Customer Reviews

twin time: or, how death befell me (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

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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.

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.