Partes de guerra

"Alone on this forgotten pier between Mexico and Guatemala will I summon the courage to listen to my heart and unravel what happened to you, to me, to us, in this season of war."

In Frontera Corozal, a small community on the banks of the Usumacinta, a couple of migrants discover the body of a fourteen-year-old girl. We soon learn that she was murdered by her cousin and her boyfriend in the presence of two children, an eight and ten-year old. Luis Roth, the brilliant founder of the Center for Applied Neuroscience Studies, becomes obsessed with the case and convinces his group of friends and collaborators to study what happens in the brains of children who become criminals. Along with Lucía Spinosi, his closest student, Roth travels to Chiapas to begin his research, but suffers a terrible accident. From there on, the young neuroscientist will be responsible not only for continuing the work of her teacher, but also for disclosing each of the lives that Roth kept secret. Her discoveries and her attachment to Saraí, the young guilty one, will force her to relive her own chain of abuse and add new wounds to those of the past.

War Dispatches, a harrowing investigation into the origins of violence and a meditation on the hidden identities of each and every one, challenges and inspires with two parallel stories that feed our questions regarding friendship, envy, love and loss.

The critics have said: 

"Jorge Volpi is one of the most interesting writers alive. Although he is Mexican, his subjects are not. Instead, he has a broad international point of view and what he sees and studies is power. Philosophy, physics, economics, psychology: Volpi appears to hold the keys to all the safes of human curiosity and the race for world domination." 

Edmund White

"Volpi has his characters fall into a kind of deep absorption in the tragic. A great work of art!”

Jean-Pierre Amette (Goncourt Prize)

"Jorge Volpi is not daunted by great challenges: he is one of those writers who face serious problems, and do so with great seriousness as to build dense and extensive narrative constructions."

Santos Sanz Villanueva, El Cultural 

"From his very first fictions, this Mexican writer was intent on going beyond the limits of space and time, those pertaining to fiction and reality, those pertaining to the local and the universal."

Arturo García Ramos, ABC cultural