When I sat down to read Diego Gerard Morrison’s Pages of Mourning, I was at a bar where two men were swapping stories. Twice, I heard “my beloved Mexico City” at the exact same moment that I read the words “Mexico City,” as if each of these men were briefly narrating the novel’s central geography. It was the sort of coincidence that could launch a magical realist novel.

Magical realism is at the heart of Morrison’s novel too. The main character, born in Mexico and having returned after a painful experience in New York, is writing a novel, tentatively titled No Magic In Realism, that protests the deficiencies of magical realism, particularly its failure to confront the violence of the drug wars and the Mexican government’s indifference, cruelty, and corruption. 

His novel is also tentative; beyond the title, he hasn’t written a word. 

It is little wonder that this frustrated novelist is fighting magical realism. Literature has defined and circumscribed his life, starting with his name. The child of parents who wished their lives were books, he has been saddled with the name Aureliano Más the Second. There was no Aureliano Mas the First; his name is amalgamation and homage, gift and curse. 

Aureliano is also the name of nineteen characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), probably the most famous work of magical realism. “Mas” is the name his mother chose, identifying with Oedipa Maas, from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Crying is not a work of magical realism, though Oedipa saw through the veil of society to the rot underneath. This made her want to throw her life away, something Aureliano’s mom found relatable. She disappeared when Aureliano was an infant. His life took shape in the hole she left. 

Virtually every character in Pages of Mourning  is a writer, filled with writerly concerns. In this, the influence of Roberto Bolaño, another Mexican writer surpassingly interested in writers, is clear. A second central figure, Aureliano’s aunt, is a famous writer as well as Aureliano’s long-suffering patron. She has secured Aureliano an important fellowship, but he’s aggravating everyone with his inability to live up to the terms of the deal. 

The novel begins shortly before the third anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from a teaching college in southwestern Mexico who were kidnapped on their way to commemorate the 1968 massacre of students by the Mexican military. The mystery of their fate—their bodies were never recovered—is central to his aunt’s work. Along with Aureliano’s fellowship supervisor, she is preparing tributes to the missing students, big literary events in which students are resurrected as emblems. Their work as presented in the book is…almost bad? Or great in the way that the moment calls for, but lacking as literature. Or: great as literature, but failing to meet the actual horror of the moment. 

These are the contradictions with which Morrison wrestles, thankfully without coming to any conclusions. Pages of Mourning takes place in a realistic world—those teachers actually were kidnapped. But it isn’t exactly our world. In the novel, the ceremonies honoring the missing are scuttled when a massive earthquake hits Mexico City on the exact anniversary of the real, horrifying, nation-altering earthquake in 1985, which killed ten thousand people. 

At this point, the novel seems to slide toward magical realism. In realistic novels, earthquakes don’t echo across time. This literary conceit would seem even more contrived when, as the novel beautifully shifts the viewpoint to that of Aureliano’s lost mother, and then to his suffering father, we learn that the 1985 earthquake played a central role in their story. So many coincidences; so much magic! 

But Morrison doesn’t play it that way. His characters’ epics are sad and small, sometimes grimy or threatening grandeur, ultimately fading into memory or its residue. 

Life and its leavings; memory and its holes; absence and its yearning: these are the materials of ghost stories. If Morrison is not writing a ghost story, he is at least a communing with the pesky dead. The book itself is a conversation with perhaps the high point of Mexican magical realism, Juan Rulfo’s classic Pedro Páramo. Aureliano is obsessed with it—and understandably so. 

In Rulfo’s novel, the narrator travels to Comala, the town of his father, where everyone is dead, and most will say so. The city in all its murderous, raunchy, and beautiful glory is gone. Except it isn’t. It whispers and insinuates. Its people are brightly alive even while translucently decayed. 

Morrison never goes as far as Rulfo. He doesn’t have to. Like Rulfo’s narrator, Aureliano returns to his father’s hometown. His father had brought the family to another town called Comala, but they couldn’t stay, due to the tragedies of real life. There are probably no ghosts in this second fictional Comala. There is just sadness, narratives that almost match, and memories that never quite add up. 

Morrison isn’t raging against magical realism as much as yelling that it isn’t enough. People aren’t alive or dead; in the drug wars, they are generally dead. Bullet holes don’t turn you into a kite to be carried into heaven; they turn you into meat. 

Is magical realism bankrupt? In a sense, yes: by detaching from the real world, the style reduces evil characters to toothless abstractions. Bullet-ridden bodies in the desert aren’t ghosts or angels, even if we imagine them to be. When such absences form, pretending there’s a reason for them outside human experience is an abdication of responsibility. 

That said, coincidences do exist. Even in Aureliano’s earthquake, there is a hint of magic. Aureliano is in his apartment when the building starts shaking. 

Through the walls, I can hear people screaming, a baby crying, an overpowering roaring sound, rapid footsteps rushing to safety. The roof, it creaks and it groans. Fearing it might give, and holding the closest wall, I stumble outside, where it seems two worlds exist, one vertical and one horizontal, and are merging into each other. 

It’s a beautiful image—worlds slipping into each other, the one where magic isn’t real and the one where earthquakes can happen at the exact same moment thirty years later, the worlds of the quick and of the dead. But Morrison doesn’t quite let that happen. It’s an earthquake. People die. Babies scream and are silenced. Red dust chokes the ambitions of builders and poets. Probably the most difficult reality of this novel is that life is almost magical, except when it suddenly isn’t. 

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Diego Gerard Morrison is a writer, editor, and translator whose recent work explores themes of magical realism and appropriation in the context of the Mexican drug war. He is the author of The Wait, an appropriation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a setting of Mexican cartel violence and its resulting crisis of forced disappearances. His debut novel, Myth of Pterygium won the Rising Prize in Fiction. He lives and works in Mexico City, where he is the fiction editor of diSONARE, a project he co-founded.

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Brian O’Neill is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is a reviewer specializing in small presses, novels in translation, foreign policy, the Midwest, and regional histories, and he also writes about baseball. Follow him @oneillofchicago on Twitter and Bluesky.