The Mutations

September 1, 2019
Cancer takes center stage in this quietly powerful first novel by Mexican writer Comensal. Ramón Martínez lives a bourgeois life as a Mexico City lawyer, with a wife, Carmela, and two teenage children, Mateo and Paulina, and "their respective hobbies of masturbation and karaoke." Then comes a day when his tongue is so sore that he can't eat the pork torta he's just ordered, followed by a couple of weeks of inconclusive hemming and hawing until his doctor sends him to see an oncologist. It's cancer--cancer of the tongue, requiring the offending organ to be removed. Ramón's success depends on his silvery orations in the courtroom, and he's left with the dreadful prospect of a life of silence, punctuated by fierce arguments with a lawyer brother, Ernesto, who loans him enough money for the operation but demands Ramón and Carmela's home as collateral. Ernesto is as grasping as cancer is obdurate, but he's just one element of the existential chaos that surrounds Ramón as he grapples with the terrible disease. Other characters bear their own burdens: One, Eduardo, a support-group denizen, having lived through childhood cancer, now fears all things white; as Comensal writes, "In Eduardo's case, the essence of the Lacanian Other was the danger that lay in wait, the invasion of the leukemia that threatened to poison his blood with whiteness--with abnormal cells that were, precisely, white." The mutations in Ramón's body lead to mutations in his life, some introduced by his God-fearing maid, Elodia, who brings a parrot to Ramón as a gift, a parrot with gifts of profanity The bird voices Ramón's mood perfectly as he undergoes treatment, even as the lives of everyone around him change in sometimes unexpected ways, adding clamor to his voicelessness. An assured debut by a writer from whom readers will want to hear more, and soon.

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September 16, 2019
Comensal’s punchy debut follows a group of physically and emotionally ailing
characters in present-day Mexico City. Lawyer Ramon Martinez opens his mouth “like an angry baboon” to discover a painful lump. His whole tongue needs to be removed; his wife Carmela seems more worried about his children’s reactions than his pain, though she adopts his insomnia “in solidarity.” Psychoanalyst Teresa de la Vega, a breast cancer survivor, specializes in treating people with illnesses. One patient is Eduardo, a young man also very concerned with cancer, having had leukemia as a child. Teresa obsesses over Eduardo as Carmela does over her family. When Eduardo comes down with bronchitis, Teresa and the reader are compelled to wonder about the connection between neurosis and physical ailments. A quote from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor introduces the novel’s second half.
Teresa, Eduardo, and Ramon and his family anchor the narrative, while Comensal folds in other, complementary plot threads. Ramon’s doctor, Joaquin Aldama, becomes passionately involved in the care of his terminal patient Lorena Galvan, but not so much in that of Luis Ramirez, who is fond of complex conspiracy theories about his illness. The novel gets its comic charge from blunt and colorful descriptions of emotional situations that in other fiction would dictate long and evocative passages (“The dream’s latent content represented the paradox of the jouissance of the Other.”). Sidestepping sentimentality and elaborate emotional expression, Comensal brings comic compassion to his treatment of contemporary neuroses.

November 1, 2019

DEBUT Diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, attorney Ramón Martínez undergoes a glossectomy, a terrible and symbolically ironic operation for one whose livelihood depends upon speaking. His postoperative life deals not only with his dysfunctional family (his wife Carmela and two children) as they cope with the loss of the breadwinner's income but also with his obnoxious brother, who lends Ramón suspiciously earned money for the operation. A subplot involves the psychologist Teresa, herself a cancer survivor, who counsels the extremely neurotic Eduardo, a former leukemia patient. Thus the dominant theme of this smoothly translated novel is change, oncological as well as relational. VERDICT In his first work, young Mexican writer Comensal creates markedly credible characters and instills a vein of humor with a cussing parrot and Ramón's clueless and self-absorbed adolescent children. But this book remains a chilling reminder of the suffering, both physiological and psychological, that cancer patients and their families endure. For those who have cared for a cancer patient or have been victims themselves, it hits very close to home, reminding many that its gravity trumps humor.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2019
Your health! Happy words, two of the last Ram�n Mart�nez is able to utter as he toasts a client. His tongue has grown a strange tumor and since Ram�n is a lawyer in Mexico City, a useless tongue emasculates him, transforming him from a macho head-of-the-household and vigorous career man into a pitiable echo of his former self. From this bleak premise, Mexican author Comensal launches his debut novel, a tale about cancer and impending death that slyly provokes more than a few guffaws. Comensal bounces between the point of view of Ram�n to that of his therapist, Teresa, to Dr. Aldama, Ram�n's oncologist. Effortlessly elevating his tale to the rarefied heights of Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Ravel only to plunge the bawdy depths of the rawest profanity while peppering his narration with erudite discussions of the mysteries of genetics, Comensal has written a fearlessly irreverent and unexpectedly deep novel about a family's blundering with the most atavistic of challenges.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)