Abstract: This article presents Laia Jufresa's novel Umami as a postmodern chronicle of grief which uncovers certain psychic "fault lines" that highlight the essence of a fragmented Mexican identity in line with Octavio Paz's dialectic of solitude. More specifically, the novel is studied vis-à-vis the early chronicles of conquest and colonization, to show that paying close attention to characterization and topoi, as well as specific textual strategies such as parody, irony and metatextuality, reveal in Jufresa's text palimpsestic traces of the early chronicles of discovery and conquest whose function it is to highlight an anguished postmodern Mexican subjectivity that not only grieves for the loss of its loved ones, but also—and perhaps more importantly—for a historical past with which it cannot be reconciled.
María Ignacia Barraza (Mon,) studied this question.