The Transmigration of Bodies

Reviews / Votes

'Herrera's characteristic concision goes a step further here, his skill for expression more impressive in its restraint than its excess. This is a harsh novel, as are those from a borderland besieged by extreme violence, but it's also oddly comforting, in large part due to its exceptional literary quality.' * El Pais * 'The Transmigration of Bodies is a magnificent book and its author one of the few indispensable Latin American writers of our times.' -- author of My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Patricio Pron Rain 'The Transmigration of Bodies represents a highpoint in the genre of the novel. Herrera has been slowly building an oeuvre constructed on a singular conception of the world, in which literature's past and present form a continuum. Reading him gives one the sense of diving into his library, a place that is unashamed of belonging to a tradition and being well-read and much-underlined.' -- author of Sudden Alvaro Enrigue Death 'In Herrera's slim, amusing book, [he] strips Romeo & Juliet to its essence and sets it against a plague that symbolises Mexico's recent violent history.' Publishers Weekly * Publishers Weekly * 'Yuri Herrera's novels are like little lights in a vast darkness. I want to see whatever he shows me.' -- San Francisco Green Apple Books Stephen Sparks CA. 'This is as noir should be, written with all the grit and grime of hard-boiled crime and all the literary merit we're beginning to expect from Herrera. Before the end he'll have you asking how, in the shadow of anonymity, do you differentiate between the guilty and the innocent?' -- Mr B's Emporium Tom Harris Bath. 'Both hysterical and bleak, The Transmigration of Bodies builds an entire world in 100 pages. Herrera's ability to express everything in so few words, his skill of merging the argot of the streets with the poetry of life is unrivalled. The world his characters inhabit is dangerous and urban, like a postcard sent from the ends of the earth. Reading his compact novels is both exhilarating and unforgettable.' -- Houston Brazos Bookstore Mark Haber TX. 'A fabulous book full of low-life characters struggling to get by. It's an everyday story of love, lust, disease and death. Indispensable.' -- Waterstones Cork Matthew Geden Ireland 'A microcosmic look at the lives of two families straight out of a Shakespearean drama. Pick it up and you won't put it down till you've finished.' -- Posman Books in Chelsea Market Grace Waltemyer NY. 'A work replete with the gritty, informal prose first displayed in Signs - rooted firmly in the modern world yet evoking the feel of an epic divorced from time . . . a cross between Cormac McCarthy and a detective novel, an incisive portrait evoking a Mexican Inherent Vice.' -- Chicago Seminary Co-op Bookstore Marina Clementi IL 'The Transmigration of Bodies reads like a fever dream: an intense, enthralling examination of how people live in a city of the dying and the dead. It takes an extraordinary amount of skill to combine elements of noir, political commentary, hardboiled crime, and allegory (not to mention Shakespeare, with a seasoning of existential ennui) and keep the novel moving, or in this case, racing along. Herrera, clearly, has at least that much talent, and then some.' -- Chicago Volumes Bookcafe Thomas Flynn IL