A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother
overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.
... as I poured my father's ashes into a big Ziploc bag, a little of my
blood dripped in. I thought about how each cell has all of you fully
inscribed in it, so that if I left those drops in there, it would be as
if I were already dead too. I plunged in then, to try and get myself
out, but it was all so sticky that I had to give up; when I pulled out
my hand, parts of my father were stuck all over it...--from Twin Time
Witty, sarcastic, and sensuous, Twin Time: or, how death befell me tells
the story of Mona, who, upon her father's death in Los Angeles, decides
to set off in search of her long-lost twin brother, given away as an
infant. With her father's ashes as a guide of dubious reliability, Mona
embarks upon a quest that takes her into a forest where she's confronted
by--among other beings--a band of Nordic men, her Chinese doppelganger,
a lascivious giant, and a pack of feral children. Along the way Mona
recounts her parents' past as she imagines it, a romantic tale of love
and rescue set in a fabulist, idealized Mexico--a dreamy place that only
vaguely resembles the harsh quotidian realities of the 1960s Mexico City
her parents inhabited. When Mona finds her brother at last, she learns
that he grew up in London with their mother--who had supposedly (or so
Mona had been told) died in childbirth--and her parents' story is thrown
into further disarray. By the end of the journey, all Mona's received
ideas of home, motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation have been
overturned.
Veronica Gonzalez is the coeditor of Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and
12 Excellent Drawings and the founder of rockypoint Press, a series of
artist-writer collaborations produced in association with 1301PE
Gallery. Twin Time is her first novel.
