Ramifications

In Mexican writer París's strange and elegant latest (after Among Strange Victims), the unnamed narrator toggles between past and present from the confines of his bed, contemplating his childhood, his father's death, his relationship with his older sister, and the disappearance of their mother. The despondent narrator claims to never leave his bed and holds onto the self-absorption of his childhood, when he cultivated an "egocentric theocracy" and felt he was god's "favorite human being." He was 10 when his mother, Teresa, walked out on the family in 1994, and afterward the narrator grew closer to his sister, Mariana, while obsessively searching for the letter Teresa had left their father. As an adult, the narrator finally discovers the letter, along with another sent from Chiapas, each of which only brings him more angst and confusion, as he remembers the rumors about her activity that circulated when he was a child (did his mother join the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas? Was she a murderer?), causing his social life to crumble as he spent hours in a closet he calls his "Zero Luminosity Capsule." Along the way, París brilliantly explores memory, masculinity, and familial drama in equal measure. The result is an affecting account of arrested development. (Oct.)

A Dostoyevskian tale set in the Mexico City of today, marking a young man's slide into not meanness but torpor. Saldaña París' nameless narrator "never leaves his bed." He has complicated reasons for this that would keep a psychiatrist busy for a couple of decades, especially since it's his mother's side of the bed that he sleeps on. His mother, Teresa, is absent from the first page on, which begins in the year 1994, when the narrator was 10 years old: She has written a letter to the boy's father whose contents the author releases to the reader bit by bit until we learn that she's abandoning their bourgeois existence in the little Mexico City neighborhood called Educación and heading off to take up the Zapatista cause with Subcomandante Marcos. The narrator's older sister, Mariana, reacts in the way of a disaffected teenager: Charged with babysitting while their dispirited father goes off to work each day, she has pizza parties, drinks beer, and smokes with her boyfriend, a hood called Rat, "the leader of a gang of hell-raisers, famous for his precocious consumption of illegal substances," who has a tiny bit of silver lining in the dark cloud of his soul. The boy hops on a bus bound for Chiapas to try to find Teresa; he does not succeed, and only late in the story does Saldaña París reveal the most tantalizing hint as to her fate. After their father dies, Mariana continues to look after the narrator, who slides into inertia while replicating his father's bedridden end of life: "Two and a half years on, my existence is, like his during those months, restricted to the width of a bed….I'm able to understand the infinite pleasure my father must have experienced on discovering, after a whole life of work, the sweet honey of immobility." That sweet honey soon turns acrid, and even though at the end the narrator thinks he might eventually get up, the reader might imagine that he's lying there still. A claustrophobic, depressive story that goes from bleak to bleaker. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.