Alejandro Morales

ALEJANDRO "LUPERCA" MORALES (CIUDAD JUÁREZ,1990) TRABAJA CON LA FRAGILIDAD DEL ARCHIVO. CON EL DESLIZAMIENTO SINUOSO DE UNA GOMA DE BORRAR SOBRE EL PAPEL DE DIARIO. DE ESTA MANERA BORRA MANUALMENTE LOS CUERPOS ARROJADOS EN EL CEMENTO QUE APARECEN EN LAS PAGINAS DE LA CRÓNICA DE DIARIO DE CIUDAD JUÁREZ, SU CIUDAD NATAL. SU TRABAJO DA CUENTA DE UNA RIGUROSA RECOPILACIÓN DE PRENSA SENSACIONALISTA INICIADA HACE YA DOS AÑOS PARA ASÍ PONER EN EVIDENCIA CÓMO LOS MEDIOS MASIVOS HACEN RESONANCIA DEL ESPECTÁCULO BRUTAL QUE APARECE A DIARIO EN EL ESPACIO PÚBLICO. ALEJANDRO MORALES EXHIBE LAS IMÁGENES QUE UTILIZAN LOS DIARIOS, SUS RETÓRICAS Y ENUNCIADOS. Y ASÍ, MEDIANTE LA INTERVENCIÓN DE DICHO SOPORTE, GENERA UNA REFLEXIÓN SOBRE LA PUESTA EN DISPUTA DE LA IMAGEN COMO DISPOSITIVO DE EXHIBICIÓN DE IMÁGENES DE VIOLENCIA. DE ESTA MANERA MORALES ELABORA UN EJERCICIO PLÁSTICO EN EL QUE SE PREGUNTA SOBRE QUÉ ES LO QUE DEBE SER MOSTRADO POR LA IMAGEN O MÁS BIEN, EN TORNO A QUIÉN SE VALIDA EL CRITERIO SOBRE LOS QUE FUNDA LA EXHIBICIÓN O CENSURA DE LAS IMÁGENES DEL HORROR EN SU CIUDAD.… (mehr)

Alex is invited to the Los Angeles Central Library to hear a famous author. Uncomfortable with the crowd Alex decides to explore, and is enthralled by photos from the 1930’s showing the construction of the city’s bridges. Lost in the faces of the Mexican workers, the present fades away and is replaced with the past world of the city of Los Angeles where Abelardo Ríos and his wife Toypurina live at their home bordering El Río de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciúncula (the Los Angeles River) in 1882. Read the rest of the review on my blog (are you following my blog?): http://shouldireaditornot.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/river-of-angels-alejandro-mor...… (mehr)

I am completely perplexed by this book. By any standard I know of, it is simply bad writing with no redeeming features. But when I poke around on the Internet, I find it is praised (or at least described) as either magic realism or something like magic realism. If that’s true, then it may be that no standard I know of is a fair one to use in judging this book. So, I won’t actually assert that it’s bad writing with no redeeming features. It may, for instance, be funny, and I just don’t get it. Or the author may be intending to challenge traditional standards of good writing by defying them all and tempting someone to call his work sophomoric, which would actually be falling into some sort of trap, somehow. So, I won’t call the book sophomoric.

It’s in three parts. Part one takes place in Mexico City, 1788, and relates the hopeless efforts of a Spanish doctor to fight an especially horrid plague. The plague eats away at the extremities and works its way toward the torso. Nothing will save the victims, once they contract the plague, but multiple amputations will slow its progress—hence the name of the book. The vivid and horrific nature of both the disease and the treatment lead me to believe this isn’t meant to be funny. But the narrator affects some sort of stilted language, which I guess is supposed to be the author’s impression of an English translation of late 18th century Spanish. So everyone who catches the plague dies, and the disease eventually moves on.

Part two is in contemporary Los Angeles. The narrator now is a chicano doctor, who is in love with an actress. We know he’s in love because he writes like someone in love—piling one metaphor on top of another until the meaning of a simple sentence has been obscured past recognition: “She was happy even in the stone-cold afternoon which hid little knives that carved their way through her body as she wrote on my arms and back silent undecipherable words. My skin against hers. We kissed. I searched for water in her green-blue eyes and I found stone.” OK—I got the “we kissed” part, but not much else. In part two, it turns out that AIDS was actually a secret weapon the USA set loose in Africa.

Part three is set in the gosh-wow future, where we have another narrator who can’t write. Here, I see the magic realism just fine. Plagues come from the sea, travel underground, and appear in some random city, for instance. The previous narrators reappear as “mechanical ghosts.” OK, fine. But, the stilted language of the previous sections has evolved into a sort of 1930s Golden-Age-of-Sci-Fi pedantry: “She piloted our emergency vehicle into the entry position on the computer travelway. She punched our code and destination and in thirty seconds, just enough time to prepare psychologically, our vehicle was catapulted into the supersonic travelway.” Common sense tells us that in such a world, nothing, absolutely nothing, would actually be called an “emergency vehicle,” or a “computer travelway” or a “supersonic travelway,” when there are perfectly good slang-like syllables out there. How about starting out with, “She zummed the flivver into the sling-dock”? But maybe that’s the difference between futuristic magic-realism and sci-fi.… (mehr)