Margo Glantz

Two nuns, and one obsessed mother, doing everything thing in their power to achieve communion with the one they love.Sister Lugarda de la Encarnación takes the lash, and an unnamed mother gets down on her hands and knees—sacramental postures demanded by inscrutable men. Apparitions is a novel of ecstasy pursued, desire transmogrified into devotion, and obedience as a passionately pursued, not entirely free choice. Erotic, and suffused with painting, music, art, it’s an incantatory exploration of what it means to abandon the world, and to use your body—in pain, and in pleasure—as a way of finally coming to know the divine.

After her ex-husband dies unexpectedly, Nora García travels to the funeral, back to a Mexican village from her past and the art and music of their life together.The way you hold a cello, the way light lands on a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could—a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora García as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora’s life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Glantz’s hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, 'Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.'

""What do I feel?"" asks the narrator, Nora García, as she goes back to a Mexican village she has not visited in years to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, a famous pianist who has died of a massive heart attack. This deeply moving novel is the unspoken answer to Nora's self-questioning. ""The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of,"" Pascal said, and this aphorism of knowing and not knowing is at the core of the novel. Employing motifs of ""the heart,"" modes of music from the tango to Bach, and allusions to poetry, the text is a rich amalgam that reveals a life lived deep within the culture of the late twentieth century. Like her ex-husband, Nora is a musician, a cellist, and so it is fitting that her novel takes the form of a canon and fugue: phrases circle and repeat, variations are introduced, motifs come and go and intermingle, reflecting a paralysis of the grieving. The novel moves inexorably toward the burial and the revelation of Nora's complex, emotional reaction to Juan's death. Throughout the novel, Nora is moving in the ""wake"" of that death, being pulled along by the ceremonies of the funeral, the mass, the burial-and her grief and rage, suppressed, never spoken of, is made palpable to the reader through the indirection of memories. Show More For her rich, nuanced evocation of states of mind and emotion, Margo Glantz can stand proudly alongside such modern masters as Virginia Woolf and William Gass.