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.
Industry Reviews
"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." -- 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 "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." -- Robert Hass - The Washington Post Book World "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 "In this strange and beautiful novel as in life, love is part of what is sacred." -- Jeanette Winterson - The New York Times Book Review "Gander's poetic writing lends this story a dense, brooding atmosphere; a carefully crafted novel of intimacy and isolation." -- The New Yorker "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 "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 does Gander in this book." -- Lowry Pressly - Los Angeles Review of Books "Spooky and sublime." -- The Paris Review
