![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Piranesi and Mexican Gothic
There are so many books that I want to read, and damn how badly I fare these days. I stopped doing reading challenges on Goodreads (or even add the books I finished). Nevertheless, there are two books since January that gave me joy.
The first one is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It is difficult to say anything about this book, it is so dreamlike and careful and very much like ocean. I dived in on January 1st, and then I dived out, full of fish and wonder.
A little bit of that wonder is still with me and I hope it will stay.
The second one is the Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. Which is exactly what it says in the title – a gothic horror novel, the kind that were written by Ann Radcliffe, but it happens in Mexico, in 1950.
We have a young plucky heroine, her sick cousin, cousin's suspicious husband, husband’s weird family, family’s rotting British mansion and forlorn silver mine, deep fog, etc…
It is all rather on the nose – post colonialism, racism, women’s question, allusions on all British literature from Radcliffe to Bronte sisters, to Bram Stoker, to others, but it all works. It is all weaved into one good story where historical facts and legends, and imagination and literature all feed into each other. The horror worked for me, for weird personal reasons, very well. The gothic part – I thought the replanting the story in Mexico was a great move, and allowed it to work on several more levels. And I have seen the complains that it wasn’t very Mexican. Well, there are no sombreros and other “exotic symbols” we associate with Mexico, and I think it was exactly what was needed here – it is not Mexico for tourists, it is Mexico for people who lived there in 1950.
The first one is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It is difficult to say anything about this book, it is so dreamlike and careful and very much like ocean. I dived in on January 1st, and then I dived out, full of fish and wonder.
A little bit of that wonder is still with me and I hope it will stay.
The second one is the Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. Which is exactly what it says in the title – a gothic horror novel, the kind that were written by Ann Radcliffe, but it happens in Mexico, in 1950.
We have a young plucky heroine, her sick cousin, cousin's suspicious husband, husband’s weird family, family’s rotting British mansion and forlorn silver mine, deep fog, etc…
It is all rather on the nose – post colonialism, racism, women’s question, allusions on all British literature from Radcliffe to Bronte sisters, to Bram Stoker, to others, but it all works. It is all weaved into one good story where historical facts and legends, and imagination and literature all feed into each other. The horror worked for me, for weird personal reasons, very well. The gothic part – I thought the replanting the story in Mexico was a great move, and allowed it to work on several more levels. And I have seen the complains that it wasn’t very Mexican. Well, there are no sombreros and other “exotic symbols” we associate with Mexico, and I think it was exactly what was needed here – it is not Mexico for tourists, it is Mexico for people who lived there in 1950.
no subject
no subject