Finishing a long book feels like a small death. A forever goodbye.
Do authors cry when they finish their books? out of sadness, satisfaction, frustration?
Monge finishes the book really similarly to how I expected everything to end. You would expect that if an author is writing about the history of his mother throughout the different years she lived, he would end the book with the last year she was alive. and of course as a reader, I had to witness the death of Monje’s mother. Thus, I not only went through the death of the story, of the book, but also the deeath of the main character that made this book possible.
2014
That’s the year Monge’s moms dies. But the book doesnt end there but two years after. These last two chapters/two years are particularly small, in comparison to others (a great way to denote the absence of our main character).
2015
“Recordarás, entenderás o leerás —aquí, en esta página— que aquel año tu madre fue un torbellino de auroras boreales.”
“You will remember, you will understand, or you will read—here, on this page—that that year your mother was a whirlwind of northern lights.”
2016
“Empezarás, en el silencio de tu mente, a estar con ella otra vez. A sentir, en realidad, cómo se descompone el monopolo, cómo se disemina su energía, cómo zurcen, esos vectores, el caos y los afectos.”
“You will begin, in the silence of your mind, to be with her again. To feel, in reality, how the monopole breaks down, how its energy disperses, how those vectors stitch together chaos and affection.”
These chapters are so short, less than half a page each, and that contrast with the rest of the book feels intentional. It’s like the structure itself changes once she’s gone.
For me, this shift really reads as “the silence of the mind” that Monge mentions in 2016. Not just empty space, but the kind of silence that comes after someone dies. The absence of her, of tu madre’s voice becomes part of the narrative. And it’s uncomfortable, but also necessary because, in some way, that’s what grief feels like. You’re left with fragments, with less to hold onto, and you have to figure out how to exist in that new reality. To a weird extent, it is the same way we have to deal with the end of a book (a book that you care for).
It also changes how we read. The book kind of forces you to slow down, to sit with that absence, and to recognize that the story can’t continue in the same way anymore. In that sense, grief doesn’t just happen in the content, it reshapes the entire form of the book.
Looking back at my first blog post about this book, I’m starting to better understand the two worlds that each chapter holds: the intimate world of the family, especially tu madre, and the broader world of global events (scientific discoveries, political tensions, the rise of narco violence in Mexico, etc.). You can’t take a person out of their context. The mother is not just an individual with her own emotions, memories, and behaviors, she is also shaped by everything happening around her, even things that seem distant or unrelated. In that sense, the book feels like an attempt to map an impossible network of connections: between history and intimacy, between large-scale events and the smallest, most personal experiences.
It’s almost as if Monge is searching for an explanation, not in a reductive way, but in a desperate, expansive way. Like trying to understand: why did she become who she was? Why does trauma take the shape it does?. You can’t understand a person in a vacuum, because their life is entangled with political violence, scientific paradigms, cultural shifts, and historical moments that exceed them.
So instead of offering a clean explanation, the book builds this dense web of references and timelines, where everything seems connected, even if those connections are not always clear or fully comprehensible.
