The Brooklyn Rail

In a moment of stasis amidst one of the many scenes of death that occur in Pages of Mourning, the principal narrator, Aureliano Más the Second—an alcoholic writer on fellowship to Mexico City—pulls out his notebook, surveys the small hospital room, the labored breathing of his loved one, and attempts to cope. “It’s all too terrifying to watch, so I write down what I’m seeing to put a scrim of language between myself and the brutal reality.” His attempt falls short; language is not up to the task. His scrim of conjured letters is too sheer to mask the realness of the present. He puts aside the notebook and rejoins the world in front of him, a world he never fully left, and waits for the inevitable.

Even when the wait seems over, the wait persists. The same can be said for many families in present-day Mexico, a fact that Diego Gerard Morrison, who is Mexican, knows all too well. The Wait is the title of his first book, a revision of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which takes place in a rural town plagued by cartel violence and forced disappearances, and follows two mothers as they search for their missing children. This theme—an unresolved, interminable wait—reappears as a throughline in his poignant new novel Pages of Mourning, immobilizing the lives of its central characters. For Aureliano, whose own mother vanished when he was a child, writing is never more than a reproduction of this purgatory. He drinks away his fellowship stipend, unable to focus on his semi-autobiographical novel, and wanders around Mexico City. It’s September of 2017, a foreboding month that commemorates the anniversaries of the 1985 earthquake, as well as the unsolved kidnapping of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. He sees his mother in the faces of the missing, papered across the city, while protests erupt in the streets: “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.”

Without a grave to visit, how do we honor and care for our dead? Do we mourn for those who have disappeared, though they might still be alive? And what is the role of fiction, if it has a role at all, in confronting these problems and the world that spawned them? That Pages of Mourning raises such questions is a testament to its importance and ambition. Its answers lie coiled in the polyphonic register of its narration, and the multigenerational and intertextual hauntings of its composition. Which is to say, this novel includes at least six of them. Each of which offers its own limited but luminous perspective on the sorrow of the country’s ongoing drug war.

First, there’s Aureliano’s fellowship project: No Magic in Realism, a book that aspires to “shatter” magical realism as a genre because there can never be a ghostly reunion with a mother who might not be dead. Then there are the multiple novels of Aureliano’s overachieving mentor Nayeli: conceptual, journalistic mash-ups of fact and myth that resuscitate the voices of the disappeared and their mothers, such as Drug War Aspalis, 43 Effigies, Schrödinger’s Cat, and Waiting for More than One (the last of which bears a striking resemblance to Morrison’s The Wait). Finally, there’s the unfinished novel by Aureliano’s aunt, Rose—also about the disappearance of her step-sister—set in the 1970s and 1980s when his parents grew marijuana and smuggled drugs into Mexico City from their farm on the Pacific coast; this last book, Snake Skin: Brief Passages in the Life of Édipa Más, comprises about seventy pages and concludes in the magical town of Comala, made famous in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.

Morrison handles these interwoven narratives with great dexterity and an expert sense for the interplay of humor and dailiness alongside chronic grief. Returning to Comala in 2017, seeking answers from his disaffected father, Aureliano receives a tequila-soaked monologue reminiscent of the best passages in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. Lurking in the grass, fluttering in the air of Morrison’s pages, the reader encounters innumerable birds and serpents and butterflies—offerings from Quetzalcóatl. Every character sweats, wheezes, shits, ritually cleanses and acquires a new layer of dust as the days accumulate in an ever-revolving and claustrophobic progression. During the 1985 earthquake, a pool erupts in “blossom-packed splashes.” News arrives on the “worried avian wail of the landline.” Aureliano stands over the stove while a “tortilla swells up like a toad in the pan.” This is a poet’s eye and ear.

Ultimately, however, no amount of searching can release our hero from the curse of his name: like his literary forebears in Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Aureliano inherits an all-encompassing solitude that dwells in the “split subjectivity of my loss: is my mother dead, or is she gone?” Morrison has written the next chapter in the Magical-Realist-Surrealist-Realist-Infrarealist lineage, a suspenseful—what else, after all, does a wait consist of?—entry into the canon of the Mexican present.