twin time

Witty, sarcastic, and sensuous, Twin Time: or, how death befell me tells the story of Mona, who, upon her father's death in Los Angeles, decides to set off in search of her long-lost twin brother, given away as an infant. With her father's ashes as a guide of dubious reliability, Mona embarks upon a quest that takes her into a forest where she's confronted by - among other beings - a band of Nordic men, her Chinese doppelganger, a lascivious giant, and a pack of feral children. Along the way Mona recounts her parents' past as she imagines it, a romantic tale of love and rescue set in a fabulist, idealized Mexico - a dreamy place that only vaguely resembles the harsh quotidian realities of the 1960s Mexico City her parents inhabited. When Mona finds her brother at last, she learns that he grew up in London with their mother - who had supposedly (or so Mona had been told) died in childbirth - and her parents' story is thrown into further disarray. By the end of the journey, all Mona's received ideas of home, motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation have been overturned.