Ramifications

de Daniel Saldaña Paris, Christina MacSweeney

"On a Tuesday in July 1994, Teresa leaves her home in a residential neighborhood of Mexico City and travels to Chiapas, drawn by news of the formation of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. She leaves behind a sixteen-year-old daughter, a solitary, introspective son of ten, and a husband she has long regretted marrying. Twenty-three years later, her son, the narrator of this novel, lies prostrate in a bed, meticulously going back over the events of the summer that changed his life forever: the long mornings trying without success to make origami figures, his attempts to get along with his teenage sister's school friends, his fantasies and his quest, guided by the children's books he reads, to discover the whereabouts of his mother. The boy forms an alliance with his sister's boyfriend, a local teenager of ill repute, and sets off on a bus in search of Teresa. During this journey, he becomes aware of the existence of evil, but also of the kindness of strangers. Between premonitory dreams, flashbacks to his infancy, and episodes of gratuitous cruelty, the child gains his first glimpse of the complexities of the adult world. As the events of that summer progress, the present situation of the narrator also unfolds. Obsessed by the concept of symmetry and the figure of his absent mother, he writes his story from the room that has become his whole world. His father has died, he is distanced from his sister, and he alone is capable of reconstructing the past, of bringing to light the dark, painful secrets surrounding the disappearance of Teresa in 1994. A novel of a child's awakening, of his exercise of memory and a secret that paralyses his life."--