Mantra

What does a nostalgic brain tumor, a specter obsessed with masked wrestlers, and a hypothetical android searching for a missing creator through a world in ruins have in common?

“Mantra is a kaleidoscopic novel, shot through with fierce, occasionally over-the-top humor, written in a prose of rare precision that allows itself to oscillate between anthropological document and the delirium of late nights in a city—Mexico City—that superimposes itself on the subterranean cities beneath it like a snake swallowing itself. [. . .] The novel, or so it appears (and I say appears because everything in this novel can come to seem only apparent, though its parts are assembled with mathematical exactitude), is divided into three long chapters. [. . .] Among the multiple plotlines that crisscross like lightning bolts is the story of Joan Vollmer, killed in Mexico City while playing William Tell with her husband, William Burroughs; and the story of the Mexican masked wrestlers and the nouvelle vague film that one of them wants to make in France; and the story of LIM, the international language of the dead; and the story of Mexican monsters and Mexican pornography; and the story of the female rock group Anorexia & The Skinny Chicks; and the story of Martín Mantra as a millenarian and media-savvy guerrilla; and even the love story (though it’s set in Paris) of the French narrator and a Mexican girl.

“Mantra is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years. It made me laugh more than any other book, and it seemed more virtuous and at the same time more roguish.”—Roberto Bolaño