Publishers Weekly
09/16/2019
Comensal’s punchy debut follows a group of physically and emotionally ailing characters in present-day Mexico City. Lawyer Ramon Martinez opens his mouth “like an angry baboon” to discover a painful lump. His whole tongue needs to be removed; his wife Carmela seems more worried about his children’s reactions than his pain, though she adopts his insomnia “in solidarity.” Psychoanalyst Teresa de la Vega, a breast cancer survivor, specializes in treating people with illnesses. One patient is Eduardo, a young man also very concerned with cancer, having had leukemia as a child. Teresa obsesses over Eduardo as Carmela does over her family. When Eduardo comes down with bronchitis, Teresa and the reader are compelled to wonder about the connection between neurosis and physical ailments. A quote from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor introduces the novel’s second half. Teresa, Eduardo, and Ramon and his family anchor the narrative, while Comensal folds in other, complementary plot threads. Ramon’s doctor, Joaquin Aldama, becomes passionately involved in the care of his terminal patient Lorena Galvan, but not so much in that of Luis Ramirez, who is fond of complex conspiracy theories about his illness. The novel gets its comic charge from blunt and colorful descriptions of emotional situations that in other fiction would dictate long and evocative passages (“The dream’s latent content represented the paradox of the jouissance of the Other.”). Sidestepping sentimentality and elaborate emotional expression, Comensal brings comic compassion to his treatment of contemporary neuroses. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"[A] caustic, pitch-black comic debut." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"A feisty first novel . . . Comensal’s brisk, if at times diffusive, storytelling — in a translation by Charlotte Whittle that conveys both his blunt and sharp humor — coheres around the question of how a person (as well as his family members, friends and colleagues) deals with the felt and future consequences of sudden dire news . . . the funny, messy unexpectedness of life, death and potty-mouthed pet birds." —Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times
"[A] promising, frustrating, and ultimately moving debut. It’s a novel brightly alert to the conflict between the storyteller’s imperatives and the raw facts of disease." —Garth Risk Hallberg, Air Mail
"The Mutations is a wonderful novel, as tragic as it is comic, as classical as it is contemporary, and above all impossible to forget. After reading it, you'll wish that there were many more novels by Jorge Comensal ready for you to enjoy—but since this is his first, we'll just have to wait patiently till his next brilliant book is done." —Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice
“Sharp, hilarious, yet sensitive—an amazing first novel!” —Guadalupe Nettel, author of After the Winter
"Punchy . . . The novel gets its comic charge from blunt and colorful descriptions of emotional situations that in other fiction would dictate long and evocative passages. Sidestepping sentimentality and elaborate emotional expression, Comensal brings comic compassion to his treatment of contemporary neuroses." —Publishers Weekly
"Quietly powerful . . . An assured debut by a writer from whom readers will want to hear more, and soon." —Kirkus Reviews
"Effortlessly elevating his tale to the rarefied heights of Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Ravel only to plunge the bawdy depths of the rawest profanity while peppering his narration with erudite discussions of the mysteries of genetics, Comensal has written a fearlessly irreverent and unexpectedly deep novel about a family’s blundering with the most atavistic of challenges." —Sara Martinez, Booklist
"Through the story of an illness and an exploration of the fear of death, Jorge Comensal has created a world both absurd and hilarious, yet one that also touches on our darkest emotions. The Mutations is one of the greatest Latin American novels of recent years." —Daniel Saldaña París, author of Among Strange Victims
"Jorge Comensal's The Mutations oscillates masterfully between comedy and tragedy, gathering up in its pages a stupendous panoply of characters before whom the reader is never sure whether to smile in sympathy or pity." —Fernando Aramburu, author of Homeland
"The Mutations is a speculative exercise, implacable as cancer itself, on the limits of compassion. An uncompromising inquiry that tries to answer a sinister, almost eschatological question: What to do when faced with the news of an incurable disease?" —Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of I'll Sell You a Dog
"No contemporary Mexican novel has impressed me as much as Jorge Comensal's The Mutations. Barely exceeding 200 pages, this debut novel is both hilarious and funereal, a clinical history turned portrait of death." —Christopher Domínguez Michael, El Universal
Kirkus Reviews
2019-08-19
Cancer takes center stage in this quietly powerful first novel by Mexican writer Comensal.
Ramón Martínez lives a bourgeois life as a Mexico City lawyer, with a wife, Carmela, and two teenage children, Mateo and Paulina, and "their respective hobbies of masturbation and karaoke." Then comes a day when his tongue is so sore that he can't eat the pork torta he's just ordered, followed by a couple of weeks of inconclusive hemming and hawing until his doctor sends him to see an oncologist. It's cancer—cancer of the tongue, requiring the offending organ to be removed. Ramón's success depends on his silvery orations in the courtroom, and he's left with the dreadful prospect of a life of silence, punctuated by fierce arguments with a lawyer brother, Ernesto, who loans him enough money for the operation but demands Ramón and Carmela's home as collateral. Ernesto is as grasping as cancer is obdurate, but he's just one element of the existential chaos that surrounds Ramón as he grapples with the terrible disease. Other characters bear their own burdens: One, Eduardo, a support-group denizen, having lived through childhood cancer, now fears all things white; as Comensal writes, "In Eduardo's case, the essence of the Lacanian Other was the danger that lay in wait, the invasion of the leukemia that threatened to poison his blood with whiteness—with abnormal cells that were, precisely, white." The mutations in Ramón's body lead to mutations in his life, some introduced by his God-fearing maid, Elodia, who brings a parrot to Ramón as a gift, a parrot with gifts of profanity The bird voices Ramón's mood perfectly as he undergoes treatment, even as the lives of everyone around him change in sometimes unexpected ways, adding clamor to his voicelessness.
An assured debut by a writer from whom readers will want to hear more, and soon.
