May God Blast the Woman Who Writes About Me
In May God Blast the Woman Who Writes About Me, Aura García-Junco’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, the ‘protagonist’ inherits approximately 10,000 books from her father, the eccentric teacher, underground writer and cultural promoter H. Pascal, after his death, and it is through her (re)connection with this library that she decides to investigate both her fractured relationship with him and her own relationships with literature, materiality and society. This familial archaeology ultimately serves as both a ritual of mourning and as the celebration of a life lived through and because of the written word.
Heather Cleary’s inspired and remarkable translation guides us through the narrator’s radical explorations of generational change, inheritance, personal libraries, feminism and the ideological tension that it can create between fathers and daughters, self-publishing and ‘outsider’ art that all parade through these pages, in a story that oscillates between distance, fury, happiness, humour and reconciliation.
– ‘Although [this novel is described] as a hybrid text somewhere between an essay and a memoir, the way it explodes in front of readers’ eyes makes it so that it doesn’t only surpass that ubiquity (…) but also exceeds those constraints and becomes a novel that paints a portrait of the growth and conflicts between generations, as well as the encounters and disagreements between fathers and their children, and, above all, about illusions and disillusions, hopes failures, love and grief.’ – Emiliano Monge, El País
– ‘Writer Aura García-Junco presents many fascinating questions in this book that is like no other. An autobiographical, political, and radical book in which she talks about her relationship with her father, the 10,000-volume library she inherited after his death, Italo Calvino, and the bridge between generations that extended between her re-reading of two different editions of Cosmicomics. And at the centre of the plot is a narrator with a critical, astute, and reflexive perspective….In the pages of [this novel,] there is an abundance of glimmers of truth and intelligence that allow us to know an intimate side of this young Mexican writer.’ – Publishers Weekly
– ‘An extraordinary book by one of the leading Mexican writers.’ – Juan Villoro