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A review by mafiabadgers
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
dark
emotional
sad
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
First read 03/2025
It was a good book, but it wasn't for me. It reminded me of Han Kang's Human Acts, in that it deals with some heavy stuff but it's not particularly cathartic, so it's best to set everything else aside and plough through it quickly. I read it over two days, which was too long.
The first section worked best for me as a piece of horror, and as a meditation on grief and its many derangements, but it became less and less unsettling as it went on. It's difficult to go all out on beautiful, literary prose when doing first-person narration, so the quality of this book mostly came from its particulary incisive statements about grief.
The most interesting issue raised by this book, for me, was the question of to what extent one should attempt to alter one's child into the person one thinks they ought to be, versus giving them free rein to be 'themselves' (whoever that might be; another preconception, perhaps). There is always something authoritarian in parenting, in the implicit assumption that the parent is better with the child and can therefore dictate their actions to an extent that would be horrifying if practiced upon an adult (except for those classic exceptions: the physically and mentally ill, the convict, the soldier...). At its best, this power is used to prevent children from crossing the road without looking; at its worst, to beat them for being too gay; but no matter how it is used, it relies on the exercising of power over an unwilling subject. We think well of parents who use 'alternative punishments' in place of corporal ones, but there is a violence there, too. The book doesn't do a lot to connect the parenting of the replacement child with parenting more broadly, and I don't suppose it particularly needed to, but it might have been more to my taste if it had.
It was a good book, but it wasn't for me. It reminded me of Han Kang's Human Acts, in that it deals with some heavy stuff but it's not particularly cathartic, so it's best to set everything else aside and plough through it quickly. I read it over two days, which was too long.
The first section worked best for me as a piece of horror, and as a meditation on grief and its many derangements, but it became less and less unsettling as it went on. It's difficult to go all out on beautiful, literary prose when doing first-person narration, so the quality of this book mostly came from its particulary incisive statements about grief.
The most interesting issue raised by this book, for me, was the question of to what extent one should attempt to alter one's child into the person one thinks they ought to be, versus giving them free rein to be 'themselves' (whoever that might be; another preconception, perhaps). There is always something authoritarian in parenting, in the implicit assumption that the parent is better with the child and can therefore dictate their actions to an extent that would be horrifying if practiced upon an adult (except for those classic exceptions: the physically and mentally ill, the convict, the soldier...). At its best, this power is used to prevent children from crossing the road without looking; at its worst, to beat them for being too gay; but no matter how it is used, it relies on the exercising of power over an unwilling subject. We think well of parents who use 'alternative punishments' in place of corporal ones, but there is a violence there, too. The book doesn't do a lot to connect the parenting of the replacement child with parenting more broadly, and I don't suppose it particularly needed to, but it might have been more to my taste if it had.