Velorio is an ambitious, movingly lyrical debut novel from Xavier Navarro Aquino that looks at the real-life tragedy of Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico through a grief-soaked, phantasmagorical lens. The novel alternates between bitter despair and glimmers of hopefulness and community, reflecting throughout on the extent to which Puerto Ricans feel abandoned and abused, both by their own government and by the rest of the world. Velorio begins soon after the hurricane subsides, when Camila finds that her sister, Marisol, has been killed by a mudslide. Camila sets off to find "the people that would return things back to how they were," taking the corpse of her sister, who Camila cannot believe is dead even as Marisol begins to decompose.
Marisol's fate is only a hint of the tragic strangeness to come, which draws multiple characters into the makeshift cult leader Urayoán's attempt to form a utopian community in the mountainous center of Puerto Rico. The effort is ominous from the start, with Urayoán employing bands of teenagers and children dressed in red, wearing black surgical masks, as his muscle. The "reds" behave increasingly like an animalistic pack as the novel goes on, but under his direction they steal all-important gasoline and diesel and redistribute it from his base in the mountains. To Puerto Ricans feeling abandoned in the wake of the hurricane, all-too-accustomed to the island's metaphorical and physical decay--"the entire island is rot. Not just a little rot, something mishandled or forgotten. A rot like bone corruption, punctured so deep inside it spreads"--even Urayoán's twisted vision can seem like a viable alternative.
While Urayoán's paradise follows a familiar course, becoming increasingly violent and Hobbesian as the novel progresses, the prose is distinctive and dreamlike. Navarro Aquino swaps characters and takes on their voices with graceful fluidity, moving from Urayoán's messianic prophecies to characters that punctuate their passages with scraps of poetry. Velorio has apocalyptic fires and savage violence, but its most powerful moments are the quiet, searching ones, where Navarro Aquino reflects on the island's history of being "taken and given like the final play in a losing game of dominoes." Navarro Aquino's gift is translating that historical pain into the turbulent inner lives of his characters, all struggling in their own, sometimes destructive, ways with their feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Their wounds are older and deeper than those inflicted by Hurricane Maria. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader
Shelf Talker: Velorio is a phantasmagorical journey into Puerto Rico in the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Maria, drawing its damaged characters into a bizarre utopian cult.