Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Today’s Important Goodreads ”Heavens Earth” by Carmen Boullosa


Wed 18 Sep 2019 | 01:17 PM
Ahmed Yasser

”Heavens on Earth” book is set out to discover what drives humans belief in life after death? Read Heavens Earth by Carmen focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality by radical life extentionists, extropians, transhumanists and mind-uploaders, along with utopians who have attempted to create heaven on earth.

This book is consisted of three different narratives. These words of a fictitious author opened ”Carmen Boullosa’s” 1997 novel Heavens on Earth that published five years after the quincentenary of Columbus’s “discovery” of “Nueva Espana”, its main voice is that of Hernando, a sixteenth-century Franciscan monk during the early years of the Spanish invasion of his native Mexico.

”Heavens Earth” by Carmen Boullosa

His memoirs were rediscovered in Mexico and translated from Latin into Spanish by ”Estela Learo”.The last was an archaeologist lived in a postapocalyptic future and discovers ”Estela’s” translations.

All three narrators were translators, chronologistsand historians, all facing the imminent destruction of their world. Hernando is witness to the slow death of his pre Columbian culture and people. Estela, much like Boullosa, seems to sense a “beat of a destructive violence.

The relationship among these three narrators bridges language, culture, and time, as they muse on their respective lineages and experience visions against the tide of modernization that depends on the annihilation of their shared history.