SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina. “Elena Garro's Recollections of Things to Come: ‘Exiles from Happiness’.” Confluencia 5, no. 2 (spring 1990): 69-77.

In the following essay, Knapp discusses alienation in Recollections of Things to Come.

Elena Garro's novel, Recollections of Things to Come (1963)¹ sketches certain events in the lives of a community of Mexicans during the politically difficult 1920's. Not only are the families involved cloistered in their small town, Ixtepec, and therefore exiled from the rest of their country, but they are cut off from the other members of their community—and themselves. Alienated, they are “exiles from happiness.”

Surrealistic in style, Garro's episodic narrative has banished rational and logical systems. Instead, spasmodic glimpses, flashbacks, and flashforwards into events revolving around a variety of lives are offered the reader. In keeping with the dictates outlined in André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924), Garro explores hidden and neglected areas of the psyche in poetic images...