Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
For the first time in my life my plane got me to my destination a full hour early — which meant I ended up in the center of Madrid at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning with six hours to kill until I could check in to my Airbnb.
It was still dark, and very cold, yet the streets were busy. A slim guy ambled by wearing cupid wings, then two girls dressed up with cats, their whiskers drawn in by eyeliner. My fellow flaneurs had clearly been up all night. Some were chatty and boisterous, others sullen and braced against the cold, and others pensive, perhaps puzzling out what in the night had gone wrong — or right.
We were in Malasaña, the hipster part of town. The narrow street was lined with stores that at this hour looked vaguely dangerous, shutters sprayed with gritty graffiti —
Madrid wakes up late. Even the Starbucks was closed at this hour. I walked into the first place with its lights on, a churreria, and found a seat near the back next to a table of four young girls whom I quickly discovered were still drunk, tired yet spastic. They sang hoarsely, they called their friends on speakerphone, they communicated with each other almost entirely through filler words: mira, vale, mira mira, vale.
The girls finally left, and I started reading, trying to finish up the books by Mexican authors I’d started while in Mexico City. By the time I ate my churros and headed back out onto the streets an hour later, the sun had risen and the pedestrian population had changed completely — the young revelers gone, replaced by joggers and dog walkers.
More about Madrid soon. For now, some reading recommendations —
Siel
Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablos Villalobos (FSG, 2021)
Say you’re a little kid and your father is rich. Everything you ask for is yours: video games, hard-to-find hats for your quirky hat collection, even cute exotic animals to raise as pets. Everything, that is, except the freedom to play outside or make friends with other kids — because your father’s a drug kingpin in hiding, growing increasingly paranoid as the government starts to close in on him.
This novella’s told from a young boy’s perspective — a boy who doesn’t quite understand what his father does, why he lives such an isolated life, or how he can relieve his lonely boredom. There’s love and a bond between the father and son, but the two can’t reach each other because so much remains unspoken. Pick up this book if you like the spooky feeling of fairytale-like nightmares, the kind where you’re a child running away from an unknown yet certain danger that keeps pressing closer, closer, closer —
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (And Other Stories, 2015)
Here’s a border crossing story unlike any other. This strange, spartan novel follows a Mexican girl who makes a perilous journey to the U.S. not because she wants to live there, but because she wants to bring back a long-lost brother, enticed up north by false promises long, long ago.
The prose: spare and dark. The mood: mythological and mysterious. The girl’s journey is a real odyssey, with disillusioning setbacks and freakish twists of fate that keep her lurching forward then sideways then around. Spoiler alert: She finds her brother, but the ending isn’t what you’d expect. Read this one if you like simple sentences that somehow envelop your mind in a haunting poetic haze.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez (Scribner, 2011)
If while wandering around Mexico City you’ve wondered, What was this place like a decade ago? Daniel has the answer. His lively book of essays tries to encapsulate the sounds, smells, and feelings evoked by Mexico City back in the aughts — from the cocaine-fueled fashion shows in Condesa to the crush of bodies in the religious procession on Dia de la Virgen Guadalupe.
In these missives Daniel is young, impressionable, and intoxicated by the energy of Mexico’s metropolis. That makes this book a bit of a coming of age story, Mexico City being the place Daniel goes to discover who he is — as a new adult, as a Californian born of Mexican parents, as a fledgling writer. The Mexico City he describes sounds more dangerous and frenetic and disquieting than the one I experienced — partly because Mexico City has changed in the intervening years, and partly because I’m older than Daniel was when he wrote this book (The young Daniel parties hard every weekend then describes an unprovoked, painful sorrow that hits him every Sunday — and I’m like, dude, that’s called a hangover). Pick it up if you enjoy parties, youthful confusion, and unanswerable questions about transnational identities.
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love — When war meets social media edition:
I’m dying to hear what you, some guy on the internet, has to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Some people have thoughts, understand they don’t know much about the subject, and decide to keep those thoughts to themselves. But you dare to be different.”
How we ended up with so much cringe war content. “The general rule among prolific posters seems to be that if we don’t say something, we’re part of the problem—and if we post about anything else, we’re being callous.”
The problem with observing a war via a Twitter feed. “Our online platforms essentially deprive us of the means to commiserate complex experiences like confusion, fear, horror, helplessness, shame, denial, and even the base need of getting on with business per usual beyond, essentially, three options: like, retweet, or post.”