Against the backdrop of Diego Gerard Morrison’s sophomore novel Pages of Mourning is a real-life mass kidnapping that has become emblematic of the torturous years of drug war violence in Mexico. In 2014, forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were abducted and disappeared. The case is unsolved to this day and remains a flashpoint in Mexico, where parents of the missing students continue to organize under the slogan, “Vivos se llevaron, vivos los queremos.” Alive they were taken, alive we want them back.
The protagonist of Pages of Mourning, Aureliano Más the Second, is in search of his mother, who left him when he was young. In Aureliano’s mind, his mother exists alongside the forty-three Ayotzinapa students in a purgatorial state, sharing the qualities of both the living and the dead. The novel explores a question that haunts both Aureliano and Mexico: How does one mourn those who have disappeared, those who aren’t dead but aren’t alive either?
Aureliano is a self-conscious and struggling writer who has landed a fellowship in Mexico City run by his aunt, Rose. The words may not be flowing but Aureliano knows what he wants to write: a novel about his missing mother that sheds the false comforts of magical realism. “Misdirection: the preferred deployment of the magical in the Latin American tradition is the return of the dead,” Aureliano writes of the genre. “Realism as the guise of fantasy.”
The irony is thick. The protagonist’s name is plucked from the pages of Latin America’s most famous work of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And the nascent writer hails from the fictional Mexican city of Comala, home in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo to the living dead. As much as he wants to distance himself from the genre, fantastical events follow Aureliano. Before the three-year anniversary march for the forty-three missing Ayotzinapa students, an earthquake strikes Mexico City. It happens on another anniversary, thirty-two years to the day that a real earthquake devastated the country. “‘I mean, very Magic Realist, is it not?’” Aureliano’s fellowship advisor, Nayeli, a young and famous author, says of the event, negging the budding writer. The tragedy, along with an embarrassing public reading, sends Aureliano deeper into alcohol abuse. He’s also having more conversations with the ghost of his New York City friend and informal editor, Chris, who has stained the writer’s work-in-progress with red ink.
Gerard Morrison’s metafictional approach in Pages of Mourning is something of an antidote to what Aureliano sees as the pesky fantasies of magical realism. Aureliano’s aunt Rose suggests he find some closure and search for his mother, who is Rose’s stepsister. His first clue is a failed manuscript Rose wrote about her and her stepsister’s secretive journey from the United States to Mexico—a reversal of the typical illegal immigration narrative in U.S. headlines. The story takes place in the 1970s and 80s. The manuscript—titled Snake Skin: Brief Passages in the Life of Édipa Más—is provided in full within the novel, which itself is broken up into six sections called books. It’s not the only time Gerard Morrison employs different story-telling forms in Pages of Mourning. Later, when Aureliano returns home to Comala, his father provides an oral telling of the same events as Rose’s manuscript to try and help his son further understand his mother’s disappearance.
Themes of return and recurrence run throughout the novel. While still at his fellowship, Aureliano remarks of his flailing work about his mother that he wants to “endlessly collapse her return,” thus shutting out magical realism from performing its magic of bringing back the dead. Recurrence, of an eternal nature à la Friedrich Nietzsche, surrounds the protagonist and his Mexico. There’s the anniversary earthquake in Mexico City, adding to the missing in its rubble. Aureliano’s mother is chased by fire twice and encounters an unfortunate number of snakes. His father—named Lázaro, like the biblical figure who returns from the dead—has two stints in the drug trade, first cocaine and then marijuana. Yet, throughout the novel, Aureliano is continually denied the return of the one person he seeks most. His mother seems to have broken the recurrence cycle.
Aureliano is allowed to return, though it’s not his preference. Dropping out of the fellowship, he heads back to his hometown of Comala to stay with his father. It’s a hard landing for Aureliano, who must pick coffee berries for his father if he wants to stay in Los Confines, his childhood home. He only stays long enough to hear his father’s side of the story about his mother before drifting elsewhere, to Brooklyn to confront the ghost of his friend Chris, until he is drawn back to Mexico City. Everywhere he goes, the disappeared haunt Aureliano.
Gerard Morrison’s lyrical prose style provides a rich guide for the reader as the novel traverses the contrasting landscapes—gray skies in New York City, the lively streets of Mexico City, the desert solitude of Tomatlán, the foothills of a volcano in Comala. The author has a knack for sensory details, like when Aureliano describes a hot cab ride as making him feel like “the shredded pork sizzling on the hotplate at the taco stand.” Complimenting his florid style, the novel’s literary influences are ever-present, including not only One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pedro Páramo but Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which supplies the name for Aureliano’s fellowship program, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, whose paranoid protagonist Oedipa Maas inspires his mother’s chosen name, Édipa Más. The references are integral, but can, at times, bog down the narrative.
This is a small criticism for an otherwise beautifully delivered novel exploring complex themes about what place the missing occupy in our lives and how, or if, we can mourn them. Gerard Morrison tackles these questions from many angles, including with Schrödinger’s Cat. The thought experiment illustrates the quantum mechanical concept of superimposition, in which one imagines a cat placed in a chamber that’s pumped with radioactive gas. Lid closed, no one can say whether the animal is dead or alive. Without a resolution, without a body to mourn over, the families of thousands of disappeared in Mexico’s drug war are left puzzling over this same mortal middle ground. Aureliano thinks of his mother. “I’m finally recognizing the absurdity of my own pain,” he says, “the impossibility of finding closure, my endless dwelling in a quantum superimposition.”
Yet despite the heavy themes, Gerard Morrison supplies Pages of Mourning with a playful nature that allows him the flexibility to change narrative styles while also diving into the darkness of his violence-wracked country. Even amid the bleakness, Gerard Morrison finds space for humor in the novel.
In the end, the disappearance of Aureliano’s mother is a mystery that Pages of Mourning can’t escape. But rather than settle for a tale simply in search of clues and answers, Gerard Morrison does something far more interesting. He provides a meditation on the mystery itself, exploring the empty space the missing leave and what that means for those who seek them.
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Publication date: May 14, 2024
Reviewed by Eric Tegethoff
Eric Tegethoff is a fiction writer and journalist. He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. His reporting has appeared in The New Republic, Orlando Weekly, and elsewhere. He lives in Orlando, Florida.