![]() If those names sound familiar, it’s because Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World won this year’s Best Translated Book Award. ![]() This much is hinted by the title of Yuri Herrera’s excellent neo-noir, The Transmigration of Bodies, out this month and translated by Lisa Dillman. If these writers teased about the movement of the soul across boundaries, maybe it was because they were nervous about not having one.īut if the soul is dead, the pun still lives in 21st century Mexico. It all reminds me of Freud’s prosaic conclusion about non-tendentious humor: it whispers an otherwise unnameable anxiety. ![]() Later, at the end of the century, David Foster Wallace made it again a punchline, as in the case of his most famous character, Madame Psychosis. In Ulysses, it comes as a silly pun from the mouth of Molly Bloom (“the reincarnation met him pike hoses”). Proust used it, in the opening paragraph of Swann’s Way, to joke about inserting himself in what would become a seven-volume künstlerroman. Metempsychosis, or “the transmigration of the soul,” was a thematic wink in 20th-century fiction. ![]()
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