This Blue Novel
By Valerie Mejer Caso (Mexico)
Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
(Action Books)

This bilingual edition of Valerie Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel presents the story of the author’s multigenerational family, immigrants from Spain, Germany, and England, in images that have the heft of myth and the unpredictability of dreams. A work of metafiction that explores the difficulty of evoking the past through unstable language, it nonetheless makes the case for probing history through oneiric memory. The resulting novel becomes less a linear sequence of events than a compelling montage. Michelle Gil-Montero’s translation ably renders the lushness of Mejer Caso’s idiom, even as it interrogates the “lie [that] is language.”