David
Toscana

David Toscana was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1961. He soon drew attention to his work with a unique, characteristic voice in modern Mexican literature. He is also one of the few South American authors to be appreciated in the USA. His novel “Estación Tula” (Tula Station, 1998) even appeared in the USA before the publication of the Spanish edition.

David Toscana refers to his poetics as “realismo desquiciado” (unrestrained realism), rejecting the traditional magical realism, since the latter requires magic to explain the world. His protagonists act with neither logic nor reason; their world exists in the imagination alone, although there is a multi-layered exchange between life and fiction. “When writing, I always like to be aware of the direct experience of life”, underlines the author, who puts himself in the shoes of his protagonists, seeking to comprehend their personal risks and so progress from each situation into the everyday instability of the world. Onetti and Juan Rulfo schooled his literary sense of atmosphere, Donoso his feel for the opulently peculiar. His debut novel “Las bicicletas” (1992; The Bicycles) begins with the laconic sentence: “The way to the cemetery was a long one.” Immediately, he thus placed himself within the Mexican tradition of the death motif in literature, which he – as a regional author – locates in the desolate North. In 1997, he published the volume of stories “Historias de Lontananza” (Stories from the Distance), in 1998 his third novel, “Santa María del Circo” (Our Lady of the Circus), and in 2002 this was followed by the fourth novel “Duelo por Miguel Pruneda” (Lament for Miguel Pruneda). International literary criticism has praised the sometimes cutting irony of his prose, employed in face of his protagonists’ failure and loneliness: “There is a very rich seam in my region which no one has actually prospected before now; that is why I feel quite content to work in my own mine, unearthing many untold stories.”