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Itzel I: A Tlatelolco Awakening (ePub)
Guernica Editions, Fall 2019
335 pages
ePub (eBook)
ISBN13: 9781771834155
ISBN10: 1771834153
English
$10.95 Canada, $10.95 US
The first of a two-part novel, Itzel I tells the story of three disparate characters swept up in the drama of the Mexican student movement of 1968 whose ending in the Massacre in Tlatelolco on October 2nd, a date now always commemorated in Mexico, changed their lives forever. Broad in scope and exuberant in style in the best
What we will return to is a city under occupation. A city in defeat. And
in the midst of it, the beacon of Itzel's smile.
Sarah Murphy has done the undo-able: written, in strange magnificent future-tense prose about events that were kept hidden until 30 years after they’d been perpetrated. We understand the movement that culminated in Tlatelolco and the country that produced it, finally, as we come to understand Nauta, Itzel, Basta and the others who populate this rich and rewarding novel. Is it a novel? Memoir? Who cares? It must be read.
Margaret Randall, author of Che on My Mind, Haydée Santamaria, Cuban Revolutionary, and Exporting Revolution
In this audacious novel of many mixed ancestries, Sarah Murphy writes beautifully not only of but within the lives of exiles, thoughtful lives in haunted Mexico, lives that teem with the blockages and narrow escapes we call history. Such tenderness and intelligence are rarely found within the same covers. She plants them all over Itzel for the hungry reader.
Todd Gitlin, author of Occupy Nation and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
The dazzling fluency, the technical virtuosity, the energy and exuberance – they’re all here. Sarah Murphy is entertaining and reckless and wittily self-conscious about language and story-telling, but make no mistake: She is a literary and political subversive. If you haven’t read her before, hold onto your hat. You are in for a wild ride.
Ken McGoogan, author of Fatal Passage, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Flight of the Highlanders
Books by Sarah Xerar Murphy
