THE STONE WORLD

The beauty and hardship of post–World War II Mexico are brought to life through the eyes of a young child in this semiautobiographical debut novel.

Peter Vogelsang, known by the nickname Pira, is a 6½-year-old boy living in a small Mexican town in the summer of 1947, being raised by his American mother, Martha, his German stepfather, Bruno, and their live-in maid, Zita. Pira processes the world in the curious, syntactically simple language of a bilingual child. He plays army men on an anthill and overhears adults talking of communist revolution. He learns of the death of Manolete, the famous bullfighter. Meanwhile, Bruno dreams of bringing his family back to his native Germany, but Pira wants to stay in Mexico with his friends Arón and Chris. “Isn’t it good,” Bruno said, “that two people can have opposite wishes and still love each other?” Pira often retreats to the zapote tree in the garden or to the stone patio with one ear pressed to the ground: “Sounds on the air side were crisp and clear, and many. On the stone side there were few sounds, and they were muffled and dark.”Although Pira is a bright, emotional child—and an aspiring poet—whose voice occasionally flirts with lyricism or profundity, he is absent any outsized quirks or precociousness. He asks questions about concepts like evil, honesty, and prayer, and the adults in his life answer him attentively, without a trace of irony. The only clues that this book is geared toward adult readers are the rare descriptions of curse words, violence, or human anatomy, all interpreted through Pira’s naïveté. The unpretentiousness of the story carries a certain magic, but its larger meaning hinges on its connection to Agee’s 1981 memoir, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany.

An earnest and mystical evocation of childhood memory.