Mexican Gothic EXPORT by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Even when you think you know what lurks, the power to unsettle isn't diminished. This is Silvia Moreno-Garcia's greatness as a storyteller: She makes you uneasy about invisible things by writing around them. Mexican Gothic touches on racial, class, and labor inequity, the way these things fester, infusing the landscape and blighting generations. It never quite falls off, even at the end, which I loved for its satisfying ambiguity this is a novel that will leave you wary even after the last page. There is a gradual rise of dread in Mexican Gothic.

Noémi wonders whether she is losing her mind. Where the dreamworld ends and reality begins feels uncertain. A dead woman repeatedly tells Noémi to open her eyes. Dream Virgil appears, a figure of lust and terror.

Noémi's dreams become haunted: A woman whose face is a golden cloud tries to speak, accompanied by visceral dread. But even his friendship only stretches so far - and can it stretch further than the family land he's never left?īook Reviews Music Is Troublesome Magic In 'Signal To Noise' Virgil and Florence (High Place's mistress) keep Noémi away from Catalina, saying she's in mysterious 'treatments.' Noémi's only potential ally is Francis, Florence's sheltered and delicate son. And when conversation does happen, the patriarch of the clan (Howard) says things like 'You are much darker than your cousin,' and approvingly discusses eugenics. Smoking cigarettes, going into town, and conversation at dinner are all against house rules. There is no regular electricity, so our heroine must get around with candles and oil lamps. Rot seeps from cracks, corrupts wallpaper and slimes the ceilings of the house. The Doyles of High Place are so Anglo and insular they brought European earth for their garden.

The situation is more complicated and sinister than the initial fear of just a con artist husband isolating his new wife and convincing the world she's mad so he can steal her money. She claims her new husband Virgil Doyle is poisoning her, that 'fleshless things' and ghosts trouble her, that 'they will not let me go.' Noémi - self-assured, chic and stubborn - leaves the glamor of 1950s Mexico City for the countryside, still depressed after a mining bust and fecund with secrets, to determine whether Catalina needs rescue. Noémi's cousin Catalina writes a strange letter begging for help.

I remember placing my bookmark in the book and thinking, I should not have read this before bed. I want to discuss it around tea, preferably while in the mountains, preferably somewhere well-lit. Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking novel.

Mexican Gothic EXPORT by Silvia Moreno-Garcia