Cars on Fire
Mónica Ramón Ríos, Translated by Robin Myers
Reviewed by Kaitlyn Yates
Mónica Ramón Ríos’ revolutionary novel Cars on Fire is an electrifying collection of stories that magnifies characters at the intersection of identity, culture, and language. Ríos uses these intersectional characters to shed light on the normalized violence that trails immigration across the globe. The collection organizes the character-focused stories in three parts: “Obituary,” “Invocation,” and “Scenes from the Spectral Zone.” Ríos opens with “Imprecation,” a short foreword that binds the lyricism of Spanish nomenclature to storytelling, imbuing a litany of names with distinctive identity. This precedent contrasts with the contents of the collection: the following stories strip all characters therein of names and leave them with only their most identifying attributes.
These are stories bereft of sound—infrequent dialogue is embedded imperceptibly within paragraphs—but which reverberate with noise that lingers long after finishing. Themes of violence, identity, and silence neatly bowtie this collection, such as the story aptly named “The Ghost,” featuring a rather silent and restless character close to the protagonist who lingers long after he’s welcomed, but who also forever remains offstage within the periphery of the narrator’s life, voiceless without the telling of the story in which he inhabits. Too, in the story “The Head,” a failed Chilean Marxist at a university’s Spanish department metaphorically and literally separates her body from her head as a symbol of leadership and sacrifice in a final “poetic” act. The violence that visits these characters is viewed indifferently, as if occurring to someone else, watched as if on TV.
What is not so obvious for the characters, but obvious for the reader and intentional on part of the author, is the omnipresence of violence. These characters are forced to reconcile their identities in a world tied heavily to politics and the growing, paranoid aversion to immigrants in the US. Ríos’ intention is clear. “When you live in an adopted country,” says Ríos, “when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.” Cars on Fire offers a critically cohesive, even if varied, take on South American Latinx identity that is unmistakable, necessary, and, by extension, revolutionary in its existence.