No escaping the magic

Aureliano Más II is haunted. An aspiring author undertaking a prestigious writing fellowship in Mexico City, he is at work on a novel that he hopes will rid him of the spectres that stalk him. Pages of Mourning, the Mexican author and translator Diego Gerard Morrison’s second novel (like its predecessor, written in English), begins in 2017, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Iguala mass kidnapping, in which forty-three trainee teachers were abducted in southwest Mexico, never to be seen again. The cry of the missing students’ loved ones, “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos” (“They were taken alive, we want them returned alive”), echoes throughout the novel.

Some forty years earlier Aureliano’s mother, Édipa, vanished without a trace. Like the families of the forty-three students, who maintain their constant vigil, Aureliano is unable to accept that she is unlikely ever to return. The novel he is working on offers him a way both of writing his mother back into existence and of finally saying goodbye.

Aureliano’s project brings him face to face with another spectre: magic realism – both a touchstone for Latin American writers and a weight around their necks. References to magic realist classics abound in Pages of Mourning. The name Aureliano will be familiar to readers of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), while his home town, Comala, is the setting for Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955), an important influence on García Márquez. The text Aureliano is working on during his fellowship is entitled “No Magic in Realism” and its objective is to “shatter” the genre. In a country ravaged by a drugs war and plagued by disappearances and death, the genre’s fantastical elements seem to him to trivialize the violence of day-to-day existence; while magic realism was in many ways a creative response to horror, Aureliano begins to perceive its popularity as a symptom of a region’s unwillingness to face the truth about its missing and about the political corruption that undermines efforts to bring about change. Yet he is unable to leave magic realism behind him, not least because it can help him to resurrect his mother.

Pages of Mourning jumps between Aureliano’s experiences during his fellowship in 2017 – his difficulties compounded by his struggle with alcoholism following the recent death of a friend – and the Mexico of the 1970s and 1980s. These historical sections are revealed through a series of novels within the novel, to which Aureliano turns in an attempt to unearth his parents’ murky past and overcome his writer’s block.

The first of these, written by Aureliano’s aunt, Rose, tells the story of Édipa. We learn of her relationship with Aureliano’s father, Lázaro, her ascent to the upper ranks of a drugs syndicate and the attention of both the cartels and the authorities that preceded her disappearance. This tale leads Aureliano back to Comala in 2017, and to his father, who provides his own retelling of the same period. Lázaro’s narrative centres on his dream of creating his own “Macondo”, the city in One Hundred Years of Solitude founded by the Buendía family on utopian principles and eventually wiped from the map following a series of catastrophes.

These nested narratives are the most engaging parts of Pages of Mourning, as we join Édipa and Lázaro on their ride through the underworld, with all its romance and paranoia. The chapters set in 2017, by contrast, can feel rather cerebral and scholarly, bogged down by intertextual references that some may find abstruse.

Matthew J. Mason is an art historian and judicial assistant based in Perth, Australia. He was previously Lecturer in Art Business at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London

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