“Salen los vecinos corriendo, tapándose las caras y gritando. Escucho sirenas a lo lejos. Se desencadena el caos. La calle está alborotada. A lo lejos veo a Juan corriendo, buscándome entre la gente. Levanto los brazos y grito su nombre. Me ve parada en la banqueta y sonríe mientras camina en mi dirección. Nos abrazamos.

La casa arde con mayor intensidad y pienso que quizá sucede porque el fuego se alimenta de la risa de los locos.” 

Arde Josefina is a fiery short novel about love between siblings, mental health issues and inter-cultural families. The narrative is easy to follow with flashbacks every other chapter and characters’ involvement intertwined with Josefina’s life. Josefina, the main character and narrator, lets the reader crawl into her most personal and even forbidden thoughts. She starts the novel with an interesting and controversial situation – her younger brother Juan, who suffers from mental illness and lives in an insane asylum, has impregnated a fellow patient, Agata. Agata’s parents are, of course, hysterical. Who will take care of this child if both parents cannot take care of themselves? This event sets the tone of the novel and brings us back to Juan’s and Josefina’s disastrous upbringing and their relationship with their parents.

Since the beginning, the novel flirts with other controversial themes. Josefina, not entirely sane herself, discovers her sexuality, toys with incest and plays with fire. Her cold English parents cannot understand her explosive nature or her brother’s illness, so they leave the complicated situations to other characters in the story – nannies, psychiatrists, boyfriends and neighbors. Josefina navigates her relationships and deals with her situation in the only way she can – burning. Even though the novel is short, there are many events taking place in different time frames, many unwritten messages the author is trying to show us, and many uncomfortable situations the reader faces. These combinations of resources make it a novel hard to put down and digest. I read it twice before I understood how I felt about it, and in the end, I sympathized with Josefina and felt relieved that she was not all alone in this world.

Unfortunately, the novel is not translated into English, but we’ll keep you posted if this changes.

About Luisa Reyes Retana

Luisa Reyes Retana studied Law in the same university as Ceci and me. She worked in the Supreme Court for a few years, until she decided to follow her true calling, open an independent publishing company and start writing. Arde Josefina, originally named Nos vemos en el infiernillo, is her first novel, winner of the Mauricio Achar/ Literatura Random House Award in 2017.

She is Ceci’s second cousin.

Other books written by Mexican women:

We just recommend books we’ve read

• Umami (Umami) – Laia Jufresa (Read by Angelica and Ceci)
• Cuaderno de faros – Jazmina Barrera (Read by Angelica)
• El murmullo de las abejas – Sofia Segovia (Read by Angelica)
• La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas – Elena Garro (Short story read by Angelica)

Mexican initiatives and projects that support and empower girls and women

Crea, Comunidad de Mujeres Emprendedores

Crea’s mission is to empower Mexican women entrepreneurs with access to financial resources and capacity-building workshops. They work in urban and semi-urban communities and promote different programs to help business-women. Programs include Business Development Centers where women can acquire different business skills and professional guidance, online courses developed by the nonprofit itself on marketing and workplans, and cross-country projects that impulse high-quality Mexican products into the US market.