Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hour. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the one who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.

Makina must travel from her home in Mexico over the U.S. border to bring a message from her mother to her brother, who crossed before her. To bring it she must ingratiate herself among Mexico's criminal underground, asking favors from men with names like Mr. Aitch and Mr. Double-U and Mr. Q. They will help her make arrangements with the coyote, the man who assists crossers over the border, but of course they also want something of their own to go with her.

Why do so many cross the border? What are they looking for, and what will they do to get there? When they arrive, what happens to them? Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World approaches these questions with the sensibility of a poet, perhaps one who has recently ingested peyote. The novel's hallucinogenic methods reflect the metaphor that lurks beneath the story: the traveler to the underworld. Makina is like Odysseus, searching in Hades for the shade who will tell him where home can be found. In the novel's opening scene, a mysterious sinkhole opens up in the ground before her, and though she's saved, we understand that her journey across the border is another descent into something strange and subterranean. And like some ancient travelers to the underworld, the greatest risk is that she won't be able to find her way back.

When Makina arrives in the U.S., she discovers that her brother has disappeared. She hears a rumor that he has entered the domestic service of a white military family; tracking down the family's son she discovers her brother himself, having taken the son's place to save him from war. He's a walking metaphor for the requirements and perils of crossing the border: he is indispensable but invisible; more chillingly, he has been transformed into someone else. He refuses to come back with her, and in the end, Makina finds herself in a strange waiting room where new names and identities are being parceled out. Will she, too, be changed by the crossing?

Like Aura Xilonen's The Gringo Champion, another--but very different--novel about migrants crossing the border, the translator must have had fun with this one. In the translator's note, Lisa Dillman discusses the neologism jarchar, a word Herrera adapts from an Arabic term for "to leave." Dillman chooses to translate the word as verse, and suddenly a whole host of new meanings open up in the novel: not just leaving, but crossing, as in transverse. But there are intimations, too, of changing, of conversion and reversion, of turning, and of course, of the poetic "verse." When briefly captured by the border police, Makina grabs a cop's notebook and writes the prose poem above, which he reads aloud. For Herrera (and Dillman), the act of crossing becomes a kind of writing, a story or poem written in deed. Can what is written be unwritten?

The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen

I shrug my shoulders again and feel like gunning away right there, awash in the many gallons of ink it must have taken the printers to splatter all those books with letters. But it's not like I'm scared of his anger. In the brawl outside, my pulse had been cataleptic, mummified. Serene. I could have passed a camel through the eye of a needle while I was pulping those scruffs. No, it's the chickadees, especially the beautiful ones, the flirtatious ones, that give me the shakes; I feel things leap in my belly just imagining I'm near one of them; I think I shouldn't even be breathing the same air they breathe; my marrow sizzles if I just brush their skin with my eyes, I can handle punch-ups, no problem. With those curves, though, I spin out and plunge into my deepest voids or whatever--but when the chickadee headed out of the bookstore I felt desolate, upside down, and all saggy-like.

Liborio works at a bookstore in a large, unnamed city somewhere on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border. His foul-mouthed boss lets him sleep in a small loft above the books, but when the store is broken into and vandalized, Liborio has to scram in case the cops come by and discover he's in the country illegally. Basically homeless, Liborio finds many people coming to his aid: a prurient woman reporter with cancer, the proprietor of a children's shelter, but most importantly, Aireen, the "chickadee" who lives across the street and with whom Liborio has fallen deeply in love. Being cast out brings challenges, but it ends up giving Liborio a new path in life, first with Aireen, and then as an amateur boxer: Liborio, we discover, has a punch that can take down even the biggest opponent.

I discovered while reading The Gringo Champion that Mexican-German writer Aura Xilonen was just 19 years old when she wrote it, and something about that makes sense; it has the air of a book written by an especially talented teenager. The story, such as it is, doesn't quite work; although the jacket compares it to The Adventures of Augie March, there's little of Augie's sense of being propelled forward into the wider world. Instead, Liborio kind of circles around the corner where Aireen lives, and where the bookstore was, spinning in circles, and the book sort of spins in circles, too. The latter of the book, set in the children's shelter, is a little treacly. (Liborio's greatest cheerleader is a young girl in a wheelchair; together they build the shelter a library.) And the way that Aireen appears in Liborio's life, cheerful and deeply interested, with only brief gestures toward conflict, reflects a teenager's hopeful attitude toward romance.

Despite all that, I couldn't put the book down, because I was captivated by the language. Liborio is an autodidact who learns everything he knows from the books in the bookstore; he's intelligent and articulate, and his eloquence overflows the vocabulary set out for him. Things are "poltergeistal," "polypathetic," "alphabeticated," "spangalanged." The success of it belongs, surely, as much to the translator, Andrea Rosenberg, as to Xilonen herself. And I was most struck by the way that Liborio describes the tribulation of crossing the Rio Grande into the United States; interspersed with the boxing and the chickadee-wooing is a harrowing story of braving the sun and the heat, and of narrowly escaping the bullets of the Border Patrol. Liborio is such a vivid, engaging presence; it can be easy to forget just how hard some people work to keep him from being here.