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  • The Last Reader
  • Beth Pollack
The Last Reader. By David Toscana. Translated by Asa Zatz. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009. 188 pages, $26.95.

The setting is the arid region in northern Mexico, the town Icamole, where it has not rained in more than a year. All but one well has run completely dry, and the inhabitants rely on Melquisedec, their neighbor, to bring them water in his mule-drawn wagon. However, Remigio can still manage to extract small amounts from his well with which to wash [End Page 444] himself and tend his avocado tree. One day, at the bottom of his well, he finds the body of a thirteen-year-old girl. Thus, the novel is set in motion; Remigio is strangely attracted to the dead girl and fears he will be blamed for her death.

The only person Remigio tells about finding the body is his father, Lucio, the town's librarian, the "last reader" and title character. Lucio associates everything around him with literature and tries to council his son based on books shelved in his library that he likes, yet nobody reads. The books he dislikes are marked "withdrawn" and consigned to a back room where cockroaches devour them. Although he calls to mind entire passages from various books, there are no direct quotations or any other form to indicate textual references. Like Lucio, the text does not separate fact from fiction and molds fiction to fit reality and vice versa. They intertwine and mesh together as he tries to advise his son, albeit illogically, by retelling plots from novels. The death of the girl, Anamari, becomes the plot of The Death of Babette, even to the girl's mother, who visits and has read the novel. Remigio follows his father's re-plotting of the novel and buries the girl under his avocado tree, which bears copious fruits Remigio covets in a sexually provocative way, as if they were part of her. The police investigate; Melquisedec—who has contact outside the community as he fetches water—is wrongly blamed, something that frequently happens in the works Lucio reads. There is no big "aha" moment where the police reveal the culprit at the end, there is only rain. Finally, rain—but not before Lucio loses complete sense of reality, relives his wife's death, and kicks a local boy who he thinks is one of his fictional murderers.

Toscana's style is self-defined as "unrestrained realism," rejecting magical realism as a way to explain the world. For him, magical reasoning is not needed to explain the world, and death is a reality often used as a motif in his fiction. He states that his dark themes are inspired by the violence plaguing northern Mexico; many of us who live in the Southwest border region are well aware of this fact, as it is reported daily in the news. Concomitant is the depth of solitude and sometime-failures of his protagonists Lucio and Remigio.

The Last Reader is accessible to the English reading public thanks to Texas Tech University's The Americas series. The translation by Asa Zatz is fluid and carries the pace of the original, including the irony often present in Toscana's writing. This is an interesting read by one of northern Mexico's bright stars. [End Page 445]

Beth Pollack
New Mexico State University
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