The Mutations: Jorge Comensal and Charlotte Whittle
The Laundry | 3359 26th Street | San Francisco, California
Mexican writer Jorge Comensal and translator Charlotte Whittle discuss The Mutations with Julia Sanches.
The Mutations, written by Jorge Comensal and translated by Charlotte Whittle, is a comedy tracing the metastasis of Ramón’s cancer through his body and in the lives of his family members, colleagues, and doctors, dissecting the experience of illness and mapping the relationships both strengthened and frayed by its wake. Mateo and Paulina, his teenage children, struggle with the temptations of masturbation and binge eating, respectively. Ramón’s melancholic oncologist is haunted by the memory of a young patient whom he was unable to save. His selfish pathologist believes Ramón’s tumor holds the key to a major scientific breakthrough. And then there’s Elodia, Ramón’s pious maid, who brings him a foulmouthed parrot as a birthday gift. This lewd bird becomes Ramón’s companion, confidant, and unlikely double.
Paying homage to the works of forebears such as Sontag, Didion, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, and filled with a rough-hewn poetry of regret, rage, and finally resignation, The Mutations offers a profound but funny cross section of modern Mexican life, as well as a bold treatment of an unspeakable yet universal reality.
Jorge Comensal was born in Mexico City in 1987. He has received grants from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. His work has appeared in Letras Libres, Este País, Nexos, Revista de la Universidad de México, VICE, The Literary Review, and The Paris Review. His essay Yonquis de las letras was published in Spain in 2017. The Mutations is his first novel.
Charlotte Whittle is a writer and translator. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, Guernica, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of Norah Lange’s People in the Room was published in 2018 and is currently shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She lives in New York and is an editor at Cardboard House Press.
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Dolores Reyes, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild.