Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Signal to Noise

[bibliogramma]

Signal to Noise, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's debut novel, is a rich and complex tale of power, music, magic, and love, told in two times and set in the working class neighbourhoods of Mexico City.

For 15-year-old Mercedes "Meche" Vega, music is the structure of her life, what connects her to her father - an alcoholic dreamer who never manages to carry through with his dreams - and to the magic she discovers within herself. Her family is breaking apart under the weight of her father's fecklessness and her mother's disappointment. The only subject that interests her at school is math. She's an outsider among the other young people in the neighbourhood. So when magic comes her way, and she - and her friends Sebastian and Daniela, outsiders themselves - discover that together they can use music to cast magic spells to make their lives better - and the lives of those who torment them worse - it seems only right that they should.

In her mid-thirties, Meche is a programmer, living in Oslo, when her father's death brings her home to Mexico City for the funeral. When she meets Sebastian and Daniela again, old grudges, mistakes and betrayals rise to the surface that demand resolution.

The narrative weaves between past and present, unraveling the complicated relationships between the three friends, and between Meche and her family. Power - interpersonal, magical, institutional - is used and abused, to ends that become increasingly disruptive and divisive. But in the end this is a love story, where the path not taken - indeed, the path carelessly cast away in youth - is not forever lost.

As a person rather deeply involved with music myself, I loved the way musical references, from jazz greats to Latin music to the Who, were woven into the narrative. I could hear major parts of the soundtrack of Meche's adolescent life and her forays into sorcery, which made reading the novel all the more engaging.

Comments

[fragilespark]

This sounds fascinating, thank you for writing about it. One to check out.