4.0
Ramifications
ByPublisher Description
A neurotic young man, self-confined to his bed, reflects on the turning point of his childhood: his mother’s disappearance.
Folding and refolding origami frogs, extracting the symmetrical veins from leaves, retreating to an imaginary world in his closet: after Teresa walked out the door one July afternoon in 1994, her son filled the void she left with a series of unusual rituals. Twenty-three years later, he lies in bed, reconstructing the events surrounding his mother’s disappearance. Did she actually join the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas, as he was led to believe? He dissects his memories of that fateful summer until a startling discovery shatters his conception of his family. Daniel Saldaña París (Among Strange Victims) returns with an emotionally rich anti-coming-of-age novel that wrestles with the inherited privileges and atrocities of masculinity.
Folding and refolding origami frogs, extracting the symmetrical veins from leaves, retreating to an imaginary world in his closet: after Teresa walked out the door one July afternoon in 1994, her son filled the void she left with a series of unusual rituals. Twenty-three years later, he lies in bed, reconstructing the events surrounding his mother’s disappearance. Did she actually join the Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas, as he was led to believe? He dissects his memories of that fateful summer until a startling discovery shatters his conception of his family. Daniel Saldaña París (Among Strange Victims) returns with an emotionally rich anti-coming-of-age novel that wrestles with the inherited privileges and atrocities of masculinity.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesRamifications Reviews
4.0
“Rating: 4.5
"Ramifications" by Daniel Saldaña París has a simple premise: a man tries to make sense of his traumatic past by retracing the circumstances of his childhood to unlock when his life had been altered incontrovertibly.
París writes from the perspective of a child to great effect, and it's easy to empathize with the narrator as he recounts the ways in which is life was affected from a young age when his mother left the family in order to join the Zapatista uprising. Faced with his father's bleak indifference and his older sister's studied nonchalance, the young boy's confusion grows at the way his family treated the mother's disappearance. Readers are then taken on a journey when the narrator attempts to retrace his mother's footsteps in order to make sense of the situation, as only a naive young child would.
For such an unassuming book, this one sure packed a punch, and even with the distance of time, it's hard for me to pinpoint why I loved this so much. The dive into the narrator's psyche in relation to trauma of abandonment and neglect -- the first by his mother, and the second by his father -- was the highlight of the book for me. The gradual reveal of the circumstances of his mother's disappearance was affecting, and despite the bleak subject matter, I loved the note this book ended on.
This is one of my notable reads from Charco Press, and I look forward to reading more books from this publisher!”
About Daniel Saldaña París
Daniel Saldaña París is an essayist, poet, and novelist born in Mexico City. His first novel, Among Strange Victims, published to critical acclaim in 2016, was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. He has been a fellow at Union des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois, the Omi International Arts Center, The Banff Centre, and The MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in BOMB, Guernica, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Guardian, El País, and on KCRW’s Unfictional, among others. In 2017 he was named by the Hay Festival as one of the best Latin-American writers under the age of 40.
Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translations of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and her translations of Daniel Saldaña París's novel Among Strange Victims was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. In 2017 she published a translation of Elvira Navarro's A Working Woman, followed in 2018 by Empty Set (Verónica Gerber Bicecci), and Tomb Song and The House of the Pain of Others (Julián Herbert), all of which have received critical acclaim. Her work has also been included in various anthologies of Latina American Literature. Christina also collaborated with Verónica Gerber Bicecci on the bilingual book Palabras migrantes / Migrant Words. Her translations of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (Julián Herbert), On Lighthouses, a book-length essay by Jazmina Barrera, and Elvira Navarro’s short story collection Rabbit Island are forthcoming in 2020.
Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translations of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and her translations of Daniel Saldaña París's novel Among Strange Victims was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. In 2017 she published a translation of Elvira Navarro's A Working Woman, followed in 2018 by Empty Set (Verónica Gerber Bicecci), and Tomb Song and The House of the Pain of Others (Julián Herbert), all of which have received critical acclaim. Her work has also been included in various anthologies of Latina American Literature. Christina also collaborated with Verónica Gerber Bicecci on the bilingual book Palabras migrantes / Migrant Words. Her translations of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino (Julián Herbert), On Lighthouses, a book-length essay by Jazmina Barrera, and Elvira Navarro’s short story collection Rabbit Island are forthcoming in 2020.
Other books by Daniel Saldaña París
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