The Trace

by Forrest Gander

Overview

A Mexican road novel of love, hate, drugs, and the Mexican Revolution.

The Trace is a masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico taken by a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution) and try to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son. With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of their relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons and desertcapes, on a journey through the the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the novel spinning out of control, with devastating consequences. . . . Poet Forrest Gander’s first novel As a Friend was acclaimed as “profound and relentlessly beautiful (Rikki Ducornet). With The Trace, Gander has accomplished another brilliant work, containing unforgettable poetic descriptions of Mexico and a story both violent and tender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224864
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/27/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. He taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received a Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.

Editorial Reviews

"The Trace is a rule-breaking work of fierce imagination and rich, associative thinking. Love, landscape, poetry, pain—these draw Gander’s characters to the edge of the void. Paying attention to detail—its accumulation and its demands—is what keeps them from toppling in."

The Oxford American - John McElwee

"Gander's poetic writing lends this story a dense, brooding atmosphere; a carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation."

The New Yorker

"I haven’t read many novels as spooky and sublime and psychologically acute as Forrest Gander’s The Trace. It’s the portrait of a couple in crisis and their misguided road trip through the Chihuahua desert, on the tracks of the writer Ambrose Bierce. Gander’s landscapes are lyrical and precise (‘raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite’), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing."

The Paris Review - Robyn Creswell

"A moving elegy. It is also proof that language has magical potential."

Joanna Scott

"The clarity of his artistic vision, formal innovation, and emotional honesty are enviable."

The Harvard Review

"Gander's novel surges. No other writer that I know of has so accurately and carefully depicted the tiny internecine battles of two lovers on an interminable drive as Gander does in this book."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Lowry Pressly

"Gander's poetic writing lends this story a dense, brooding atmosphere; a carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation."

The New Yorker

★ 10/06/2014
Poet and translator Gander's second novel (after As a Friend) begins with a riveting opening scene depicting a gruesome beheading of a faceless character inside a grime-caked bathroom. What follows is seemingly incongruous—tight, eloquently expressed chapters describing a distraught couple's road trip through the barren but seductive desert landscapes of Texas and Mexico, retracing the last steps legendary journalist Amrbose Bierce took before his unsolved death in 1913 while covering the Mexican Revolution. Though Dale and Hoa play at conducting research for Dale's book on Bierce, they mostly spend long hours in the car trying to bridge the crevasse that developed between them following their son's psych ward stint and disappearance. The pair's circumstances go from bad to worse when their rental car breaks down, leaving them panicked and stranded miles from nowhere in the blazing heat without water or cell signal. As in his previous works, Gander shows he is keenly aware of the loneliness that imbues human suffering and sets grief alight using beautiful, tense, haunting prose. As the well-paced plot creeps ever forward, the mysterious events at the beginning of the book are slowly revealed, resulting in an incendiary denouement that comes as a relief, but one not without each character's sacrifices. An intense read, with meditative poems between chapters to complete the package. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"What really haunts Gander, who is a translator as well as a poet, isn’t so much death as the complexities of life: the frequently unknown stories that lie beneath and within the stories we tell."

The Washington Post

"In this strange and beautiful novel as in life, love is part of what is sacred."

The New York Times Book Review - Jeanette Winterson

"Spooky and sublime."

The Paris Review

"His work burrows into the particularities of disparate places and cultures in order to sound the differences between them."

The Boston Review

"A restlessly experimental writer."

The Washington Post Book World - Robert Hass Robert Hass

"The Trace is a poet's book, which is to say it is filled with the pleasures of language, sharply and skillfully used, but Forrest Gander also has the narrative drive of the best novelists. The Trace is a tense, propulsive thriller, which keeps on building until the very last page."

Hari Kunzru

"A restlessly experimental writer."

The Washington Post Book World - Robert Hass