Recent Reading: Mexican Gothic
Mar. 12th, 2024 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocky41_7Mexican Gothic is a 300-page novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This book made a bit of a fuss perhaps a year or two back, but I have no faith in the NPR or NYT book recommendations after the heaps of uncritical praise piled on Madeline Miller's Circe. Nevertheless, Mexican Gothic remained in my head as something to check out when I had the chance, and in a rare W for my neighborhood free book library, I triumphantly snatched a slightly waterlogged copy of it a few weeks back.
First, Moreno-Garcia is clearly a fan of the gothic genre in general, and that shows in the book. You can tell while reading this is someone who loves this genre and is eager to work within that space. Few things are more disappointing than an allegedly "groundbreaking" genre novel written by someone with no respect or care for the genre itself. Moreno-Garcia's prose so lovingly paints those elements we adore about this genre: the unsettling isolation, the muddling fog, the strangers with sinister motives, the weight of a family legacy hanging over one's head. I absolutely loved picking this up at the end of the day to sink into the atmosphere.
Second, I just loved the protagonist, Noemi. Novel protagonists often trend towards introverted, bookish, slightly standoffish types (sometimes writers DO write what they know...) so Noemi in that sense feels like a breath of fresh air as an unapologetically extroverted socialite, who, in her own words "wished for eternal youth and endless merriment." A spoiled debutante Noemi may be, but she is also quick-witted, determined, and courageous. And her honed ability to read the room and manipulate social situations to her benefit becomes another weapon in her arsenal when she faces up against the Doyle family.
I was also delighted with Francis Doyle. Can a piece of gothic lit be complete without a sickly waif preyed upon by the forces of evil? This role unfailingly falls to a woman, who is often love interest-adjacent, if not an outright love interest, and her delicate, ill beauty inspires feelings of protectiveness in the protagonist which help spur him to escaping the dark forces at play. I love genderbending stock characters, so to see Francis fulfilling this role in a masculine way tickled me. Apparently the book has taken some flak for the relationship between Francis and Noemi, but I thought it was delightful.
Moreno-Garcia also shows us how well traditional gothic lit themes work intertwined with commentary about colonialism, classism, and racism. The House in this gothic lit story belongs to a family of wealthy English immigrants in Mexico, and the horror of it stems not only from the supernatural forces at play, but the cruelty and abuse of the Doyle family, their family silver mines a veritable graveyard of local impoverished Mexican workers used up and cast off to fuel their extravagant lifestyle.
The one real criticism I could cite is that the book is quite predictable if you're familiar with gothic lit or film. There are no huge surprises here, and the plot twists are likely to all be familiar to you. However, as someone who usually detests predictability in my stories, even I'll say that Moreno-Garcia's story was engaging enough that I was still keen to read on and find out just how these things came about, if I wasn't surprised by the plot points themselves. And I found all the concluding elements quite satisfying.
My final thought is that I will definitely be hanging onto this one! I think Mexican Gothic deserved the praise it got and I hope the appreciation of it continues.
First, Moreno-Garcia is clearly a fan of the gothic genre in general, and that shows in the book. You can tell while reading this is someone who loves this genre and is eager to work within that space. Few things are more disappointing than an allegedly "groundbreaking" genre novel written by someone with no respect or care for the genre itself. Moreno-Garcia's prose so lovingly paints those elements we adore about this genre: the unsettling isolation, the muddling fog, the strangers with sinister motives, the weight of a family legacy hanging over one's head. I absolutely loved picking this up at the end of the day to sink into the atmosphere.
Second, I just loved the protagonist, Noemi. Novel protagonists often trend towards introverted, bookish, slightly standoffish types (sometimes writers DO write what they know...) so Noemi in that sense feels like a breath of fresh air as an unapologetically extroverted socialite, who, in her own words "wished for eternal youth and endless merriment." A spoiled debutante Noemi may be, but she is also quick-witted, determined, and courageous. And her honed ability to read the room and manipulate social situations to her benefit becomes another weapon in her arsenal when she faces up against the Doyle family.
I was also delighted with Francis Doyle. Can a piece of gothic lit be complete without a sickly waif preyed upon by the forces of evil? This role unfailingly falls to a woman, who is often love interest-adjacent, if not an outright love interest, and her delicate, ill beauty inspires feelings of protectiveness in the protagonist which help spur him to escaping the dark forces at play. I love genderbending stock characters, so to see Francis fulfilling this role in a masculine way tickled me. Apparently the book has taken some flak for the relationship between Francis and Noemi, but I thought it was delightful.
Moreno-Garcia also shows us how well traditional gothic lit themes work intertwined with commentary about colonialism, classism, and racism. The House in this gothic lit story belongs to a family of wealthy English immigrants in Mexico, and the horror of it stems not only from the supernatural forces at play, but the cruelty and abuse of the Doyle family, their family silver mines a veritable graveyard of local impoverished Mexican workers used up and cast off to fuel their extravagant lifestyle.
The one real criticism I could cite is that the book is quite predictable if you're familiar with gothic lit or film. There are no huge surprises here, and the plot twists are likely to all be familiar to you. However, as someone who usually detests predictability in my stories, even I'll say that Moreno-Garcia's story was engaging enough that I was still keen to read on and find out just how these things came about, if I wasn't surprised by the plot points themselves. And I found all the concluding elements quite satisfying.
My final thought is that I will definitely be hanging onto this one! I think Mexican Gothic deserved the praise it got and I hope the appreciation of it continues.
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Date: 2024-03-13 03:35 am (UTC)lmao same!!! My most recent disappointment was All Night Pharmacy, but Circe was... well, I could see what it was trying (and succeeding) to do, and it was hardly the ~feminist retelling~ that it had been uncritically praised as.
That said!!! I loved Mexican Gothic and while I've not actually read many Gothic novels myself, I've absorbed a lot of the tropes via cultural osmosis. No surprises in this novel, just a really well executed version that, like you said, looks at the traditional themes through a lens on colonialism, class, and race. Which I found really interesting because so many "classics" can be interpreted through a modern lens, but weren't explicitly crafted with that in mind. (Ah, the familiar alienation of being marginalized along any axis and struggling with the "greats" of Western canon.)
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. And feel free to share the Circe salt if you are so inclined. ;)
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Date: 2024-03-13 02:34 pm (UTC)Starting with the feminist thing. For one, I hate it when a book is described as feminist. Feminism is just abour EQUALITY. ALL books today should be feminist! If it's NOT feminist, it's sexist, and that's a problem we should be talking about. What does it even MEAN to say a book is "feminist"? I don't think have a female protag is the end-all-be-all of that. Plenty of men have written sexist drivel starring a woman.
I'm also really not a fan of retellings of villainous women where they're recast as just misunderstood would-be do-gooders. Now you could say Circe's original tale is just an expression of male fear of female power and there's probably truth in that, but to me, making Circe just a poor bullied woobie mischaracterized and misunderstood by the world robbed her of what made her most interesting.
Neither did Miller make a compelling case for the above, imo. Casting Circe as the one good woman among a sea of bitchy amoral whores is one of my all-time LEAST favorite story elements, and to me, it's actively anti-feminist. If your protag is the only "good" woman in the story, it's NOT a feminist book.
The story itself was aggressively mediocre to me. The opening third in particular read like a book for teenagers, and maybe when I was fifteen I would have been riveted with this book, but I was forcing myself through it by the mid-point, and the only really interesting part came at the end, when Circe, as an immortal, struggles to parent a mortal child.
Like...I'm not against myth retellings! I grew up on Percy Jackson! I enjoyed "The Song of Achilles" and I wasn't troubled with the changes Miller made to the myth for her story. But "Circe" was just...bad. And it still flummoxes me to see it get these reviews where people talk about it like some lifechanging experience, like they've never read a book with a woman in it before. I may never read another one of her books again lol Perhaps she just got unusually successful with TSOA--or maybe it wasn't even as good as I remember.
Moreno-Garcia on the other hand--I would love to check out more of her work! I think she did a great job of keeping to staples of the gothic genre while also making it work for her and the commentary she wanted to give on social dynamics in Mexico at the time. I was definitely in "Mexican Gothic"'s AO3 tag this week looking for more Noemi content XD
I heard rumors there's going to be a Hulu miniseries? I don't have Hulu myself but I would definitely be interested in finding a way to see that, if it's true and it pans out.
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Date: 2024-03-18 02:59 am (UTC)BUT YES THIS. I am all for villainous protags and POV flips, but...so few do it very well because by trying to make their villains 'sympathetic' (a vastly overrated term in my opinion) that they end up filing off all the nasty bits and flaws that make them interesting. (Or like that one Tumblr quote: they're so afraid of being unpalatable, they just end up bland.) In this case, Circe just ended up Not Like Other Girls (tm).
And if anything...maybe I'm the weirdo, I'm also fascinated by Pasiphae and Medea? Medea's another character I've always been fascinated by, and I was thinking that Pasiphae of the novel was remarkably underserved because yes she's a piece of work but she's also been forced to endure and survive, and chose options for that, which apparently never even occurred to Circe. There could have been so much more about the vilified women of myth making their own alliances or being forced to acknowledge and reckon with the ways that they've been pitted against each other.
HECK YEAH!!! Please do give fic recs if you find anything you like!
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Date: 2024-03-18 04:50 am (UTC)Agreed on Pasiphae and Medea as well! Both of them came off more interesting than Circe in the novel, and the more the novel ragged on the women around Circe in comparison to her, the less interested I was in Circe herself.
In terms of "Mexican Gothic" fanfic, I thought these were interesting!
https://archiveofourown.org/works/35538562
https://archiveofourown.org/works/34674028
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28503228
https://archiveofourown.org/works/26773144
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Date: 2024-03-29 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-13 07:05 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I also really enjoyed Mexican Gothic when I read it (the year it came out, I think); your description of Noemí is spot-on! She really was a breath of fresh air, and SMG did a great job keeping her characterization steady even as things deteriorated around her. Great cover, also.
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Date: 2024-03-13 07:46 pm (UTC)She really did! And you can see Noemi adjusting her attitude and behavior as she starts to realize how serious the situation is which was interesting to see. I can absolutely see how she will be FORMIDABLE when she gets older!
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Date: 2025-02-25 05:27 am (UTC)I was surprised myself to see the novel face criticism for the romance. I saw more than a few people essentially echo Virgil and chastise Noemí for "spending more time with Francis than her cousin," which imo is a bit unfair given that Catalina is kept locked in a room in a household quite literally built on the concepts of control and isolation, and there would only be so much Noemí could do in a house not her own against the wishes of her cousin's husband, AND with the added complication of Catalina clearly afflicted by something.
I thought the scenes Noemí had individually with Catalina, Francis, and Virgil were well-balanced. I never felt like Noemí "forgot" about Catalina in the novel. But! Of course, there will always be a differing opinion.
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Date: 2025-02-25 05:54 am (UTC)I did think Noemi was very charming! Absolutely cannot blame Francis for being smitten (✿◡‿◡)
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Date: 2025-02-25 07:20 am (UTC)Thanks for indulging me anyway! <3
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Date: 2025-02-26 01:36 am (UTC)