PLANES FLYING OVER A MONSTER

A collection of autobiographical essays distorted through the lenses of memory and literature.

Saldaña París writes of his time in Mexico City, Montreal, Madrid, and beyond as “an autobiographical melting” (borrowing a term from Robert Creeley), and he frequently uses the literary canon to shape his recollections. In “Malcolm Lowry in the Supermarket,” he looks to Lowry’s Under the Volcano to piece together details of his own childhood and adolescence in Cuernavaca. He considers his own memory “riddled by research” and explains that the stories he’s read have “superimposed themselves, forming a pastiche that I now employ to replace experience.” The title essay, about nine years spent in Mexico City, invokes both the work of Roberto Bolaño and Witold Gombrowicz in an effort to “embrace [the city’s] ugliness.” Beyond these literary references, Saldaña París frequently ruminates on the act of writing in many meta digressions. He explains that the essay “Return to Havana” is the result of a series of handwritten revisions. “A Winter Underground,” one of the highlights, recounts the author’s time in Montreal and his struggles with addiction; it opens with a declaration that the text would be written entirely after midday, as “language, in the evenings, is dense.” The author’s confidence carries many of the essays: “I liked to talk loud and clear, as if I were always right,” he declares. Later, he recalls writing his first book with “a fireproof arrogance.” In “Notes on the Fetishization of Silence,” he describes his own breathing as “the music of me being alive.” The author’s knack for finding profundity in everything makes for an occasionally exhausting read; still, most of the pieces are thoughtful weavings of memory and place, explorations of how the author’s heavy reading both informs—and, at times, obfuscates—his understanding of the past.

Often heady, occasionally pretentious, and steeped in literary touchstones.