The Trace
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 081122371X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Mexican road novel of love, hate, drugs, and the Mexican Revolution.
The Trace is a masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico taken by a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution) and try to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son. With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of their relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons and desertcapes, on a journey through the the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the novel spinning out of control, with devastating consequences. . . . Poet Forrest Gander’s first novel As a Friend was acclaimed as “profound and relentlessly beautiful (Rikki Ducornet). With The Trace, Gander has accomplished another brilliant work, containing unforgettable poetic descriptions of Mexico and a story both violent and tender.
formally and that helped me. So he always encouraged that side of me instead of critiquing my coffee mug for being too heavy.” “That first cup I bought from you was heavy. I liked the heft of it.” “Yeah. Another student said about a thick cup I’d made that if I hit someone with it, they’d die instantly. And Ray happened to be there, and Ray handed me the cup and said, Why don’t you try it on him?” When Hoa finished what she had to say, she didn’t ask Dale something in return. She looked out
pipes and a skeletal ladder next to a lit bulb on the wall. “Brady climbed down and I was right after him. We were in a dark, narrow concrete corridor hung with sweating steam pipes, and everything — the walls, the floor, the air — everything was moist with condensed steam. It was like crawling through a cow — there was something maternal and uterine and nostalgic about the temperature and the moisture and the dim light. Along the corridor, there were light bulbs in metal cages about every
church wall thinking about the little unspoken twenty-year contention they had about toilet paper in their bathroom. Hoa would always put the roll on the holder in the under position, and Dale would sit down, take off the roll and put it back in the over position. Generally, it would stay like that for a few days, a week or two, and then he would find it reversed again with the toilet paper hanging down against the wall. Neither of them had ever mentioned it. Dale met Hoa walking toward the car.
She stared at the industrial plant and the fires on its flare stacks a mile or so to the north. At five a.m. the office light in the gas station came on. Hoa waited until she saw a car pull alongside the pumps before she woke Dale. Dale gassed up while Hoa went inside. In the fluorescent brightness, the man at the register looked unreal to Hoa. Then she caught a reflection of herself in the sliding-glass doors to the cold drinks and she realized that she looked far worse. She bought six bottles
want to make a quick trip to Ojinaga. It’s only an hour from here, across the border. Then we’ll come back, go east around Big Bend and south to Mexico through Piedras Negras. We’ll spend tonight there. Tuesday we’ll visit Icamole. And Wednesday, we make it to Sierra Mojada. Okay?” Another redundant question. Inside the car, the seats had been baking and the steering wheel was hot under Dale’s palms. While he started the engine, Hoa fastened her seatbelt. “I just wanted to see what was left