Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Hererra (Book Review)

Signs Preceding the End of the World
By Yuri Herrera
Translated by Lisa Dillman
Published by And Other Stories, 2015
Ebook Price: $7.99

Makina is a young woman that works as a switchboard operator for the only phone in a small Mexican town. As such, she knows everything there is to know about the town, from marriage troubles to the activities of the drug dealers that rule over the residents. She keeps on everyone's good side by remaining neutral in everything. She delivers any message she gets, she doesn't get too curious about people's business or try to blackmail anyone. She just can't help overhearing all their conversations. Makina says she is "the door, not the one who walks through it."

The main plot of the book concerns Makina's brother. He had heard that their father had left some land in the United States to the two siblings so he leaves Mexico to investigate whether it's true or not. He writes a couple of letters back home but then the letters stop and he's never heard from again. Makina crosses the border illegally with the help of her town drug lords to discover the fate of her missing brother. She's going to have to carry a "package" for delivery in the US.

I don't really know what to think about this book. For one thing, it's so SHORT, you don't really get time to search for a deeper meaning in it. I get it, it's a "quest" book. Makina's brother is missing. She goes to find him. Along the way, she gets to see varying abuse of illegal immigrants, her "compatriots" by "Anglos"....referring, I guess,  to White Americans. I really don't see it as a quest or an "epic journey" in as much as it's pretty easy for Makina to cross the border. She gets on a big inner tube and just floats across the Rio Grande.

And once she's there, nobody really bugs her or questions her except for an evil white rancher. In this book, illegal immigrants are good. The authorities that are trying to catch them or don't want them here are more vile than the drug lords running her town. Yeah, this "novel" wears its politics on its bleeding sleeve. Even the translator gets in on the action by using such terms as "migration, immigration, transnationalism, transculturalism, and language hybridity (?)". Hmm, she didn't mention ILLEGAL immigration. To me, I would be hard pressed to see this "novel" as anything other than a thinly disguised liberal agenda dossier.

Now, the book cover does say Herrera is "Mexico's greatest novelist". Wow, if this is the best, I'd hate to see their "average" or "worst" writer.

I guess you would enjoy this book if you think white people are evil, illegal immigrants are good and not the uneducated dregs of an entire county, and following the laws of our country are stupid.

You can read this book in about an hour. It is followed by pages and pages of the translator's afterword, thank yous to the thousands it seems people that made the book possible, and a catalog of other books by the same publisher. These pages actually seemed of more weight and importance than the novel itself.

My Grade: D