On September 26, 2014, a group of students from a men’s teacher training college in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, were attacked by police on their way to a demonstration in Iguala. The authorities opened fire on the buses they were traveling in, killing six, then surrounded them and took them into custody.
Sometime during the night, 43 students were handed over to the criminal cartel Guerreros Unidos, who killed them, burned their bodies, and dumped their ashes in the San Juan River.
Questions about who is ultimately responsible and why the group was targeted have been the subject of numerous investigations in recent years, including many cover-ups, false stories and wild theories that have followed the incident.
This incident formed the basis of Christie Edwall’s first novel. History keeps me awake at night, which follows Margit, a 27-year-old woman who works at an endoscopy clinic, and one day stumbles upon an article about students at a Starbucks near Goodge Street. “I felt a jolt, an electrical charge, a random flicker that precedes an ocular migraine,” she admits, reading about the case.
This is a modern installation with the atmosphere of real crime podcasts. Margit starts reading about students. She writes down the names of 43 missing people in her notebook, creates a board of evidence “like movie detectives” and even visits a medium trying to contact the dead in one ridiculous episode.
Edwall skillfully shows how when you are passionate about something, it starts to permeate everything you see. In a brilliantly visceral scene, the corpse of one of the students, found with the skin removed from his skull, looms in Margit’s mind as she rubs the marinade into the ham. Her obsession reminds her of what she calls the “Lord Lucan phase” she went through as a teenager.
Therefore, it is somewhat unsatisfactory that the longer the romance lasts, the more the missing students themselves recede into the background. The case, darkly intriguing in itself, does not strike Edwall as particularly interesting.
This is only relevant if it is used as a lens to observe something about Margate’s character – her existential angst, her anguished relationship with her husband – or to explore a fairly conventional set of ideas about the intertwining of history, gender, and national identity.
Apart from a few things (the character’s prerogative is described as “there all the time, a sacred topic like the state of Israel”), Edwall is clearly a talented writer, her prose fluid and balanced.
She astutely follows the character’s eloquent details, noting that the “young, handsome” cinema worker checking Margit’s ticket looks like he’s “definitely saving up to buy his first real camera” and that it’s a photograph of a Mexican political couple. implicated in the murders, has “an aura… the glow of health on a tennis court”.
Once you come to terms with the fact that this is not really a novel about the mass kidnappings in Iguala, but a novel about a disoriented young woman, her search for meaning and the characters that define a particular area of occupied London, there is much to admire for the bourgeois intelligentsia in this debut.