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La Milagrosa
Carmen Boullosa
Liberatur Preis, Frankfurt, 1996.
From the publisher:
Murder
in Mexico City. A body clutching a bundle of papers and a tape recording. Murder
foul, murder intriguing, murder… political?
A woman who can make
your dreams come true. A miracle-worker who has the power, by allowing the wishes
of other people to enter into her dreams, to answer their prayers. To make the
sick well, the old young, the ugly beautiful, the miserable happy.
So
they hope.
But what does she do when a ruthless and ambitious man petitions
her to help him in his quest for power? When corpse after corpse is discovered
and they all seem to have some connection?…
Carmen Boullosa is
a name to conjure with. Her vibrant new novel is one to enjoy. In the Miracle
Worker we meet for the first time one of the most impressive talents in contemporaty
Mexican letters and a thoroughly bewitching writer.
Jonathan Cape edition, London, 1994
Editions:
La milagrosa,
Ediciones ERA, México, 1994.
Die Wundertäterin, Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt, 1996.
Die Schone Slaapster, Arena, Verlag, Amsterdam,
1996.
La milagrosa, trad. Pino Cacucci, Giangicomo Feltrinelli Editori,
2001.
Reviews:
Jörg Drews:
There is a particular
way of presenting Latin American themes in literature which has developed over
the years in which, rethorically, is both extremely clever and pleasantly slick.
This even includes authors such as García Márquez and Vargas Llosa
whose great success has not been for no reason. In presenting what she thinks
about Mexico, Carmen Boullosa has developed a narrative strategy which is merciless
in its severity and excludes every kind of easily consumable rhetoric. Her language
is wiry, direct, absolute. She assumes that her readers are able for a story that
cannot simply be savoured in slumps. The texture of this book is as springly as
that of a hard rubber ball, and when it hits, it hurts. Unlike the miracle worker,
this book is not guilty of the major crime of making the course of life pleasant.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1996.
Kay
Pritchett:
The work of Carmen Boullosa, the Mexican novelist, playwright
and poet, has been called complex and fantastical. Both adjetives apply to La
Milagrosa, which presents itself as a detective story but then reveals profound
symbolic reference to matters of Mexican identity. …
Many will
enjoy Boullosa´s most recent novel. More thoughtful readers will find the
correspondences between its characters and Mexican realities -or unrealities-
alluring. Readers seeking simple diversion will be entertained by its intrigue,
for essentially it is a kind of whodunit, related not by a detective but by an
unnamed character who finds La Milagrosa diary, her lover´s tapes, and some
other document in the clenched fists of an unidentified male corpse. Untypical
of its genre, however, Boullosa´s novel clarifies neither who did it nor
exactly what was done. Readers will enjoy coming up with their own answers.
World Literature Today, Autumn, 1994.
Ricardo
Pohlenz:
La trayectoria literaria de Carmen Boullosa está marcada
por la especulación formal, por un replanteamiento constante de los recursos
y de sus alcances, en los que aprehende, primero la anécdota, y luego la
trama que la reviste: de la imagen, como consecución lógica, deviene
la historia. Lo que es, al mismo tiempo, una apuesta en antecedentes y una meditación
del punto originario; una operación de deslinde desde el acto de narrar
y de su cuestionamiento intrínseco, como amalgama que propone un juego
alternativo a las posibilidades de solución (eso, claro, de haberla).
El semanario del Novedades, 1994.