Among Strange Victims

January 4, 2016
Saldaña París’s first novel to be translated Stateside is a leisurely story of slacking off that’s nicely conveyed in a sharp, cynical tone. Rodrigo (“My level of empathy with human beings is near zero”), finds himself, through a misunderstanding, accidentally married to his museum coworker, Cecilia. But not even marriage can alter his deep-seated indifference (the height of his ambition is masturbating twice on Saturdays), and after an economic crisis forces him out of his job, he leaves Mexico City for the provincial Los Girasoles to stay with his mother. There, he meets his mother’s boyfriend, Marcelo, a “cretin with a Ph.D.” in philosophy, and with whom Rodrigo has more than a little in common. There are fascinating pieces to the narrative: most notably, a Bolaño-esque thread of an early 20th-century poet/boxer named Richard Foret who disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico and whom Marcelo is in Los Girasoles to study. But because the story is driven by characters who don’t really know what they want, readers shouldn’t expect much resolution (the book does culminate in a moment of perfectly logical absurdity, however). Rather, it’s best to read this messy, shaggy picaresque for its ample page-by-page pleasures, which include devilishly clever syntax, a charming tendency to digress, and satisfying flashes of Rodrigo and Marcelo getting their act together.

May 15, 2016
A pleasingly quirky U.S. debut from Saldana Paris, a young Mexican writer who now lives in Canada.Rodrigo has the studied indifference of a Meursault, but he's not really criminally inclined; sorting right from wrong would be too much work. He spends much of his time hanging out in his Mexico City apartment, which has, unusually, an empty lot next door on which, fittingly, nothing much happens. "My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another," he says, in a "reign of inertia." Rodrigo likes the unexamined and untroubled life, it seems, but things pick up, much to his chagrin, when he grudgingly takes a job and blunders his way into a marriage. Neither fits his lifestyle, which is doomed from the outset. "Living with Cecilia is self-inflicted torture," he kvetches. "Her scorn for me grows with the weeks, festering like a tenacious parasite in the inches of mattress that separate us each night." They wind up in his mother's hometown, cousin to the ghostly plateau haunts of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, where an effusive Spaniard, a friend, perhaps more, of his mom's, complicates his life with projects, even as Rodrigo wishes he could just be left alone to "sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink--straight from the bottle--a swig of thick, repulsive milk." The plot itself thickens, though not repulsively, as those projects widen to take in psychedelic cacti, astral projection, hypnosis, cultic doings, and expatriate hipsterdom: Rodrigo can barely keep up, and in the end, the simplicity of that empty lot beckons. The story is both critique and sendup of millennial slackerdom, and though it's more character study than action-driven, what does happen is full of odd twists and surprises. Among the high points are Saldana Paris' exasperated but affectionate paeans to "the immense, beautiful city" that is Mexico's capital. Though a study of slothfulness and its discontents, a welcome book on which the author has clearly expended energy.

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May 15, 2016
Rodrigo lives a contentedly unambitious life: his apartment's unremarkable; the vacant lot outside his window provides a modicum of amusement; his desk job at a local museum suits him. Yet when his formerly overlooked coworker Cecilia, through a hilarious sequence of miscommunication, agrees to marry him (unsolicited), he assents. The wedding goes ahead flawlessly, without any protestation by either party involved. Such is the tone and tenor of this sauntering novel, the first to be published in the U.S. by Mexican author Paris. In an easygoing, oddly entrancing style, Paris presents a meandering plot, which sees the newlyweds relocate from the urban sprawl of Mexico City to Rodrigo's dusty, rural hometown. There, they connect with Rodrigo's mother and meet Marcelo, her boyfriend, but the events of the narrative pale in comparison to the surprising pleasure of the thoroughly offbeat prose. Paris has earned comparisons to Roberto Bolano, chiefly for layering in a subplot involving the mysterious disappearance of a poet from nearly a century ago. Certainly, Paris has mastered the art of spinning an outlandish, entertaining tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)