A Surreal Story of Childhood as a Horrific and Grotesque State of Subjection

This piece by translator Christy Rodgers starts off our coverage of the authors in the Web Exclusive supplement to Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed. It covers Carmen Boullosa's first novel, Just Disappear. Boullosa is a much-acclaimed author in her native Mexico, where she's been praised by such standard-bearers as Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Elena Poniatowska.)

From Just Disappear by Carmen Boullosa
Mejor Desaparece is Mexican author Carmen Boullosa's first novel. It was originally published in 1987, when Boullosa was 33. She had already been recognized and honored in Mexico as a poet and dramatist, and was the co-owner of a theater-bar called El Hijo del Cuervo in Mexico City's bohemian Coyoacán district. Boullosa, who now lives in New York City, has since written 13 novels and a number of critical essays, and continued to write and publish poetry as well. Her international reputation as an author of challenging, complex work continues to grow.
Mejor Desaparece, which Boullosa has described as a strange montage of giddy monologues is a surreal story of childhood as a horrific and grotesque state of subjection, beginning with the travails of seven sisters (all bearing the names of flowers) at the hands of their unstable and domineering father after the death of their mother, when an unnamed presence invades their home. Two (or possibly more) of the daughters narrate the first three sections of the novel as they pass from childhood to adulthood. A woman whose relationship to the family is implied but unspecified narrates the sole vignette of the fourth section. The next section, the excerpt presented here, is an extended monologue by an unnamed, isolated woman on the border of madness who some have suggested is the father's second wife, others the dead mother herself, although the family particulars are left deliberately unclear.
Carmen Boullosa's work, particularly her early work, deserves more of an audience in the U.S. She has extended the boundaries of the novel and raised concerns of personal and political history in new and inventive ways. She is part of a post-Boom generation of Latin American authors who are continuing to experiment with narrative forms and challenge and delight us with their skill.
For the translator, the primary challenge in this work is the high level of ambiguity in its situations and characterizations. The translator must fight the desire to explain and clarify so as not to be thought guilty of a poor understanding of the text, and simply try to transmit its expressionistic tone to the fullest extent. Spanish syntax permits subjects to be far more unspecified than English does, and Boullosa often makes use of this lack of specificity to give the novel the haunted feeling of nightmare, where presences come and go, and personalities shift in a boundary-less interior landscape.