Author(s): Yuri Herrera

Novel

"Herrera is Mexico's greatest novelist." —Francisco Goldman

"Herrera's novels are like little lights in a vast darkness. I want to see whatever he shows me." —Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books

"The Transmigration of Bodies goes straight for the soul." —John Powers, NPR Fresh Air

In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part narco-lit romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera's English-language debut Signs Preceding the End of the World won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. His follow-up The Transmigration of Bodies has built on the critical and popular success of its predecessor. He teaches at the University of Tulane in New Orleans.

Lisa Dillman is a US translator based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she translates Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for her translation of Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World.

I’ve been late to come to Herrera’s work, and now I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get there. Herrera is a revelation. He has been feted as Mexico’s greatest living novelist and his third novel Signs Preceding the End of the World was awarded Best Translated Book Award in 2016, beating stiff and outstanding competition from Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The first novella in his ‘Border Trilogy’, Kingdom Cons has just been translated into English. Unusually, in the English translations, the last has come first and the first last. Loosely a trilogy, all the books (the second being The Transmigration of Bodies) deal with borders, physical, psychological and metaphysical. Kingdom Cons is fable-like in its construction, telling the story of the Artist, a wandering musician who sings songs for his supper, and the King, the Capo, the head of a palace, bejewelled and all powerful. The novella opens in the cantinas of Mexico where Lobo is singing popular ballads of humour and humility for a few coins. When a drunkard refuses to pay for his song, the King intervenes and the Artist finds himself taken into a powerful world of passion, violence and high-stakes jealousy. The world of the drug cartel is subtly played out in this tale; the story could as easily be any time or situation where inequalities thrive and those that play hardest and fastest climb to the top, only to watch with increasing paranoia for the knife to come. Lobo’s place in the palace is a lowly one, a place that protects him in its powerlessness but also leaves him vulnerable, yet he is increasingly intrigued by the machinations and power of the court. Accepted by the King initially as a harmless distraction, he later becomes an object of annoyance. His relationships with others in the power structure become increasingly complex, and his dangerous obsession with a beautiful, damaged young woman, the Commoner, compromise his former inconsequential existence. As defections occur and the King’s position becomes precarious, the tension mounts. When Lobo is sent on a mission to spy, he inadvertently makes a mistake, one that could crush him. Herrera’s ability to take you into this maelstrom of epic emotion and action is measured, holding you both aloft and completely compelled. His work deserves a second and close reading. In these slim volumes, he conjures up worlds and ideas that sideswipe you: dynamic and intelligent, they will hit you in both the gut and the mind. 

{STELLA}