No Place to Bury the Dead

Merely average. I did not finish. I have better books to try instead. A well-formed prose sentence or description can be lovely, something to savour, but these felt merely ordinary. I wondered if it was the translation, but Spanish readers have also taken it to be average. And, I had just read Svetlana Alexievitch, whose beautiful and poignant writing about violence, suffering, and courage under inhuman conditions is incomparable.

I started this as an audiobook but the narrator was so atrocious I had to switch to the written book. That improved the telling of this story but not the overall story itself. Let me break it down by dissecting the back cover blurb for this book (number added re my own and my comment is in italics):

1. In an unnamed Latin American country, a mysterious plague quickly spreads, erasing the memory of anyone infected. This plague plays little to no role, other than to give the character a reason to leave her home town

2. Angustias Romero flees with her family, but their flight is tragically cut short when she loses both her children. Consumed by grief, she finds herself within the hallucinatory expanse of Mezquite––a town corrupted by greed and populated by storytellers, refugees, and violent, predatory gangs. Hallucinatory expanse is quite an over-statement, in fact there is nothing out of the ordinary about this poor town with a corrupt government

3. Here, Angustias is finally able to lay her children to rest at the Third Country, a cemetery run by the larger-than-life Visitación Salazar and a refuge beyond suffering and fear. It is not a refuge, she just refuses to leave then complains a lot

4. While Visitación remains defiant in her mission to care for the dead, the cemetery she oversees is the focal point of a bitter land dispute with Alcides Abundio, the most feared landowner of the border. Visitación is the only interesting character in this book, but she alone can’t save it from its blandness

5. Caught in this power struggle, Angustias and Visitación–friends and sometimes rivals– stand their ground on a frontier where the law is dictated by violence; a surreal territory whose very nature blurs the boundaries between life and death. Again, there is nothing surreal about it and no blurred boundaries between life and death, just an obvious line between those living life to the fullest and those wallowing in self pity