| Veronica Gonzalez
twin time: or, how death befell me
Poetic, sensuous and
witty, Veronica Gonzalez’s debut novel unfolds like
a fairy tale spanning the dusty hills of Los Angeles and
the glittering nightlife of Mexico City. Raised in northeast
LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, Mona has grown
up believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and
her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnameable
doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off
on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The
journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations
about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City
that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process
she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double,
a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children. Gonzalez
masterfully probes the oddness of Mona’s interior
world until it becomes a twisted parable for all kinds
of displacement. |
Veronica Gonzalez
was born in Mexico City and raised in Athens, Ohio and
Los Angeles. After getting a degree in art history she
studied writing at NYU and while in NY co-edited Inflatable
Magazine, a zine which enabled her to work with many of
her artschool heroes, including Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner,
Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman. Always interested in bringing
artists and writers together, in 2004 she co-edited Juncture:
25 Very Good Stories and 12 Excellent Drawings, an exciting
cross-genre anthology published by Soft Skull press. In
2005 Veronica began rockypoint press, which produces books
of truly collaborative artist/writer pairings in association
with 1301PE Gallery in LA. |
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this book
“A lost twin, her mother held in a child-like
state, a love-struck baker, they wander, perpetually homesick,
through the urban calamities of Mexico City, Los Angeles, New
York in Veronica Gonzalez’s bold, dark and beautiful first
novel. twin time: or, how death befell me reads like a fairy
tale that has been torn apart and stitched into something utterly
contemporary, revealing the nightmares and longings of the modern
world.”
— Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and Symptomatic
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