What do I feel? asks the narrator, Nora Garcia, as she returns to a Mexican village she has not seen in years to attend the funeral of her ex-husband, a famous pianist who has died of a heart attack. This novel is the unspoken answer to Nora's self-questioning. Employing motifs of "the heart," modes of music from the tango to Bach, allusions to poetry, the text is a rich amalgam that reveals a life lived deep within the culture of the late twentieth century.<BR>Nora is also a musician, and so it is fitting that her story take the form of a fugue: phrases circle, repeat, variations are introduced, motifs come and go, intermingle, reflecting a paralysis of the grieving.<BR>The novels moves inexorably toward the burial and the revelation of Nora's complex, emotional reaction to Juan's death. Throughout the novel, Nora is moving in the "wake" of that death, being pulled along by the ceremonies of the funeral, the mass, the burial.