A crazy story of gringos and narcos in Mexico, written by one of the best novelists of his generation

I don’t know if this is sufficiently clear: Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, born in 1983 in the Mexican town of Culiacán, is one of the best Spanish-language novelists of his generation. El paisaje es un grito (The Landscape Is a Scream) is the third time he has demonstrated this, after his 2014 Anatomía de la memoria (Anatomy of Memory) and the 2022 El libro de nuestras ausencias (The Book of Our Absences), all constructed with an obsessive slowness and communicating with each other in complex ways, sometimes obvious (a certain arrangement of the text which puts it on the verge of becoming poetic verse; its torrential nature; or, of course, its “Mexicanness”) and other times subtle. We are talking about important, enormous, dense works. Unmissable ones.

In his ‘Final Notes,’ Ruiz Sosa explains that El paisaje es un grito contains a great deal of biographical material, but in a collective key, referring to his own life as much as to those of his family and friends. The traces scattered throughout these pages, however, lead to a horizon of even greater dimensions, to the many biographies of an infinite number of migrants or residents of the border, that space which, as was said in an old Western, exists to be crossed. The problem is how and why we cross it, whether by our own will or dragged along by the violence of power; whether the movement leads to freedom or to uprooting. In Ruiz Sosa’s work, so deeply conditioned by physical and political geography, there is always a painful, harrowing, and desolate weight, a harshness. This novel is no exception.

It’s hard to know what relationship Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, who has lived in Barcelona, Spain for two decades, maintains with his birthplace today, but, in literary terms, it seems undeniable that Culiacán fully exists in his literature, rooted in that region and its people, in the bloodshed of its history, in the tragedy that fuels his generous and feverish style. Moreover, Culiacán and Sinaloa and Mexico and the border are one and the same, a gateway to the frenzied and fascinating story of the ancestor Matheus Xante, a madman or idiot or genius or conqueror, whose adventures provide an unexpected escape route to the stories of Baldor and his companions, connecting the drug traffickers or the hitmen with the exploitative gringo, the 19th century with the 21st: “Mat Xante had no history of his own and, instead of building it, he decided to fight against the history of others,” we read at one point. And this, which explains nothing, will again contribute to making the story labyrinthine and paradoxical, because “you cannot abandon the one who is pursuing you.”

Thus, the book culminates in a memoir of work and the search for a home, in a vindication of love and the possibility of an ancient future (this reminds me of a line from Franco Battiato, “I hear a murmur of swing coming from the Neolithic”), and becomes an extraordinary book that no one who still believes that literature is language, that language is reality, and that the novel cannot be content with being merely pleasant and comfortable if it aspires to continue existing and enjoying any relevance, should miss. And Eduardo Ruiz Sosa accomplishes all this from a uniquely independent and free perspective.

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