Reviewed by Sarah Booker<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its construction and powerfully recognizable as a reflection of its modern-day counterpart. Kingdom Cons<\/em>, originally published in Spanish in 2004 and translated by Lisa Dillman, is Herrera\u2019s third novel to be published in English (though the first he wrote in Spanish) and it completes his loosely-connected triptych of border novels. In his other novels, Signs Preceding the End of the World<\/em> (2015) and The Transmigration of Bodies<\/em> (2016), Herrera tackles the experience of crossing the border, the conflicts between crime families, and the effects of disease within the context of the US\/Mexico border. Taking on the upper echelons of narco-culture in this text, Kingdom Cons<\/em> examines the possibilities of language, artistic creation, and the construction of power in a way that feels staggeringly contemporary and necessary.<\/p>\nHerrera\u2019s writing can perhaps best be characterized by the ways that he blends myth and reality. In Kingdom Cons<\/em>, a drug lord becomes a King, his cartel is depicted as his court, and his palatial residence is transformed into his kingdom. This structure can partly be explained by the author\u2019s writing approach; in an interview published in \u201cLatin American Literature Today\u201d: http:\/\/www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/en\/2017\/april\/literature-political-responsibility-interview-yuri-herrera-radmila-stefkova-and-rodrigo, Herrera explains that he writes lists of words that he will not use (such as Mexico, United States, border, drugs, and narco-trafficking) as a way of avoiding clich\u00e9s, but this also means that his writing takes on a more mythical feeling as it is distanced from the specific culture depicted. While it clearly engages with the genre, Kingdom Cons<\/em> is not a narco-novela because of this approach and the underlying critique of narco-culture that is embedded in the novel.<\/p>\nThe novel is told from the perspective of Lobo, or the Artist, who makes his way into the court by composing and singing songs\u2014or narcocorridos<\/em>, as they are commonly known\u2014about the grandeur of the King and his court. Also referred to as Songbird, he is an artist-figure navigating a world of crime and violence. He plays and records his songs and the recordings are sold on the streets\u2014\u201cAfter all, isn\u2019t that the way we do business?\u201d muses the king\u2014and this circulation contributes to the construction of the King\u2019s grandeur. With roots in Spanish romances<\/em>, the corrido<\/em> is a traditional Mexican musical form that typically narrates historical events and functions as a primary means of circulating information and news before the advent of radio and television. Narcocorridos<\/em> draw on these same traditions, but they engage with narco-culture. As can be seen in the novel, this music is banned from public spaces, such as the radio, in an attempt to suppress narco-culture, but they nevertheless have a significant function within these societies as they create and circulate the narratives that legitimize the authority of those in power.<\/p>\nIn the novel, the Artist is quickly incorporated into the kingdom because of his ballads, becoming visible to the rest of the community when he is needed to compose or perform. In the meantime, he almost invisibly moves through the kingdom, learning the secrets hidden there and getting involved in a somewhat predictable illicit affair. As the kingdom begins to collapse and the Artist returns to the world he previously occupied and witnesses another kingdom where all he can see is that \u201cit was all the same<\/em>,\u201d he begins to understand that he has become a part of a system that makes an individual all-powerful, but that he still maintains agency within this system: \u201cWho was the King? An all powerful. A ray of light who had lit up the margins because it couldn\u2019t be any other way as long as it wasn\u2019t revealed what he was. A sad sack, a man betrayed. A single drop in the sea of men with stories. A man with no power over the terse fabric inside the artist\u2019s head.\u201d<\/p>\nFor me, the plot and characters of Kingdom Cons<\/em> are not as compelling as those I found in Signs Preceding the End of the World<\/em>, which does mark a greater maturity on the writer\u2019s part, but the beauty and importance of this novel resides more in the underlying questioning of power and the narrative itself. Herrera\u2019s inventive use of language is well-matched by Dillman\u2019s own linguistic artistry, leading to a staggeringly beautiful piece of writing. The narrative itself feels like it comes from another time, creating resonances with medieval Spanish literature or the music of the early twentieth-century United States. There is something subversively jazzy about the pace, improvised words, sparsity, and marginality of the narrative that is reminiscent of the Beat writers. For example, there is a heavy use of verbs, some of which are invented, which gives the novel a greater sense of agitated movement, such as in the following example: \u201cThe man backed up and cactus-armed in fear.\u201d Dillman skillfully adapts Herrera\u2019s creative use of language into the English\u2014a challenge that she discusses in her Translator\u2019s Note in _Signs Preceding the End of the World_\u2014by using similar techniques to play with the sounds of the language and the images that it conjures. As an example of this, Dillman renders lush imagery while also paying particular attention to the repetition of certain sounds in the following passage: \u201cHe heard tell of mountains, of jungles, of gulfs, of summits, in singsong accents entirely new to him: yesses like shesses, words with no esses, some whose tone soared up so high and sank so low it seemed each sentence was a journey: it was clear they were from nowhere near here.\u201d<\/p>\nLanguage, however, is not just an adornment in the novel, but something that is central to the underlying questions of power. Early on there is a discussion of the Artist\u2019s love of language and the sounds it makes: \u201cFor him school was brief, a place where he sensed the harmony of letters, the rhythms that strung them together and split them apart.\u201d Words were, for him, an escape from the world rather than a reflection or creation of it:<\/p>\n
He started writing songs about stuff that happened to others. He knew nothing of love but he\u2019d heard stories, so he\u2019d mention it amid wisdom and proverbs, give it a beat, and sell it. But it was all imitation, a mirror held up to lives overheard. And though he suspected there was more he could do with his songs, he didn\u2019t know how to go deeper. It had all been said before. Why bother.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Once he becomes a part of the kingdom, though, the Artist\u2019s words take on a new significance as they are used to create power and to construct reality. Herrera\u2019s words, on the other hand, reflect a certain reality as his novel demonstrates the ways that power can be systematically created through language in a way that is just as believable in the underground crime world as it is in the contemporary political scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kingdom Cons\u00a0by Yuri Herrera translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman 220 pgs. | pb | 9781908276926 |\u00a0$13.95\u00a0 And Other Stories Reviewed by Sarah Booker Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its construction and powerfully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":404782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[49736,66506,7766,66496,6516,59786],"class_list":["post-307056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-and-other-stories","tag-kingdom-cons","tag-lisa-dillman","tag-sarah-booker","tag-spanish-literature","tag-yuri-herrera"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307056"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404822,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307056\/revisions\/404822"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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