Before

Reviews / Votes

"This 1989 novel from one of Mexico's most prolific authors won the Xavier Villarutia Prize, the country's most prestigious literary award. In its first English translation, Before offers a perfect introduction to Boullosa's fluid and powerful writing... Beneath the events Boullosa presents in often comic terms -- playing childhood games with her half-sisters, visits to her grandmother, the shock of coming into womanhood at the time of her mother's death, her savage dreams -- is a powerfully rendered sense of loss and separation." -- BBC Culture's "10 Books to Read in August" by Jane Ciabattari "However spectral, this fictive double of the author produces a vividly expressionist argument that the transformations of adolescence amount to the literal death of the child. She also serves up a finely observed account of how a person--specifically, a high-strung, privileged, and impatient Catholic girl like the author herself--becomes a writer." -- Will Heinrich, BOMB Magazine "A ferociously intimate evisceration of her own formative personal history as well as an exploration of everything that is lost with childhood and of the places of silence that precede speaking." -- Aaron Bady, Guernica "Before is a small gem that brings to mind two other gems of Mexican literature: Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo and Carlos Fuentes's Aura. This comparison is not overstated. Like its predecessors, death is a central theme in Boullosa's novella. Before differs, however, in the playful, sometimes irreverent way in which the protagonist confronts this macabre topos." -- George Henson, World Literature Today "Boullosa's novel is playfully subversive rather than derivative, and converses with her precursors while forging a decidedly feminine?--?and feminist?--?path for the treatment of growing up (or failing at it)." -- Charlotte Whittle, Electric Literature "Part ghost story, part coming-of-age tale, Before is utterly haunting, mesmerizing and heartbreaking. This novel is an eerie and unforgettable masterpiece, an original take on the Central and South American tradition of magical realist literature." -- Ann Mayhew, The Riveter Magazine One of Bookriot's "7 Small Press Books to Read in August" 2016 One of Literary Hub's "13 Translated Books by Women You Should Read" "Told by an unnamed, extremely sensitive, and very frightened girl, this early novel by one of Mexico's premier writers rivals Clarice Lispector's work for sheer hypnotic power." -- Staff Pick at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC "Like Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Carmen Boullosa's peculiarly spooky novella uses formal experimentation and an uncompromising emotional honesty to explore the formation of a young woman's identity. Only a writer as fearless as Boullosa could so perfectly capture the unease of youth with such Angela Carter-like weirdness." -- Garry Perry, Staff Pick at Foyle's Bookstore London "What strikes the heart in Before is the profound earnestness in which the narrator explores the memories that transform her life...Boullosa captures these sensations with a poet's heart and sensibility." -- Laura Farmer, The Cedar Rapids Gazette "Everything is in flux and in motion in Before, corresponding to the narrator's emotional and psychological state leading up to and including the twin traumas of losing her mother and achieving puberty." -- Rachel Cordasco, Bookishly Witty blog "spooky...Breathless, haunting..." Suzanne Fischer, Tiny Letter "Carmen Boullosa's early novel Before meets the everyday with bewilderment. In this dream world of childhood, realism is nothing short of an act of magic; the supernatural suffuses the ordinary." -- Anna Zalocostas, Music & Literature "A ghost story told by the ghost herself. It's Boullosa's first major novel--her first real novel--originally written in the 1980s when she was a well-known poet in Mexico City and was worried that she would be lost as a poet if she started in on prose... it's the first of the many strange masterpieces she's written in the three decades since. But while her later work tends towards baroque and postmodern explorations of strange new linguistic worlds--future utopias and lost historical archives--this first novel is raw and unadorned, like a vein opened up on the page." -- Aaron Bady, Literary Hub, Thirteen Books to Read in June "The return to childhood that Carmen Boullosa has given us feels unlike any other book that I have read. I can't say enough about Boullosa's incandescent writing, which glows from within, radiating possibilities, contradictions, ambiguities."--Terry Pitts, VERTIGO