A Fine Mess

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.