Among other things, The Mutations, a feisty first novel by the Mexican writer Jorge Comensal, is a dark, extended lawyer joke, made at the expense of Ramón Martinez ... Comensal’s brisk, if at times diffusive, storytelling — in a translation by Charlotte Whittle that conveys both his blunt and sharp humor — coheres around the question of how a person (as well as his family members, friends and colleagues) deals with the felt and future consequences of sudden dire news ... [Carmela's] is one of the novel’s straggling secondary plotlines, which generally feature characters connected to Ramón through his illness, none of which hold the same charge of high-stakes black humor as his ... The only other character in the novel that Comensal invests with an interior dimension and sense of life and death capable of matching Ramón’s (if not besting it) is Elodia, the family’s pious Roman Catholic maid ... At novel’s end, Comensal turns to a more provocatively ironic situation, when the character most concerned with God’s mercy must decide what kind of mercy she should offer the character who is least interested in it. This makes for a little too neat and obvious a dilemma and resolution, especially when compared with the case Comensal prosecutes elsewhere in The Mutations for the funny, messy unexpectedness of life, death and potty-mouthed pet birds.

... a tale about cancer and impending death that slyly provokes more than a few guffaws ... Effortlessly elevating his tale to the rarefied heights of Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Ravel only to plunge the bawdy depths of the rawest profanity while peppering his narration with erudite discussions of the mysteries of genetics, Comensal has written a fearlessly irreverent and unexpectedly deep novel about a family’s blundering with the most atavistic of challenges.

In this caustic, pitch-black comic debut, the insights all point toward the fundamental frailty of the body and the overpowering strength of death ... In brusque, bitten-off prose Mr. Comensal captures the patient’s rapid and humiliating decline, allowing him nothing in the way of redemption. This is a mean and narrow, if creditably undeluded, little novel. The last word goes to the parrot.

In his first work, young Mexican writer Comensal creates markedly credible characters and instills a vein of humor with a cussing parrot and Ramón’s clueless and self-absorbed adolescent children. But this book remains a chilling reminder of the suffering, both physiological and psychological, that cancer patients and their families endure. For those who have cared for a cancer patient or have been victims themselves, it hits very close to home, reminding many that its gravity trumps humor.

... an odd novel about different ways of dealing with cancer ... moves along jauntily, not indulging in Ramón's decline or drawing out his steadily worsening condition but matter-of-factly skipping along from stage to stage. There's quite a bit of fascinating character-development -- or rather adjustment, to the changing circumstances, including in the children, who don't know how to deal with their father's decline and whose own awkward behavior seems particularly plausible. Still, the skipping along also gives a sense of much being missed, including the transition in the household and business; Carmela, in particular, gets short shrift ... There are lots of clever, neat details and small episodes in The Mutations, including among the storylines that are, essentially, separate from Ramón's, but it's all a bit puzzling; it doesn't really add up. It's a novel full of good ideas and scenes, and interesting thoughts, but with too little interest in any larger sort of picture or story developing -- slices of quite a few lives that, together, still feels much too much simply like separate slices (and reflections on and information about cancer that are intriguing but also never really fully developed). It's not quite all unrealized potential but it does feel oddly limited.

Cancer takes center stage in this quietly powerful first novel by Mexican writer Comensal ... The mutations in Ramón’s body lead to mutations in his life, some introduced by his God-fearing maid, Elodia, who brings a parrot to Ramón as a gift, a parrot with gifts of profanity The bird voices Ramón’s mood perfectly as he undergoes treatment, even as the lives of everyone around him change in sometimes unexpected ways, adding clamor to his voicelessness. An assured debut by a writer from whom readers will want to hear more, and soon.

The novel gets its comic charge from blunt and colorful descriptions of emotional situations that in other fiction would dictate long and evocative passages ... Sidestepping sentimentality and elaborate emotional expression, Comensal brings comic compassion to his treatment of contemporary neuroses.