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From Semiotext(e):
twin time: or, how death befell me
Veronica Gonzalez
 ... as I poured my father's ashes into a big Ziploc bag, a little of my blood dripped in. I thought about how each cell has all of you fully inscribed in it, so that if I left those drops in there, it would be as if I were already dead too. I plunged in then, to try and get myself out, but it was all so sticky that I had to give up; when I pulled out my hand, parts of my father were stuck all over it ...
—from twin time
Poetic, sensuous and witty, Veronica Gonzalez's debut novel unfolds like a fairy tale spanning the dusty hills of Los Angeles and the glittering nightlife of Mexico City. Raised in northeast LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, Mona has grown up believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnamable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The journey takes he into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents' lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children. Gonzalez masterfully probes the oddness of Mona's interior world until it becomes a twisted parable for all kinds of displacement.
About the Author
Veronica Gonzalez is the coeditor of Juncture: 25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings and the founder of rockypoint Press, a series of artist-writer collaborations produced in association with 1301PE Gallery. twin time, her first novel, won her the 2007 Premio Aztlán Literary Prize.
| "I loved the fabric of this book; the rhythm was palpable. The forces swirling in and around the young girl and the estranged and luscious descriptions of nature and mating and storytelling and dreams were told so silently. It was like being in an aquarium looking out somehow."
—Eileen Myles, the Believer "Defying easy categorization, Gonzalez's debut novel is an often-mesmerizing account of a young woman's search for the truth about her parents, with absorbing stream-of-consciousness passages that draw the reader into her mind...."
—Publisher's Weekly "[A] lush and layered debut..."
—Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine |
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| "A lost twin, her mother held in a child-like state, a love-struck baker, they wander perpetually homesick, through the urban calamities of Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York in Veronica Gonzalez's bold, dark, and beautiful first novel. twin time: or, how death befell me reads like a fairy tale that has been torn apart and stitched into something utterly contemporary, revealing the nightmares and longings of the modern world."
—Danzy Senna
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| Winner of the 2008 Premio Aztlán Literary Award.
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