invention and the subject is more alone than before, because the thing recalled no longer exists, is just a replica of a replica of a replica.

He circles around various memories: his mother falling in a market; kicking a pigeon; events around an ill-conceived cross country bus ride he took in 1994 to try and reach Chiapas – some money handed to him by his Sister’s wannabe-hard guy boyfriend The Rat, a humiliating encounter with a a soldier who shared his father’s laugh.

He returns frequently to how he always aspired to be like his mother (fiercely socially aware, non-conformist, unemotional and unsentimental in speaking style) but instead realises to his frustration that he is much more like his father (temperamental, unable to relate to others, entirely unremarkable)

Overall I found much in this novel to like. The examination of memory, its unreliability and effects was well structured; the way in which certain ideas which start as a young boy, become totemic to his teenage existence and still reoccur at 33 is very well done. And, via the translator, the book is written in a style which drew me in.

Where I was less convinced: ultimately I struggled to connect with the narrator – firstly as a 10 year old (only, once, when reading a passage about the author tracing rain drops down a bus window did I feel any real link to my own thoughts) and even more so as a 33 year old (unfortunately these passages read like an extended Nicholas Lezard column). And I was disappointed at some discoveries made by the author when 31.

But overall a strong read.

First I have to write the story through to the end, fill this spiral-bound notebook with my scribblings to the very last page, drop it by the bed, open the next notebook, and continue writing until that one, too, is full. Not because writing is an act of salvation, but because there’s no other way I can tell myself the things I don’t even dare think when I’m alone. Only when I’ve written it all down will I be able to look at myself in the mirror and not see the face of someone else, the other that stalks me from within.

[Come Musica · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ricordare consuma. Non solo il ricordo stesso, come affermavano gli esperti di quell’articolo, ma anche il soggetto che ricorda – questo lo aggiungo io. Ricordo e soggetto si annichiliscono a vicenda nell’esercizio della memoria, finché il ricordo non è del tutto inventato e il soggetto è più solo di prima, perché ciò che ricordava non esiste più: è solo una copia di una copia di una copia.”

In questa citazione c’è l’essenza del libro.

Con questo libro si entra nelle pieghe della memoria del protagonista e si scoprono le piaghe del suo cuore, quelle causate dai suoi genitori. Un libro duro nel finale. E al tempo stesso avvolto in una sorta di ingenuità, quella di un bambino di 10 anni, congelato nella memoria dell’adulto trentunenne che cerca di risolvere e archiviare il proprio passato.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Charco Press focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.”

Ramifications is the latest book from Charco Press and it jumps around between the narrator’s present and several different events in his past, most notably the time when his mother walked away from the family to join the Zapatista uprising. In the aftermath of her departure, he, his emotionally distant father and his teenage sister are left to come to terms with their loss.

The first page of the book made me wonder if I was actually going to enjoy the book. This quote from page 1 refers to the way his mother used to speak and says:

…it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that writing this is, in some form, an effort to find an echo of that monotone voice in the written word.

Did I want to read a book that was seeking to find a monotone voice?

It turns out I did, and that’s partly because the narrator doesn’t really succeed in finding that monotone voice. At least, not for me.

Twenty-three years have passed in the narrator’s life since his mother left, and the key events on which he reflects are mostly from around that time over two decades ago. This means that he also spends quite a bit of time reflecting on the process of memory. When he sees a photo of his mother, he says:

Her only makeup was a discreet black line on each eyelid (I’m discovering that fact now, looking at photos; my memory, as everything that follows here, depends on secondary sources.

And later, he says:

Memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past, as if the cord holding it to life itself is fraying until one day, it snaps and the memory bolts, runs free through the fallow field of the spirit, like a liberated goat taking to the hills.

And later, he reads:

Every time you remember something that happened in the past, your brain distorts it.

This final quote instantly made me think of one of my favourite quotes from Siri Hustvedt’s “Memories of the Future” which explores how memory and imagination interact:

Let us not forget that each time we evoke a memory, it is subject to change, but let us also not forget that those changes may bring truths in their wake.

It is interesting that Hustvedt is agreeing with the author here that memories distort over time, but she is seeing something positive in the truths that can be revealed by that, whereas the overall impression in Ramifications is that something is being lost rather than gained.

These ideas about memory are a key theme running through the book and they gradually set an expectation in the reader’s mind about how the book is going to finish. If not the details, at least the general idea. In my case, I was pleased to discover that I was completely wrong. I was really hoping I would be, enough to feel some tension as the climax approached (right at the end of the book) because I didn’t want it to be all neat and tidy. Real life isn’t like that.

There are other themes developed in addition to thoughts about memory. There’s the emotional effects of loss (and the use of origami, a Zero Luminosity Capsule and a Choose Your Own Adventure novel to help deal with it). There’s masculinity. In the background, there’s the political upheaval of Mexico in the 1990s.

From having started the book a bit nervous as to whether I would like it, I found myself more and more drawn into it. In some reviews I have seen the writing described as “precise” and “elegant” and I would agree with both those words. Everything is carefully put together, both in terms of the way the different events in the book are mixed and in the construction of the sentences.

A strong 4 stars.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Ramifications front cover, there is a quote by Ottessa Moshfegh, comparing Daniel Saldaña Paris to a Mexican version of Philip Roth and, as much as I dislike comparisons, this is correct. Both authors have a way of detailing incidents which lead to heavier topics, while at the same time incorporating a sort of coming of age realisation.

In Ramifications, the narrator recounts his mother saying goodbye him and his sister, while placing note for his father. As the narrator is only 10 he thinks his mother is just going for a small trip only to realise that she has run away. The rest of the book is about him trying to play detective and finding out why his mother left and when finally realising the truth and understanding the repercussions of it. Ramifications takes the form of a reminiscence, which is also a device Philip Roth likes to use, most definitely in the books in which he plays the eponymous character such as The Plot Against America and Nemesis

One motif which dominates is origami. Throughout the book, the narrator likes to fold things , especially leaves and although he is excited about receiving a book about origami, he is incapable of really doing anything with those squares of paper other than badly made frogs. Could this be a metaphor for this character’s trajectory in the book? i.e not able to make things fit neatly and end with a decent finished product?

Elsewhere the emphasis is on family relationships : mainly his sister and his distant one with his father. We also get glimpses of his relationship with his mother. As the mother’s disappearance affects the family in different ways, the narrator chronicles this as well, his own coping mechanisms being quite interesting.

I just loved this novel. The translation is flowing, the narrator’s observations were not too precocious and the book builds up nicely. It’s well constructed. Plus, as with every Charco book, there are insights to South American culture, ranging from food to customs, this time round the country being Mexico.

Charco have rarely ever made a mishap and I consider Ramifications to be one of their top books. it also serves as a great entry point to the wonderful selection of books they have to offer and, on a personal note, I do hope there will be more English translations of Daniel Saldaña Paris’ books (Ramifications is his second novel ) in the future.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ramifications is Christina MacSweeney's translation of Daniel Saldaña París's 2018 novel El nervio principal, and published by the wonderful Charco Press.

The author has explained the origin of the novel (translation courtesy of Google): “More than an idea, I think there was an image: a child making origami. For a few weeks I kept thinking about that image and ended up assigning a context to it: Mexico, 1994" (https://www.lja.mx/2018/11/entrevista...)

1994 was a momentous year in Mexico beginning with the signing of the NAFTA agreement and the public rise of the Zapatista Army, followed by the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, replaced in the Presidential election as PRI candidate by Ernesto Zedillo, who won. The year end with a peso crisis and the eruption of the Popocateptl volcano, and even included a World Cup, where Mexico won their group ahead of eventual finalists Italy, but were eliminated in the first knockout round on penalties by Bulgaria.

All this forms a backdrop to the memories of our narrator, writing from 23 years later, but recalling 1994, when he was 10, although as he himself realises, many of the memories are more his later reconstruction and explanation of the past: Memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past.

His story in 1994 begins with his mother, Teresa leaving home one day, telling her children there is a letter for their father and not returning, leaving him and his older sister in the care of their father. His mother's politics have always been more progressive and radical than his more conservative father, and it emerges that she has gone to Chiapas and rumours spread about her involvement in the campaign of the Zapistas, even that she may have taken up arms. Later in September of that year, he learns of Teresa's death.

He is now, in 2017, largely self-confined to bed (his parents bed which he inherited after his father's death a couple of years earlier), his lethargy induced by trauma induced when, while clearing his late father's possession, he discovered a second letter and his mother's death certificate calling into question his understanding and memories of the events of that earlier period.

But back in 1994, he took refuge in a fondness for origami, albeit a skill at which he is relatively inept, in Choose Your Own Adventure books, and in a mania for favouring the left side of his body, all of which relate to his desire to impose order, and categorisation on the world:

I loved repetition, patterns, the way the days always divided along the same axis, like a square piece of paper retaining the memory of its previous folds. Transgression, my sister's ultimate aim in life and almost obsessive desire, was for me like folding a piece of paper in the opposite direction to the crease, like ignoring all the clues that seemed to be shouting out for you to choose a given adventure. Since then I've learned that a piece of paper can only be folded down the middle so many times, and that the adventures that lead you to the most satisfactory ending of a story aren't the ones you choose by rationally weighting the significance of the clues, but those undertaken in the heat of the moment - that sheet of paper without folds, that eternal square with no memory.

As the author has explained (Google doesn't really do this one justice)

"The game of constant oppositions that has political and gender resonances is a structure imposed by the narrator's gaze, who needs to impose that order, this rigid structure to a reality that eludes him, more ductile and complex, and with the one that fails. In his effort to compartmentalize everything according to the laws of symmetry, he finds that they are categories of the spirit, of the political imaginary, which falls short when it comes to reading reality, his family, the world. They do help the narrator to tell a story with a redemptive spirit, that is the heart of the matter, how we provide shape to what does not have it."

Overall: the portrayal of the symmetry obsessed narrator is the book's strongest point. On the downside, the novel does rather pivot around the revelation in the second letter, which felt slightly cliched and I wasn't convinced by the narrative concept that it would have confined the narrator to bed for 2 years afterwards.

3.5 stars

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this as the second installment of my 'bibliotherapy' subscription from Mr. B's Emporium in Bath -- and my bookseller has been choosing things for me that are from UK presses that I might otherwise miss stateside. When the second package showed up, I somehow knew it would be a Charco book and, sure enough!

I started this book at the wrong moment (24 hours before my first vax shot) although it did succeed for me in the end. It begins akin to so many other books I've read/found recently coming out in English -- a kind of bildungsroman, backdropped by some moment of political history. But Saldaña París keeps turning the story away from the predictable, in ways that hooked me before long. Where I'd first thought it was like anything else I've read, he pulled off small surprises that made me wonder what would come next. If it ended up being a solid entry in a long literary tradition, that's fine too.

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

following his stupendous debut, among strange victims, daniel saldaña parís's ramifications (el nervio principal) is the second of the mexican author's novels rendered into english. foregoing the verve and playfulness of his first book in favor of a more serious, somber story, ramifications is a tale of maternal abandonment, truth-seeking, emotionally stunted adulthood, and the constancy of the hope/hopelessness cycle of depression. reflecting upon and reckoning with the legacy of his mother's disappearance some twenty-three years prior, saldaña parís's bed-bound protagonist recalls his broken youth, his pre-teen escapism (origami and a closet), his father's indifference, and his own desperate efforts to fit in and be liked by his fellow classmates. ramifications, as its title so clearly evokes, contends with the often lifelong fallout of unresolved childhood trauma. compassion and melancholy co-mingle to create a moving portrait of the shut-in as a young man.

memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past, as if the cord holding it to life itself is fraying until one day, it snaps and the memory bolts, runs free through the fallow field of the spirit, like a liberated goat talking to the hills.

*translated from the spanish by christina macsweeney (luiselli, herbert, navarro, gerber bicecci, barrera, rabasa, et al.)

**3.5 stars

[Palomar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Messico e nuvole.

"...e la memoria corre, libera e sguaiata, per i terreni incolti dello spirito, come una capra che fugge sulle montagne"

"Il mio fallimento consisteva nell'aver creduto, in modo arrogante e presuntuoso, che crescere significasse trionfare sulle avversità opponendovi grandi progetti".

Un romanzo che passa attraverso i due estremi sintetizzati dalle citazioni riportate.
Da una parte la schiavitù del ricordo, che consuma e annichilisce tanto l'oggetto del ricordo quanto il soggetto che ricorda.
Dall'altra parte, la scelta di rifiutare un futuro, che passa attraverso grandi progetti, la cui (ir)realizzazione, forse e a dispetto di ciò che pensiamo da giovani, non ha quel potere risolutivo che vorremmo avesse, però ci terrà impegnati in questo strano gioco - a tratti crudele - che è la vita.

Una scrittura godibile, che ci porta dritti nelle bizzarre dinamiche familiari del protagonista, che per quasi tutto il libro si sviluppano nell'ombra della madre, scappata con gli zapatisti nell'estate del 1994.
Ma sul finale comparirà un'ombra ben più lunga.
Consigliatissimo.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel's central character is rendered deeply depressed by his mother's abandonment of the family (husband, daughter and son) and their comfortable Mexico City life to join the Zapatistas in Chiapas in the early nineties and her subsequent death. My own reading of the novel is inflected by my own memories of the country and city at that time, the endemic corruption, the presence of soldiers at banks and the entrances of suburbs, the assassinations of the ruling party Presidential candidate and its secretary, the flight of the sitting President and his brother.
The novel captures some of that apocalyptic feel, and the impact on a young boy of a mother's flight, leaving him with an unfeeling father. But what strikes me most is how the much the novel functions as an elegy for a country that felt, with the advent of Salinas and NAFTA, that it just might be leaving the paroxysms of the eighties behind. Instead, the nation and its children were handed over the technocratic businessmen--like the boy's father--who enriched themselves and failed their citizens.

[Abbie | ab_reads]

Free review copy received from the publisher.

Another stunning little gem of a novel from Charco Press, who are publishing some astonishing works from contemporary Latin American authors. Ramifications is a thoughtful and moving musing on memory, the relationships between parent and child, specifically mother and son, and coming of age amid personal and political upheaval.
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The narrator of Ramifications is unable to get out of bed or leave his apartment. All he can do is rehash the events of his childhood, writing and rewriting crucial episodes that have shaped his life. These mostly revolve around his mother's abrupt departure when he was 10, leaving her family to join the Zapatista uprising which was gripping the country at the time. The narrator, adrift in his new family circumstances, becomes absorbed completely in his hobby for origami (for which he does not show much skill despite his enthusiasm) and his imagination to try and instil some order in his life. 23 years later, he's trying to make sense of it all by writing a memoir, armed with new information about his mother's fate.
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I love these kinds of slice-of-life reads. and this one has a brilliant intensity which makes it difficult to put down, despite not having much of a plot driving it forward. I was captivated by the narrator's attempts to see the past clearly, the way he returned to certain memories. He recalls a fact he learned from a magazine, how our most frequent memories are the most inaccurate. Apparently, each time we recall a certain memory, we're actually recalling the last time we remembered the event, not the event itself. Each time, new layers are added, details you might have altered in remembering now form the makeup of the memory itself. An accurate memory is one that resurfaces out of nowhere. Anything else has at least been partially fabricated by your own mind. I have no idea whether it's true or there's a bit of artistic license used, but I find it fascinating!
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Definitely give this one a go if you're interested in memory, family and coming-of-age stories with a heavily introspective leaning!

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

“… however many leaves and sheets of paper I folded down the middle, origami wasn’t going to give meaning to anything at all, because symmetry wasn’t a material state but an invention of the mind; half a sheet of paper was always imperfect and, therefore, the cranes, frogs, pagodas, and kimonos made of folded paper had a lie at their very cores, as do, of course, flesh-and-blood humans: we, too, are formed from a fundamental lie, or at least a fiction (a redemptive lie).”

[Nelliamoci · Rating 4 out of 5]

La ricerca della simmetria in ogni oggetto e aspetto della vita è una costante per il bambino, senza nome, protagonista di questo romanzo. Il tentativo di scovare l’esatta metà è in ogni piccolo gesto, dall’infanzia fino all’età adulta, quando scoprirà che, nonostante questo desiderio, il suo lato preferito rimarrà sempre il sinistro: probabilmente, inconsapevolmente, anche per una questione politica.

Dopotutto l’atto di divisione sembrerebbe la conseguenza più ovvia per chi si è sentito lacerato in un giorno d’estate dei suoi 10 anni, quando Teresa, la madre, se ne andò lasciandolo in soggiorno con la sorella e con un nuovo futuro da affrontare. Quella che sembrava una commissione si è trasformata in una fuga e nei continui flashback della voce narrante, lei diventa prima una moglie e poi una madre costretta in una vita che non è la sua.

[Tommi · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5]

[Reyna Amkie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hombre en depresión con una vida difícil. Padres ausentes. Bullyng y no vínculos. Fuerte

[the_wistful_reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

DANIEL SALDAÑA PARÍS ~ RAMIFICATIONS

When a 10 year old boy's mother walks out of the family home one day in Mexico in 1994, never to return, he is left to make up his own story of what might have happened to her. His father is distant and vague and his sister wants to live her own life and no one thinks to explain to the boy where his mother is.

Here starts a journey of aching loneliness and he finds comfort in origami in order to make sense of things in a chaotic life. While the book begins with a child's imagination such as fear of the boogeyman and seeking help from adventure books to solve the mystery of his mother's disappearance - often amusing and relatable - a profound sadness hangs over the second half. The impact of the loss of a mother has far reaching consequences; bullying, fear, insecurities, misunderstandings.

"What is certain is that origami was a school for being alone: it taught me to spend many hours in silence."

As an adult he struggles with social interaction and relationships and spends his days in bed writing his memoir, withdrawn and troubled, and attempting to come to terms with what really happened to his mother.

This was a vividly written and expertly translated novel and it gave me plenty of food for thought. Thanks to Charco press for the gifted copy.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[MartinaViola · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In qualche modo, la sparizione di mia madre fu un'ulteriore lezione in quel costante laboratorio di finzione che era la vita di Teresa. Aveva recitato il ruolo di sposa, madre, casalinga suburbana per sedici anni: una bugia alla quale si era aggrappata con le unghie e con i denti, con il corpo intero, fino a crederci lei stessa. Non so se fu l'insurrezione zapatista in Chiapas, il declino per cause naturali del suo matrimonio o, in modo più generale, l'avvento di una Verità maiuscola, ma di certo durante quell'estate del 1994 la bugia di Teresa si crepò del tutto. O forse erano anni che si stava sgretolando in silenzio e solo allora, quel martedì dopo pranzo, finì per crollare una volta per sempre.”

Teresa è la madre che abbandona i suoi figli per non rinunciare a sé stessa, quella che ne va “in campeggio” un martedì qualunque e non torna più. Suo figlio ha 10 anni quando si ritrova ineluttabilmente a dover affrontare l'abbandono della madre e l'inadeguatezza del padre, che viene descritto come l'anello debole di casa, “a metà tra un cagnolino e un elettrodomestico”.
Ventitré anni dopo, quello stesso bambino è confinato in un letto e ripercorre quei momenti cruciali in cui ha imparato a rifugiarsi nelle pieghe degli origami e a tentare disperatamente di far combaciare le due parti della sua storia.

"L'origami non avrebbe mai dato senso a nulla, perché la simmetria non era una condizione del mondo, ma un'invenzione dell'intelletto."

Daniel Saldaña Paris riesce a creare il giusto equilibrio tra la prospettiva del bambino, che tenta da solo di risolvere il mistero della sparizione della mamma, rifugiandosi nel conforto dell'oscurità dell'armadio (che diventa la sua capsula a luminosità zero) e la voce dell'adulto che ripercorre quegli eventi a posteriori per cercare finalmente di chiudere con il passato o con quello che ne resta attaccato alla percezione del presente.
È un racconto denso e perfettamente ritmato, con una prosa lucida e poetica – qualcuno l'ha definito il Roth messicano, in cui seguiamo questo ragazzino ormai cresciuto mentre ripercorre a ritroso tutti gli accadimenti che hanno cambiato per sempre lo sfondo della sua esistenza. Il finale è inaspettato e chiude perfettamente il cerchio, lasciandoci in contemplazione di un dolore che é la testimonianza dell'imperfezione della vita, della sua asimmetria incorreggibile.

Daniel Saldaña Paris (classe 1984) è poeta e giornalista, prima che romanziere, ed è stato inserito nelle classifiche dei migliori scrittori contemporanei del Messico e di tutta l'America Latina. Tocca tenerlo d'occhio!

[Dan HdezSa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro que trae recuerdos. O mejor dicho, copias de las copias. Al final de cuentas, cada quien conoce sus propios dobleces.

[Nadirah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.5

"Ramifications" by Daniel Saldaña París has a simple premise: a man tries to make sense of his traumatic past by retracing the circumstances of his childhood to unlock when his life had been altered incontrovertibly.

París writes from the perspective of a child to great effect, and it's easy to empathize with the narrator as he recounts the ways in which is life was affected from a young age when his mother left the family in order to join the Zapatista uprising. Faced with his father's bleak indifference and his older sister's studied nonchalance, the young boy's confusion grows at the way his family treated the mother's disappearance. Readers are then taken on a journey when the narrator attempts to retrace his mother's footsteps in order to make sense of the situation, as only a naive young child would.

For such an unassuming book, this one sure packed a punch, and even with the distance of time, it's hard for me to pinpoint why I loved this so much. The dive into the narrator's psyche in relation to trauma of abandonment and neglect -- the first by his mother, and the second by his father -- was the highlight of the book for me. The gradual reveal of the circumstances of his mother's disappearance was affecting, and despite the bleak subject matter, I loved the note this book ended on.

This is one of my notable reads from Charco Press, and I look forward to reading more books from this publisher!

[Jorge Vázquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

personalmente, este libro me ha tocado de una forma precisa y genuinamente profunda, pese a no contar con demasiadas familiaridades con ese protagonista que, más bien, es tan espectador de sus acontecimientos como lo somos nosotros.
sin embargo, esa voz cargada de pena y nostalgia, es tan contagiosa como cualquier enfermedad infecciosa. ¿quién no echa de menos a algo o a alguien? ¿quién no querría volver donde fue feliz? ¿y si ya has alcanzado el momento más feliz de tu vida y todo son reproducciones mucho menos definidas de ese momento? y si recordar es olvidar, desdibujar y manipular cualquier acontecimiento vivido... ¿qué te queda? no nos queda nada. por eso mientras podamos, olvidemos juntos nuestra vida, de una forma en la que solo nos quede revivir y sentir como la primera vez. perseguir el eterno retorno, sin que nos perdamos por el camino.
este libro fue un regalo de sant jordi de alguien especial, y es que el nervio principal no podría ser más esencial. vivir, recordar, olvidar y vivir. para volver a empezar.

[Lorena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiene algo este libro que me ha recordado a Zambra; quizá sea la mirada tierna, entre ingenua y torpe, desde la infancia. Aunque de entrada se plantea como una retrospección en el recuerdo, siento que ese carácter se pierde de vez en cuando. Hay veces en que la voz narrativa se sumerge tanto en su niñez que se le olvida que eso está contado desde el presente, desde un narrador adulto que sabe bastante más de lo que sabía a los diez años. Imagino que eso va de la mano de cierto golpe de efecto que aparece hacia el final y sobre el que, me parece, la novela descansa demasiado, hasta llegar incluso a estancarse. He estado dudando entre ponerle 3 o 4 estrellas, porque pese a esos reproches me ha gustado bastante, pero creo que es de esos libros que, cuando lo recuerde dentro de unos meses o incluso semanas, no me resultarán demasiado memorables.

[Carolina Cruz (Aries_en_libros) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si tuviera que definir con una palabra la lectura sería Melancolía. El nervio principal es un libro que habla en retrospectiva de la infancia y la búsqueda de identidad de una forma bastante intima y. La novela esta ambientada en México cuando el protagonista recuerda después de más de 20 años los sucedido en el verano de 1994 cuando tenía 10 años, y su madre lo abandonó a el y a su hermana junto con su padre sin mayor explicación.

A lo largo de la historia se alternan los momentos de su niñez que hablan de la inocencia e ingenuidad con la que veía la situación, contratados con el presente que le da un panorama más completo gracias al madurez y las experiencias adquiridas.

Es un libro sobre la memoria, la ausencia, el duelo. Si están buscando narrativas mexicanas, que abordan temas sociales y políticos esta es una buena apuesta, sin frases rebuscadas, pero si con profundidad.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hay varias cosas que me gustaría remarcar en este libro: 1) Esta escrito en un tono intimista que involucra y hace cómplice al lector, 2) Es una prosa fluida, sin florituras y utiliza un lenguaje claro que deja leer este ejemplar de forma rápida y disfrutable, 3) Daniel construye personajes peculiares, quizás extravagantes, pero verosimiles, lo que logra que de una forma natural el lector se enganche a la historia.
Si duda Daniel Saldaña París es un escritor no sólo oficioso, sino talentoso que bien merece ser leído.

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was hooked on this one. Intimate, honest prose that draws you in and keeps you. An exploration of memory itself sings beautifully underneath the wondering consciousness of a younger self. I was left feeling rather melancholy, ruminating on my own past selves, dissecting my own memories, mourning the passage of time.

[Yonit · Rating 5 out of 5]

The website of Charco Press states: "Charco Press is ambitious. We aim to change the current literary scene and make room for a kind of literature that has been overlooked. We want to be that bridge between a world of talented contemporary writers and yourself. We select authors whose work feeds the imagination, challenges perspective and sparks debate." This book personifies that sentiment.
I was fascinated by this simple story of a boy and his memories, how the losses of his childhood rendered him incapable of functioning as an adult. Just loving Latin American literature at the moment.

[Escamoles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantástico. Me encantó la atmósfera. Este libro me lo devoré durante un fin de semana. Me gusta mucho la forma de narrar de Daniel, había párrafos que releía inmediatamente. Tiene una forma de mirar y describir que me gustó mucho. Definitivamente (hasta ahora) mi libro favorito de este autor.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite some excellent prose, I did not like this book at all. The narrator demands our empathy but gives no one any empathy in return. A strangely soulless novel.

[Sebastian Uribe Díaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inesperado final.