Starred review from April 15, 2024
Novelist París (Ramifications) reflects in these striking essays on the complicated relationship between place and identity. Traversing the cities “that have marked my life,” the author explores in the title essay how he spent his 20s trying to make it as a writer in Mexico City before his life briefly unraveled there. In “The Madrid Orgy,” París recounts a disastrous party he threw for his college girlfriend and a sophisticated group of intellectuals he was trying to impress, and muses on the perspective afforded by time and age (“Literature has such miracles: one can return to a scene from the past and suddenly be able to observe it with the eyes of an onlooker; a witness capable of compassion and laughter”). Throughout, París casts a perceptive and compassionate eye on his preoccupation with alcohol and drugs as a means of dissociation (“I observed the advance of my alcoholism with tenderness, as others watch the growth of the child”), while keeping the focus on what it means to belong to a place, to create a self, and to attempt to record that self on paper. These electric essays linger in the mind.
Starred review from July 1, 2024
This hopscotch collection of 10 revelatory essays by Mexican novelist Salda�a Par�s (Among Strange Victims, 2016) opens with a note from the author situating the book as a response to poet Robert Creeley's question, ""Can you melt yourself autobiographically?"" Whether seeking to refute the query or dissolve entirely, Salda�a Par�s combines freelance assignments to Canada, Cuba, Spain, and the U.S. with more personal reflections on a variety of topics ranging from the vagaries of writerly lifestyles to drug use and academic pursuits. ""A Winter Underground"" is an interrogation of the opioid epidemic as it unfolded in Montreal, using the lens of the author's own experiences with chronic pain, which he says, ""clustered in my elbow like a clump of maggots on the stem of a plant."" In the impassioned title essay, Salda�a Par�s describes the love-hate relationship many Chilangos profess for their home, Mexico City, which is not only characterized by the serene ""blue and sienna of the Frida Kahlo house in Coyoac�n but the unpainted gray and exposed rebar"" of the urban slums. In a distinctly surprising turn, ""The Madrid Orgy"" centers around a repulsive, truly awful pi�ata. Expressing humor, provocation, and sincerity, Salda�a Par�s delivers a rewarding reading experience in each essay.
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June 15, 2024
A collection of autobiographical essays distorted through the lenses of memory and literature. Salda�a Par�s writes of his time in Mexico City, Montreal, Madrid, and beyond as "an autobiographical melting" (borrowing a term from Robert Creeley), and he frequently uses the literary canon to shape his recollections. In "Malcolm Lowry in the Supermarket," he looks to Lowry's Under the Volcano to piece together details of his own childhood and adolescence in Cuernavaca. He considers his own memory "riddled by research" and explains that the stories he's read have "superimposed themselves, forming a pastiche that I now employ to replace experience." The title essay, about nine years spent in Mexico City, invokes both the work of Roberto Bola�o and Witold Gombrowicz in an effort to "embrace [the city's] ugliness." Beyond these literary references, Salda�a Par�s frequently ruminates on the act of writing in many meta digressions. He explains that the essay "Return to Havana" is the result of a series of handwritten revisions. "A Winter Underground," one of the highlights, recounts the author's time in Montreal and his struggles with addiction; it opens with a declaration that the text would be written entirely after midday, as "language, in the evenings, is dense." The author's confidence carries many of the essays: "I liked to talk loud and clear, as if I were always right," he declares. Later, he recalls writing his first book with "a fireproof arrogance." In "Notes on the Fetishization of Silence," he describes his own breathing as "the music of me being alive." The author's knack for finding profundity in everything makes for an occasionally exhausting read; still, most of the pieces are thoughtful weavings of memory and place, explorations of how the author's heavy reading both informs--and, at times, obfuscates--his understanding of the past. Often heady, occasionally pretentious, and steeped in literary touchstones.
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