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language: English
country: USA
year: 2014
form: novel
genre(s): literary, speculative
dates read: 13.8.17-19.8.17, 3.12.22-6.12.22
Jamie Berrout’s Otros Valles, self-published in 2014, remains in 2022 what it was when I first read it five years ago: one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I think the sharpest possible counterpoint to arguments that a book cannot be a) timeful and b) deeply and explicitly political without sacrificing art or whatever.
I use the “challenging” mood on Storygraph sparingly, because I find the books that are marked with it are usually just…any book by a non-white author. I think, however, that it’s appropriate here, not — or not only — because the book challenges its readers, but because the book is the narrator’s process of challenging herself — as a young Mexican-American trans woman living in the Rio Grande valley in Texas — in many different ways: challenging her own politics, yes, but also challenging her anxiety, interrogating her relationships to place and to family, challenging, or trying to, everything about the world around her, its cruelties and injustices, its everyday violences to which we become (cruelly) indifferent.
I would characterize the book as an intense, thoroughgoing argument that the personal is political, taken not simply as a slogan but as perhaps the fundamental truth of our existence in the world. what if everything we do does have political import, not in a liberal way where reading the correct books will save us but rather in that every single part of our lives is entangled in “the political” (which is, in fact, not some separate sphere divorced from “the everyday”) in both obvious and non-obvious ways? the narrator asks herself and her readers: how could we live with ourselves if we allowed ourselves to truly know this, to recognize the thousands of tiny ways we reproduce injustice every day with absolutely no ability to change it? what would we have to do in order to survive, to live with this knowledge — and, if we can, to work to change this unlivable world — instead of either repressing (or suppressing) it or simply being destroyed by it?
the narration moves freely and extremely effectively between scales and registers: the narrator’s everyday life as she navigates her intense anxiety, the violences of home, her creative writing, and the search for any kind of trans community around her; a collective account of the strangenesses that permeate the border region, accentuating its both inhuman and all-too-human violence even as they seem to come from somewhere other-than-human; the narrator’s polemic reflections on “politics” — race, mainstream lgbt(t as an afterthought only) activism, and the death-machine that is the publishing industry; and folkloric/folklórico interludes offering fragmentary and varied — some utopian, some all too real —visions of trans life in the mode of traditional narratives.
it’s gorgeous and unsettling and hopeful and devastating, and it stands also as a heartbreaking reminder of what we’ve lost by creating a world where writing is, for almost everyone — even those who do, somehow, barely, survive the gauntlet of publishing — impossible. I hope someday we’ll make a world where Berrout is able to write again.
moods: challenging, emotional, hopeful, mysterious, polemic, reflective, tense