Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on December 10, 2024 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
No Place to Bury the Dead is a novel translated from its original 2021 award winning release in Spanish (in Spain I believe), where the book was titled El Tercer País (The Third Country). For those who come to my reviews looking for SciFi/Fantasy novels, know that this novel only barely fits: set in 2019, the novel features as a background element a plague that robs people of their memories, but other than that there is nothing speculative here and this novel is more likely to be categorized as "literary". That is not a reason to skip this novel however, as it tells a rough story of pain, grief, resilience, and to a very small extent, hope of moving on in its entirety.
No Place to Bury the Dead follows mostly a woman named Angustias who, along with her infected husband, tries to flee her unnamed Latin American country when it is hit with the memory stealing plague. She carries with her her two twin baby boys, neither of whom survive, and she searches for a place to put them to rest. What she finds is an illegal graveyard run by the rebellious Visitación Salazar, in whose affairs she becomes entangled when she refuses to leave where her children are buried. It's a story about grief and resilience in a world that seems only to promise more and more tragedies and where the people in power are dangerous buffoons...but it also ends on kind of a hopeful note.
Trigger Warning: One character's backstory involves Male on Male rape/sodomy very briefly. Also deaths of children.
Plot Summary:
Angustias Romero came to the town of Mezquite to find a place to bury her sons. She had attempted to flee her home ahead of a plague that robbed the memory of the infected - infected like her husband - and to find a place her two premature baby boys could survive...but her journey north was waylaid and her babies didn't make it. Now all she wanted was to find a place she could bury her babies and to stay with them and the only place she found was an unauthorized cemetery run by the strange woman Visitacíon Salazar.
Visitación is an occasionally foul mouthed, free spirited, older woman who puts the cemetery, The Third Country, ahead of everything else....especially the corrupt businessman Abundio who runs most of the country and who wants the land and his henchmen - like the cowardly mayor of Mezquite who does as Aurelio wishes but feels too bad about it to pull through. And as Augustias takes the job as Visitacíon's assistant so Augustias can stay with her babies' graves, she discovers that Visitacíon's brash attitude may finally run up against a brick wall when Abundio, his henchmen, and the local well armed and allied with him Irregulars decide to take the cemetery land...by force.
This novel is split into chapters that are told in two different ways: chapters from Angustias' point of view are told from a first person perspective, grounding her as the center of the story, and then chapters from other characters' perspectives, told in third person. The result is a story that largely becomes a novel about four different people in this setting: Angustias and Visitacíon from the beginning but we also get a major final arc from the perspective of Aurelio and, without ever seeing her perspective, also see the fate of one other character who runs into Angustias on multiple occasions and whose actions wind up impacting Angustias' and the story's final development. It's told in a world that takes place in an unnamed Latin American country where people are fleeing the plague, poverty, and the dangerous irregular militaries that wander the countryside, and where hopes of a better future there seem extremely unlikely - everyone does what's best to survive, and they largely do so in misery.
And so we come to Angustias and Visitacíon. Angustias begins the novel as a defeated woman, who only wants - having had her migration stopped and her sons die - to find a place to bury her kids and to stay with them in that grave until the end. It doesn't help that her husband has the plague and is forgetting and growing irrational and then goes away for a large portion of the book. But in helping Visitacíon, it kind of gives her life direction, even if it's one that she doesn't quite understand, as she gains a purpose without losing the connection to her grief she can't get past, with that purpose at first being to help Visitacion safeguard the Third Country and later almost becoming to protect Visitacíon from the results of Visitacíon's reckless actions. For Visitacíon is a person who has responded to the struggles of the world by caring only about the graveyard and spitting on the powerful man who indirectly harmed her family and her attempts to just live free and not care about who she antagonizes naturally gets her into trouble so much that even she can't yell and trick her way out of. And Angustias by contrast does manage to find something else to care about and to find some way to go forward, with ideas in the future. It isn't much and it may not result in a happy ending - that would be well into the future of where this book ends - but it's something. And then there's Aurelio, who could've just laid down and died in his cowardice or accepted that cowardice and stayed where he winds up fleeing midway through the book, but instead decides to go back and take a stand of sorts near the end to make up for his harms. And it leads to all of the characters having a way past grief to go forwards.
There's a lot that a better critic could analyze in this book that I'm failing to observe here, and I'll note that the world we see here is one that is cruel almost by accident at times - there are no heroic moments where the good guys prevail or the bad guys fail. Instead we have a world where so much damage is basically done by coincidence and bumbling actors, and where pain is just a consequence of being. And yet....Angustias and others find a way to persist through it all. I don't want to frame this too much as a book of hope per se, but it is a story of persistence and it's really well done.
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