The Transmigration of Bodies

The blurb describes ‘The Transmigration of Bodies’ very well, so the plot hardly needs restating. Rather than bodies, though, the aspect I found most fascinating was the treatment of names. Nicknames seemed to be powerful signifiers, as well as providing a visual shorthand for each character. Notably, the most humane character is known as Vicky, whilst most others are labelled as the Unruly, the Redeemer, and the Neeyanderthal, for example. Herrera’s writing style is as spare and steely as I found it in [b:Signs Preceding the End of the World|21535546|Signs Preceding the End of the World|Yuri Herrera|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398195367s/21535546.jpg|15089950], although the mythic quality of that novella is here show more supplanted by more of a noir feel. The atmosphere of doom caused by a mosquito-spread plague certainly provides a suitably grim backdrop. As the Redeemer is a less appealing narrator than Makina and the mythical-mundane juxtaposition not quite so effective, I enjoyed ‘The Transmigration of Bodies’ slightly less. Nonetheless it is a brilliantly written piece of fiction. show less

Herrera produced in 2013 this short novella about which there is not a great deal to say other than that it is a successful twenty-first century updating of the noir style and that it is oddly predictive of at least some of the psychology of disease-related lockdowns six or seven years later.

There was no way that Herrera could have known of the current (2019-2021) pandemic in advance unless you have the conspiratorial mentality of a card-carrying Qanon member so it is interesting to read how a creative talent imagined in advance the effect a plague might have on people.

In this case, the disease is only a back-drop. We are, if you like, in 'early 2020' when people were unsure of causes and risks and with governments half-absent and show more half-heavy-handed. Meanwhile, the world of low-life survival and negotiation and of sex continues.

But the book is not about a pandemic. It is an attempt to take noir and re-envision it for a more anarchic modern society where not everything is quite as obvious as murder. Sometimes bad things just happen by accident. A fixer' like The Redeemer tries to manage the consequences.

I am not one to give away plots but we can say that the story centres on an exchange of bodies betwen two families who stand in relation to one another like the two gangs in 'A Fistful of Dollars' but with a twist that emerges later.

Within its limited ambition, the book works well even if its literary modernism makes you sometimes work a little harder than you should need to for 'sense'. It is an elite approach to literature that undermines the whole point of noir which is demotic and ultimately pulp.

This is good writing and worth reading although it should be seen as a gloss on a great tradition rather than a masterpiece, perhaps a literary exercise by a craftsman, mannered and modernist and wearing its apparent 'gritty realism' as mere rhetorical cover. Yet I enjoyed it. show less

This is a futuristic, dystopian noir set during a plague amidst fighting gangs. There are elements of greek tragedy, revenge and redemption in what must all serve as an allegory for modern-day Mexico.
The characters are shadowy and just sketched out enough for our imaginations to fill out the rest.

This was the shortest book I had on the to read shelf while I was waiting for my first few postal deliveries from the Republic of Consciousness prize longlist, and was one of four books I ordered in one of the And Other Stories sales last year (two of which are still sitting on the shelf). It is my second Herrera novel after [b:Signs Preceding the End of the World|21535546|Signs Preceding the End of the World|Yuri Herrera|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398195367l/21535546._SY75_.jpg|15089950], but I have to admit that it was harder to enjoy than that book.

Herrera packs a lot into the 95 pages of text, and I found it quite easy to imagine the book as a potential film noir. It was published years show more before Covid, but it does take place in a nameless city dealing with a deadly plague. The opening describes the hung over protagonist waking to an almost deserted city and desperate to find water. We then move into a more conventional gang war scenario with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, in which two gangs blame each other for the deaths of two young adults, neither of which was deliberate. The main protagonist, known simply as the Redeemer, is a gangland fixer who is charged with finding a resolution to the crisis. show less

A Mexican noir(ish) novella set in the time of pandemic. A day in the life of a fixer who is tasked with negotiating the exchange of two youths each captured by rival criminal gang lords.

The writing (via translation) is tremendous. This author is clearly influenced by Cormac McCarthy. Recommend.

The book is set in a city where there has been an epidemic. But there don't seem to be any dead bodies from it. Also none of the main character's associates or friends have been affected. The plot involves Redeemer facilitating an exchange of bodies between two crime families. He also investigates how the deaths came about. But the book is really about Redeemer's interior life and how he tries to live in a broken violent place.

Like so many other books with cultish status, there is promise here, even lots of promise. But at the end of the day it is simply a story written pretentiously (or translated pretentiously...the challenge of translations). I will read more by Yuri Herrera but I'm not prepared to rave about him yet.