Flame Trees in May

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory lossfrom a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatn Peninsula. Mayos unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatn culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrators fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.