A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Defying easy categorization, Gonzalez's debut novel is an often-mesmerizing account of a young woman's search for the truth about her parents, with absorbing stream-of-consciousness passages that draw the reader into her mind. After her father dies, Mona tries to track down her twin brother, from whom she was separated in childhood. As Mona envisions the past, she sees her naïve mother, Mara, trying to escape from her depressing youth in Mexico City by indulging in a rich fantasy life, fueled by frequent attendance at the local movie theater, until her pregnancy forces her to face reality. Gonzalez's hypnotic writing has some elements of noir, but the absence of a crime or more formal investigation might disappoint genre readers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
... as I poured my father's ashes into a big Ziploc bag, a little of my blood dripped in. I thought about how each cell has all of you fully inscribed in it, so that if I left those drops in there, it would be as if I were already dead too. I plunged in then, to try and get myself out, but it was all so sticky that I had to give up; when I pulled out my hand, parts of my father were stuck all over it...--from Twin Time Witty, sarcastic, and sensuous, Twin Time: or, how death befell me tells the story of Mona, who, upon her father's death in Los Angeles, decides to set off in search of her long-lost twin brother, given away as an infant. With her father's ashes as a guide of dubious reliability, Mona embarks upon a quest that takes her into a forest where she's confronted by--among other beings--a band of Nordic men, her Chinese doppelganger, a lascivious giant, and a pack of feral children. Along the way Mona recounts her parents' past as she imagines it, a romantic tale of love and rescue set in a fabulist, idealized Mexico--a dreamy place that only vaguely resembles the harsh quotidian realities of the 1960s Mexico City her parents inhabited. When Mona finds her brother at last, she learns that he grew up in London with their mother--who had supposedly (or so Mona had been told) died in childbirth--and her parents' story is thrown into further disarray. By the end of the journey, all Mona's received ideas of home, motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation have been overturned.Veronica Gonzalez is the coeditor of Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings and the founder of rockypoint Press, a series of artist-writer collaborations produced in association with 1301PE Gallery. Twin Time is her first novel.
"A lost twin, her mother held in a child-like state, a love-struck baker, they wander perpetually homesick, through the urban calamities of Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York in Veronica Gonzalez"s bold, dark, and beautiful first novel. twin time: or, how death befell me reads like a fairy tale that has been torn apart and stitched into something utterly contemporary, revealing the nightmares and longings of the modern world."Danzy Senna
"[A] lush and layered debut..." Pam Houston O, The Oprah Magazine
"Defying easy categorization, Gonzalez's debut novel is an often-mesmerizing account of a young woman's search for the truth about her parents, with absorbing stream-of-consciousness passages that draw the reader into her mind...." Publisher's Weekly
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Page-Turner about Uncovering the Past and Changing (Its Effect/s),
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: twin time: or, how death befell me (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)
Why do people do the things they do, and can we change? Those questions, plus many more, are subtly presented in Veronica Gonzalez's compellingly multi-faceted novel that is divided into three main sections which involve three (and more) generations of family/relationships. I loved the first section especially, which concerns the mother/grandmother plot, set in Mexico and told within a sympathetic narration which has tremendous emotional impact without sentimentality. The novel's words trace cuttingly honest details and insights. The reader ends up "seeing" what the characters cannot see about themselves, and this process can cause a reader to think of one's own life, and about one's own vision, or lack thereof. I also very much liked the novel's second portion, which revolves around the daughter/grand-daughter/father characters, and is set in contemporary Los Angeles amidst the art and intellectual scenes there, as well as in such communities in the wider U.S., and in the larger-yet-connected world. Gonzalez's symbolic tale-telling is not your off-the-rack thing, either; for one example, the third narrative section contains "fairy tale" portions that work to convey transformations and psychological transitions, and readers used to more conventional prose may end up wanting "something" from a novel that either refuses to "tie things up" or ties them up "too" quickly. Yet the story still conveys a universal struggle to find peace with the historical fact/s of life, thus speaking to the possibilities of new hopes and possibly improved futures, even as the novel does this by exposing the sad, old, repeating generational cycles that can cause so much pain. Rendered exquisitely in its language, beautiful in its metaphoric richness, and highly recommended.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Doublings and Siblings,
By
This review is from: twin time: or, how death befell me (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)
Immigrants tend to be haunted by Home, the past, and family intimacies in a way that is peculiarly intense and distant at the same time: memories and the present are in an uneasy counterpoint to a degree of pathological intensity. In Veronica Gonzalez's brilliant book this doubling suggests - among many things - the state of immigrant lives and of those in exile from some time or place and that is perhaps the defining condition of 20th century lives: that is being caught between cultures and the torments and confusions that follow.Gonzalez's polyphonic narrative takes us from Mexico City in the 60's to Los Angeles and New York at the end of the century. Mona the main character of the book is emotionally split in a variety of ways: from her two social worlds the United States and Mexico, her two families biological and adopted, and even her own body split into male and female twins who sense their own incompletion and try to find some answers by digging into the past. Yet this past is not in any sense conclusively certain or even one of Proustian "lost time". It closer to a detective story in which Mona sets out on a quest that is both an act of reclamation and understanding. How those connections of the twin's shared pasts, not only personal but familial, historical even anthropological are all in brilliant counterpoint is the essence of this intensely felt, imaginative and moving book.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
