
Daniel Rodríguez Barrón
The brutal stabbing of Guillermo “El Gordo” Mayo, Mexico’s most important art curator and critic, draws in an insurrectionary group of artists, former students, and fugitives from academia who have been hiding deep in the mist-covered mountains for decades.
The brutal stabbing of Guillermo “El Gordo” Mayo, Mexico’s most important art curator and critic, draws in an insurrectionary group of artists, former students, and fugitives from academia who have been hiding deep in the mist-covered mountains for decades. Meche Pastrana is the investigator assigned to the sinister case. In this novel, Manual of Resurrection for Vagabonds and Prophets, Daniel Rodríguez Barrón layers, in the manner of a Mnemosyne Atlas infused with the atmosphere of noir fiction, a constellation of ruthless images saturated with references to the worlds of art and culture in modern and contemporary Mexico. This “manual” functions as a game of correspondences in which a supposedly lost painting by Diego Rivera, created during his period as a Rosicrucian disciple, becomes the key to understanding the mural The Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution.