Review: Signs Preceding The End of The World - Yuri Herrera

In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera imbues a noir-ish tale of gangsters and border crossings with an intriguing metaphysical aspect. The plot follows Makina, a young woman who works in a telephone exchange, as she travels to America in search of her brother. To make the crossing, she is forced to seek patronage from shady underworld protectors, Mr Double-U and Mr Aitch.

Makina’s brother has travelled across the border in pursuit of an impossible goal. Encouraged by local gangsters, he went to America in search of land supposedly belonging to his family, which turned out not to exist. Despairing, he is offered the opportunity to gain wealth, but at the cost of giving up his identity. This slightly unlikely scenario offers Herrera the opportunity to explore the existential problems of adapting to life in a different culture: ‘all of a sudden he had money, and a new name, but no clue what to do, where to go, what the path of the person with that name should be’.

The border between Mexico and the United States is imbued with a supernatural quality of its own. The divide is as much psychological as geographical: we are told early on that someone who stays too long on the other side may find that when they come back ‘everything was still the same, but now somehow all different, or everything was similar but not the same’. Journeying into this strange world in search of a loved one, Makina is echoing the myth of Orpheus; there are also also echoes of Dante’s descent into the Inferno, as Makina’s journey is divided into nine sections, and she is accompanied by guides along her way.

Patrolled by predatory traffickers, the border landscape is filled with danger: looking for positive omens, Makina’s eyes fall on the body of ‘some poor wretch, swollen with putrefaction, his eyes and tongue pecked out by buzzards’. The land on the other side appears orderly at first (‘signs prohibiting things thronged the streets, leading citizens to see themselves as ever protected, safe’), but things may not be as straightforward as they seem. The sky is ominous, ‘dark, like a giant pool of drying blood’, and the deserted wastelands on the edge of the city resemble nothing so much as ‘tundra’.

Makina herself is a memorable narrator, young but world-weary, sharp yet vulnerable. Her idiom mixes the vocabulary of the street with metaphysical speculations. Speaking in her translator’s note Lisa Dillman discusses the difficulties of conveying Herrera’s memorable yet idiosyncratic language: characters don’t walk out of a room, they ‘verse’, for example. Both author and translator deserve praise for creating and successfully interpreting this distinctive voice, which stays with you long after the book is finished.

Signs Preceding the End of the World is at once epic and contained, a modern novel which reaches back to ancient mythology for its structure. Brilliantly stylish, this is a book to read in one sitting: a couple of hours spent immersing yourself in Herrera’s prose is a very rewarding experience.