THE FORGERY

A labyrinthine short novel, in which each turn sends the reader down another rabbit hole, from an artistically ambitious Mexican writer.

There are at least three possibilities, not mutually exclusive, from which the reader of this novel might choose: Painter José Federico Burgos is narrating the story of a life that has gone totally bonkers. Burgos himself has gone bonkers, and much of the story he's telling takes place inside his head. Or maybe a remarkable painting Burgos has been hired to forge is driving everybody in this novel bonkers. The book begins with the narrator leaping from a high wall, his hand already broken, a jump so dangerous that he’s suspected of attempting suicide. Yet he survives, discovered by golfers, though there is no golf course in the vicinity. And by the end of the novel, he finds himself in a hospital, treated by nuns, his imagination and fantasies unleashed. In between, he recounts a story of struggle, impoverishment, eviction, and his truck being towed, before he is offered a lifeline—a commission to forge a mysterious painting by a black marketeer who resides in an architecturally extravagant domicile, where the man’s father disappeared to his presumed death and his mother remains behind bedroom doors. The reluctant protagonist had previously fallen afoul of the law in a forgery scheme, but his original art has provided little remuneration. And the windfall he is being offered, amid circumstances so desperate, is too good to pass up. And so, one thing leads to another. And another. And another.

A wild ride for protagonist and reader alike.