“I realized that there was no truth, just points of view.”
“…it seems that we copy ourselves and repeat the same patterns – I guess that’s what being a family is.”
Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Liveright Publishing Corporation 2026, first published in Mexico by Editorial Sexto Piso 2021) isn’t so much a gut punch as it is repeat jabs of grief and guilt, each section brief and landing with precision. Sometimes there is a disconnect in translated works – not here. This book (and translation) is fantastic.
I don’t always love an unnamed narrator, primarily because sometimes it seems less intentional and lazy, and when it is intentional, it doesn’t always work. It is very much intentional in Eating Ashes and had the narrator been named, the novel would not have had the same bite. The novel opens with our narrator describing her younger brother’s suicide and how she had not seen the body fall. This image (and sound( that she did not see (or hear) haunts her as she battles grief tinged with guilt and anger. Diego’s death forces her to confront trauma -generational, situational, cultural – a collective trauma that was unique to her and her brother that he left her alone to deal with.
The narrator and her brother are Mexican. Their mother leaves them with their grandparents when Diego is a baby, heading to Spain and promising to get the paperwork together to send for them. Years pass, and she never does. This sense of abandonment and a longing for home serves as the framework for the siblings’ interactions with their mother and each other when they get to Madrid. While the reader sees the loneliness of the narrator’s migration, we only get bits and pieces of the impact this had on teenage Diego.
Our narrator returns to Mexico with her brother’s ashes and is forced to face another truth – the home she’d missed so much is no longer the same; not only is there no Deigo, the homeland she remembered is no longer safe.
Eating Ashes is a story of migration, sacrifices, guilt, grief, and the ties that bind. It is well crafted, well translated, and extremely powerful.
Read this book.
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