Media Reviews
The issues addressed in [Norte] are . . . crucial to current debates about the border and immigration . . . compelling. . . . A thriller. --Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis on the Spanish edition
This searing novel about three Latinos lost north of the border is not for the faint of heart. . . . Paz Soldan perfectly modulates the tension, evincing our sympathy even as we recoil. . . . We don t forgive, but we understand. This is the Bolivian-born Paz Soldan s miraculous gift. With unflinching realism and steely grace, Norte reminds us why literature can do what journalism cannot: We inhabit the minds of people we d prefer to forget. --Lili Wright, author of Dancing with the Tiger New York Times Book Review
Norte is a rare book because it s about immigrants and heavily focused on the act of immigration, but neither of the immigrant characters are held up as models. . . . This tangled, daring novel isn t just about violence it s about roaming, missing home, and trying to find a place in the world. . . . Paz Soldan is part of a new breed of writers from Latin America: fascinated by America, aware of its contradictions, concerned with the role of immigrants in our society, but not willing to go over the same well-trod narrative ground. Norte isn t your typical immigrant story, but that s what makes it all the more powerful. --Richard Z. Santos Kirkus Reviews
These voices speak of displacement, grief, and loss, the result of the painful tension between the cultural self and the smothering seduction of the United States, el Norte. . . . Paz Soldan has written a riveting and gritty story. . . . What I find so appealing about Norte is that Paz Soldan makes no attempt to sugarcoat the grim and persistent realities he portrays about immigrants who face being 'one more digit in a disposable labor force . . . at the cost of living without dreams.' He clearly asserts that the struggle against perder el norte is an arduous process of keeping one s soul on the immigrant journey; his novel is but one stop on that journey. --Russell J. MacMullan Jr. Washington Independent Review of Books
Norte stays with the reader not only because of the rhythm of its histories, but also because it says something transcendent about the horror of the present, the horror that it is impossible not to see as well as the one which is neatly camouflaged. --Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
Norte stays with the reader not only because of the rhythm of its histories, but also because it says something transcendent about the horror of the present, the horror that it is impossible not to see as well as the one which is neatly camouflaged. --Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
The issues addressed in [Norte] are . . . crucial to current debates about the border and immigration . . . compelling. . . . A thriller. --Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis on the Spanish edition
Jesus is the dynamo powering Paz Soldan's impressive and multifaceted novel Norte, which has just been released under the same title in Valerie Miles's excellent translation. Told in three thematically linked but non-intersecting narratives involving Mexicans swallowed up by the US from the 1930s to the present day, the book gives a complex psychological portrait of the border's push/pull, delving into the calamities that have made America so seductive to Mexicans, but also the factors that make this a fraught escape. Paz Soldan is a natural storyteller, giving a vivid, blistering account. . . . With such insights, Paz Soldan offers a fresh view on what can seem like an endlessly discussed place--and one likely to be in the news even more frequently under the presidency of Donald Trump. --Scott Esposito Times Literary Supplement
At its most violent, Paz Soldan's writing can be near indigestible, but throughout Norte it's also masterful and magnetic, and this year has demonstrated that the American imagination could use another dozen novels with the defiant honesty of Norte. It is a tale of subtlety and shades of gray in a moment when the US-Mexican border is a divisive political sledgehammer with no room for either. Paz Soldan does something that otherwise eludes America culturally: navigate the porous space with an honest, realistic eye. He writes of the unshakeable fantasy of the border, and of its weight in the lives of those who cross it. . . . Paz Soldan has achieved something remarkable. --Matthew Snider PopMatters
This searing novel about three Latinos lost north of the border is not for the faint of heart. . . . Paz Sold n perfectly modulates the tension, evincing our sympathy even as we recoil. . . . We don't forgive, but we understand. This is the Bolivian-born Paz Sold n's miraculous gift. With unflinching realism and steely grace, Norte reminds us why literature can do what journalism cannot: We inhabit the minds of people we'd prefer to forget. --Lili Wright, author of Dancing with the Tiger New York Times Book Review
Norte is a rare book because it's about immigrants and heavily focused on the act of immigration, but neither of the immigrant characters are held up as models. . . . This tangled, daring novel isn't just about violence--it's about roaming, missing home, and trying to find a place in the world. . . . Paz Sold n is part of a new breed of writers from Latin America: fascinated by America, aware of its contradictions, concerned with the role of immigrants in our society, but not willing to go over the same well-trod narrative ground. Norte isn't your typical immigrant story, but that's what makes it all the more powerful. --Richard Z. Santos Kirkus Reviews
These voices speak of displacement, grief, and loss, the result of the painful tension between the cultural self and the smothering seduction of the United States, el Norte. . . . Paz Sold n has written a riveting and gritty story. . . . What I find so appealing about Norte is that Paz Sold n makes no attempt to sugarcoat the grim and persistent realities he portrays about immigrants who face being 'one more digit in a disposable labor force . . . at the cost of living without dreams.' He clearly asserts that the struggle against perder el norte is an arduous process of keeping one's soul on the immigrant journey; his novel is but one stop on that journey. --Russell J. MacMullan Jr. Washington Independent Review of Books
Jes s is the dynamo powering Paz Sold n's impressive and multifaceted novel Norte, which has just been released under the same title in Valerie Miles's excellent translation. Told in three thematically linked but non-intersecting narratives involving Mexicans swallowed up by the US from the 1930s to the present day, the book gives a complex psychological portrait of the border's push/pull, delving into the calamities that have made America so seductive to Mexicans, but also the factors that make this a fraught escape. Paz Sold n is a natural storyteller, giving a vivid, blistering account. . . . With such insights, Paz Sold n offers a fresh view on what can seem like an endlessly discussed place--and one likely to be in the news even more frequently under the presidency of Donald Trump. --Scott Esposito Times Literary Supplement
Different points of view can be distracting, but a skilled author establishes characters with distinct voices to ensure each gets the attention he or she deserves. . . . Paz Sold n astutely links the lives of these full-blooded people throughout the full-color world of Norte. . . . Paz Sold n maneuvers easily between the minds of these characters, himself crossing borders into different psyches and varying states of sanity to illustrate how traumatic displacement can be. The language often flourishes even when the scene is most solemn. . . . Norte treats the issue of immigration as something beyond the ways in which man-made boundaries become enforceable dividing lines between people and nations. Its characters experience internal struggles that arise from movement and place, but their struggles are what make them more than mere characters on a page. --Aaron Coats Chicago Review of Books
Set in what translator Miles calls a 'space of the imagination, ' Paz Sold n's Norte uncovers its characters' complicated relationships to expression and the trappings of readymade discourses. . . . The distance between the value they assign to others' lives and the lack they associate with their own renders a dissonance that can be characterized with the word ajeno. Roughly meaning 'alien to onself, ' ajeno best approximates the novel's haunting depiction of the experience of migration, even in the best of circumstances, and expresses the forces of creation and destruction it unleashes. --Jacqueline Loss BOMB
At its most violent, Paz Sold n's writing can be near indigestible, but throughout Norte it's also masterful and magnetic, and this year has demonstrated that the American imagination could use another dozen novels with the defiant honesty of Norte. It is a tale of subtlety and shades of gray in a moment when the US-Mexican border is a divisive political sledgehammer with no room for either. Paz Sold n does something that otherwise eludes America culturally: navigate the porous space with an honest, realistic eye. He writes of the unshakeable fantasy of the border, and of its weight in the lives of those who cross it. . . . Paz Sold n has achieved something remarkable. --Matthew Snider PopMatters
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