Signs preceding the end of the world

Country: Mexico
Author: Yuri Herrera
Translator: Lisa Dillman
Book: Signs preceding the end of the world

When I picked up Yuri Herrera's Signs preceding the end of the world, I probably should have paid more attention to the title. This is a 2009 book about a young Mexican woman, Makina, who illegally crosses from her home country into the US. Topical even when I read it at the end of October, given Donald Trump's promise to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and deport all illegal immigrants. Now, the title seems grimly, ironically prescient.

I actually chose this novel by chance. Well, not quite chance. I was browsing the fiction section for a short book. No more than about a centimetre thick, however many pages that works out as. I wanted one of those novellas where all the words matter and there's something brilliant about its brevity. This certainly fits that bill; its story, too, is fascinating, giving an insight into the human cost involved in such a journey – required reading, I might suggest, for the incoming president.

Signs preceding the end of the world is a realistic tale but with a mythological quality. It opens with a sinkhole swallowing up a man, car and dog. 'I'm dead,' are Makina's first words, who is only just spared a similar fate. As she embarks on a quest to find her brother in America, there's a feeling that this could in fact all be an allegory about passing from life to death. It's certainly about leaving behind a past life for a new one. Interesting, too, that these migrants have to pass across water, so symbolic of rebirth. The physical crossing of the river is fraught, and Makina doesn't make it without falling in: 'the world turned cold and green and filled with invisible water monsters.' But she reaches the USA, where she experiences snow for the first time, strange fried food, and is called scum'by 'a huge redheaded anglo who stank of tobacco'.

One of the most striking things about this novel was Herrera's non-standard vocabulary, which features a rich amalgam of anglo-Mexican and newly coined words. Lisa Dillman explores the challenge of translating this unusual lexicon, particularly how to capture the essence of the neologism 'jarchar', a word that comes from Mozarabic poetry, used all over the place here and meaning 'to leave'. She chooses the word 'verse', to suggest its poetic roots and the idea of motion – traverse, reverse, converse. And of course, it points to the wider universe, encompassing the sense that this one story of one woman in a specific time and place in fact tells us important things about identity, culture and today's world.

So that's the first country and first book from my Reading the World project. Mexico, tick! Next up, Japan.