Flame Trees in May

by Karla Marrufo, Allison A. defreese (Translator)

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

106 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2023

Reviews

[Mahnoor · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ageing mother pleads for her absent son to stay another moment. She will eventually remember his name, she promises. She will start anew, she will throw him a party, she will tell him a secret, if only he lingers in her life a moment longer. As she sinks deeper into her physical and psychological isolation, she reaches for and abandons memories, interweaving them into a tapestry of personal narratives, all the while grasping for a language that can capture them fully.

A breathtakingly tender rumination on loneliness, tradition, and loss, Karla Marrufo treads a middle ground between poetry and prose in this dreamlike work. A dizzying stream-of-consciousness to rival Mrs. Dalloway, Marrufo contrasts the immersive Yucatán landscape with the equally captivating inner life of an unnamed narrator. As the narrator spirals through a kaleidoscope of fragmentary vignettes—taking out the trash, memory and myth, tomorrow’s dinner, life and death—she navigates the blurring borders of fantasy and fact, and dream and nightmare. Rapid, blazing, and beautiful, Flame Trees in May marries the mundane with the existential and asks if there is a difference between suffocating in the summer humidity and drowning in one’s own memories.

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

So stream-of-consciousness that the characters and setting were almost utterly indistinct. Tal vez me habría gustado más si lo hubiese leído en español.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely mesmerizing! By looping back over the same words and phrases, it renders dementia as both tragedy and poetry. Deeply impactful, it follows a woman losing her memories and her grasp on love… among the blooms of her beloved tropical trees.