A Review of Pages of Mourning

Diego Gerard Morrison’s winding, meta-fictional Pages of Mourning is both haunted and haunting. Some of the novel’s ghosts are Mexico’s disappeared—people who may or may not be dead, who may or may not return. The novel opens in Mexico City in 2017, just before the third anniversary of the mass kidnapping of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, a real case that remains unsolved. Resounding across Pages of Mourning is the protest cry “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos”: “Alive they were taken, alive we want them back.” The protagonist, Aureliano Más the Second, can relate to this sentiment. His mother vanished without explanation more than thirty years earlier, when he was an infant; he grapples with the possibility that she might in fact be long dead. 

Other ghosts are literary: Aureliano hails from Comala, the literal ghost town in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, and shares a first name with nineteen characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the most famous work of magical realism. His surname, meanwhile, is a nod to his American expat mother’s overidentification with Oedipa Maas of The Crying of Lot 49. She chose the alias Édipa Más shortly after arriving in Comala.

Despite the book’s abundant references to magical realism, Aureliano, who is attempting to write a novel about his mother’s disappearance, is critical of the genre. He sees it as pure fantasy, and questions its purpose in a country riven by unending cycles of cartel violence and forced disappearances, a country that chooses not to confront the likely deaths of the tens of thousands of people who have gone missing. 

In pairing these literary specters with the ghosts of Mexico’s drug wars, Gerard Morrison explores the stories this superstitious country tells itself about death and loss. Through this reckoning with the tendency to “put a scrim of language between [one]self and the brute reality of what’s occurring,” Pages of Mourning takes us on a formally inventive tour through Mexico’s nightmares that looks straight into the face of death. 

The novel begins with Aureliano’s stalled attempt to use fiction to “unearth those that might already be dead.” Beyond the thick cloud of allusions and questions that overshadows his life, Aureliano is stymied by his alcoholism and a related tendency to see ghosts. At his desk in a Mexico City...