José Emilio Pacheco

A man sits every day on a bench in a modest park, reading the newspaper’s classified ads section. He may or may not be an unemployed worker searching for a new source of income, a timid lover killing time before a shameful date, a father mourning the loss of his son in that very place where he endures an endless grief, or a writer imagining scenes for a play.

You Will Die Far Away is an original, conjectural novel and is therefore all of these stories at once — as well as the story of a man who sits every day in the park and might be a vigilante keeping watch on another man, called “eme,” who hides in one of the neighboring houses and, suspecting he is being watched, carefully observes the first man in an attempt to discover his intentions. We are never quite sure whether eme is a Nazi criminal, guilty of atrocious acts, nor whether the other man, who remains unnamed, has finally tracked him down in a patient pursuit that has lasted for years. The action of You Will Die Far Away — this fascinating imminence that grips us from the very first page — takes place over just a few days. But this present summons a past that begins far away, with the Roman Empire’s war against the Jews and the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, then leaps to the expulsion from Thessaloniki, to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and finally culminates in the extermination camps where Nazi Germany industrialized genocide.

You Will Die Far Away is a story of chilling restraint and intelligence, a key work in Mexican and Latin American literature