Björn recenserade Signal to noise av Silvia Moreno-Garcia
None
4 stjärnor
You probably won't get this novel if you don't remember those times, those situations, where music can be magic. Not just nice to listen to, or even the pure emotional rush of it, but actual honest-to-goodness world-changing magic. And "remember" is indeed a key word here; just like music accesses some part of our brain beyond language, so do memories. Signal To Noise, therefore, takes place in two timelines: in 1989, when three outcasts at a Mexico City high school discover that they can use music to cast actual spells, and twenty years later, when Meche Vega returns home for the first time in 20 years to bury her estranged father and has to start sorting through her memories of what happened.
It's a novel about relationship and memories that doubles as playlist, or rather as mix tape; listening to the playlist (Spotify), a mix of old …
You probably won't get this novel if you don't remember those times, those situations, where music can be magic. Not just nice to listen to, or even the pure emotional rush of it, but actual honest-to-goodness world-changing magic. And "remember" is indeed a key word here; just like music accesses some part of our brain beyond language, so do memories. Signal To Noise, therefore, takes place in two timelines: in 1989, when three outcasts at a Mexico City high school discover that they can use music to cast actual spells, and twenty years later, when Meche Vega returns home for the first time in 20 years to bury her estranged father and has to start sorting through her memories of what happened.
It's a novel about relationship and memories that doubles as playlist, or rather as mix tape; listening to the playlist (Spotify), a mix of old rock and jazz classics and somewhat cheesy, overproduced 80s Mexican pop, is almost necessary. It's not that I hear the magic in all those songs, or even that Moreno-García can always capture it in writing - but it still triggers something in me, a memory that doesn't have to go with that particular song. Our mixtapes are memories of untold histories, to quote a poet.
You might argue that the misunderstood-loner-in-high-school-discovers-magic-powers (though the magic bit is nicely understated, neither solving or spoiling anything by itself) plot is trite. Trite like an 80s pop song, that at one point meant everything and now gathers dust. Sure. You might even argue that it's hard to like (who decided we have to like fictional characters anyway) Meche, I still call her a bizarrely produced but brilliant single, all elbows, too loud drums and sharp notes. And while most of the action takes place in 1989, it's the distance - and the closing of that distance - 20 years later that makes the novel more than just a novelty. Sure it's been done before, sure all those drum machines and DX7s and teenage drama sound a bit silly today, but we lived through them, they changed our world, and it would be a lie to forget it.