Mexico – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 QUEEN OF AMERICA by Luis Alberto Urrea /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/ Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:11:36 +0000 /?p=22142 Book Quote:

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

 

Bibliography:

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

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]]> BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING by Dagoberto Gilb /2011/before-the-end-after-the-beginning-by-dagoberto-gilb/ Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:33:49 +0000 /?p=21957 Book Quote:

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our short  review of:

And if you like this one, try:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

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]]> SAY HER NAME by Francisco Goldman /2011/say-her-name-by-francisco-goldman/ Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:23:56 +0000 /?p=17241 Book Quote:

“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always Aura Estrada.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 07, 2011)

Grief is, by and large, a private and intimate thing. We utter a few platitudes and then turn away in discomfort from who are laid bare by their grief. And emotionally, we begin to withdraw.

Francisco Goldman shatters those boundaries in his devastating book Say Her Name, forcing the reader to pay witness to the exquisite and blinding pain of a nearly unbearable loss. He positions the reader as a voyeur in a most intimate sadness, revealing the most basic nuances and details and the most complex ramifications of the loss of someone dear. And in the process, he captures our attention, rather like Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, until the reader is literally as fascinated and transfixed with Aura Estrada – Francisco Goldman’s young and doomed wife – as he himself is. It is a masterful achievement, hard to read, hard to pull oneself away from.

The barebones of his story are these: Francisco Goldman married a much younger would-be writer named Aura, who gives every indication of literary greatness. They revel in their marriage for two short years, but right before their second anniversary, Aura breaks her neck while body surfing and dies the next day. Francisco is raw with grief, which is exacerbated by Aura’s passionately devoted and controlling mother Juanita, who blames him for the tragedy. Although he is completely innocent, he blames himself and spirals downward, visualizing himself as “…a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead…”

Brick by brick, Francisco builds a literary altar to the vibrant and exuberant woman he married. And at the same time, he lays naked his own grief at her loss: “Little did I suspect…that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone.” And later: “Every day a ghostly train. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future.”

Hungry to keep Aura alive, Francisco takes us back to Aura’s past, to her complex relationship with her overbearing mother and her yearning for the father who left when she was only four years old (setting her on a course to look for a father replacement). He showcases various writings that Aura created in her advanced studies at Columbia and under the tutelage of two famous authors (revealed in bios to be Peter Carey and Colum McCann) for her MFA program. He paints a word picture of Aura as a young girl, a daughter, a wife, and a writer on the cusp of potential greatness.

And in order to keep himself sane, he channels his grief into his art, documenting their time together and Aura’s extraordinary life: “This is why we need beauty to illuminate even what has most broken…Not to help us transcend or transform it into something, but first and foremost to help us see it.”

At its core, Say Her Name is not “another grief book;” rather, it’s a love story, a tribute to Aura, a universal narrative of what happens when one loved one survives another. It is, I suspect, a novel that Francisco Goldman did not choose to write, but had to write. It is a wrenching and eloquent tale of remembrance, a refusal to give death its victory.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 28 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Francisco GoldmanWikipedia page on Francisco Goldman
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolois


Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE BORDER LORDS by T. Jefferson Parker /2011/the-border-lords-by-t-jefferson-parker/ Sun, 06 Feb 2011 00:30:46 +0000 /?p=15951 Book Quote:

” ‘Good and evil are not always separate,’ said Arriaga. ‘They are often together. They are part of us – present, changing, unequal.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (FEB 05, 2011)

In his fourth Charlie Hood thriller, three-time Edgar winner Parker continues to mine the violent drug and arms trafficking over the Mexico/California border. Hood, 32, an L.A. Sheriff’s Department officer, has been on loan to the ATF for 15 months, assigned to drug operations in this “often infernal, often violent, often beautiful desert.” It’s a place Hood has come to love – and fear.

This time out the central plot concerns an undercover ATF agent, Sean Ozburn, who seems to have gone berserk. Early one morning, while his team (which includes Hood) is monitoring a trio of cartel-affiliated teen killers in a rented safe house, owned by the ATF, the cameras suddenly go dark and all three boys die in a hail of bullets.

There isn’t much doubt about who did it. For one thing, Ozburn was briefly caught on camera disabling the feed right before the murders. Ozburn also took one of their guns – a newly designed machine pistol called Love 32 (fans will remember this lethal beauty from Iron River) and they suspect he’s on his way to the next cartel-rented safe-house full of young killers.

The subplot concerns a character fans will also remember, Bradley Jones, a charming little psychopath who is now an LA sheriff’s deputy and a cash courier for a Mexican cartel. On his first day at work he manages to bust out a kidnap victim (the son of a U.S. cartel connection), killing most of the kidnappers (from a rival cartel) in the process.

Point of view switches among Hood, Ozburn, his wife Seliah, and Jones as the plots hurtle towards a violent dovetailing. Seliah Ozburn cooperates with Hood’s team, sharing her email password so they can monitor her husband’s increasingly erratic – and erotic – emails. Of course she also sets up a simple code with Sean so she can still communicate privately.

Eventually Hood’s team will realize that something has happened to Sean and the symptoms are showing up in his wife too. A toxin perhaps, or a virus, that makes them aggressive, highly sexual and averse to water. As the prologue concerns a priest in a bat cave, readers will have their suspicions. And Seliah tells Hood that the symptoms began on their vacation to Costa Rica when they became friendly with a priest.

Meanwhile Bradley Jones is playing a dangerous game, juggling his two lives and his several clever schemes. As always there’s plenty of action and gore and a hint of mysticism (not necessarily benign). The world of the drug cartels grows, if possible, even more evil and sadistic, while a solution seems ever more hopeless.

Parker’s fans will be well satisfied, but newcomers should start at the beginning. The stories stand on their own well enough, but the characters – including the cartel boss – develop with each book, and it’s helpful to have the background.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 44 readers
PUBLISHER: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (January 11, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: T. Jefferson Parker
EXTRAS: MostlyFiction.com interview with T. Jefferson Parker (2009)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

From the Merci Rayborn series:

Stand-alone mysteries:

Bibliography:

Merci Rayborn series:

Sheriff Charlie Hood series:

]]> DESTINY AND DESIRE by Carlos Fuentes /2011/destiny-and-desire-by-carlos-fuentes/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:02:23 +0000 /?p=15759 Book Quote:

“She was the object-woman, something volunteered, made for the pleasure — that first night — only of Jericó and Josué, Castor and Pollux, here and now again the children of Leda, whore to the swan, born in this instant of the same egg, the Dioscuri in the act of being born, crushing the flowers and grass, shattering the eggs of the swan so that from her would be born love and conflict, power and intelligence, the tremor in the thighs, the fire on the roofs, the blood in the air.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 30, 2011)

Wow! This quotation should indicate why I both reveled in this rich and wonderful book and yet had such trouble getting through it. It was my first Fuentes, and may or may not be typical of his earlier style, but it is original, gloriously baroque, and alarmingly dense. Certainly, from the very first paragraph, when a head recently severed from its body begins the long narration of how it got to be that way, I could recognize Fuentes’ sheer originality. And his mastery of words! So much did I enjoy the easy brilliance of Edith Grossman’s translation that I got hold of the first fifteen pages of the book in Spanish for comparison; the original is perhaps more liquid, but Grossman beautifully captures its unpredictable rhythms, its shifts of tone. Fuentes is a Mexican Salman Rushdie, whom one almost reads for the brilliance of his imagery and breadth of erudition alone. Like Rushdie, he is impossible to skim, though I admit there were times in this long book when I was tempted to do so.

The severed head belongs to 27-year-old Josué Nadal. He begins his story in high school where he is befriended by a slightly older boy known only as Jericó (many names in the book have symbolic overtones). Both are effectively orphans: Jericó lives alone, and Josué is cared for by a disapproving housekeeper. The two bond closely, move in together, and set themselves an intellectual program to study all sides of every possible argument, reading Saint Augustine side-by-side with Nietzsche, studying Machiavelli. They also experience less intellectual pursuits, such as sharing the same whore. Brothers in spirit, they are also potential rivals. By entitling the first and last of the book’s four main sections “Castor and Pollux” and “Cain and Abel,” Fuentes appears to show his hand, but the truth is not so obvious.

Jericó goes abroad for college. Josué studies law, and is given repeated access to Mexico City’s most notorious prison (one of several sections that reminded me of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666). Adulthood sees each of them placed in apprenticeships to men of power: Jericó as an aide to Mexican President Carrerra, Josué in the entourage of the country’s most powerful business leader, Max Monroy. The book becomes an examination of power, whether wielded through the ballot box, the street revolution, the reach of the internet, or criminal conspiracy. It is also about heritage: the lingering question of Jericó and Josué’s parenthood, and more importantly the recent history of Mexico that has brought it to its present crisis of lawlessness. “Just yesterday,” one of the characters remarks, “a highway in the state of Guerrero was blocked by uniformed criminals. Were they fake police? Or simply real police dedicated to crime?” Unlike Bolaño, though, Fuentes keeps most of the lawlessness offstage, although he has the same passion for detail of other kinds, mundane detail that can alternate with abstract philosophy in often disconcerting ways, as in this passage that explains the book’s title:

“And what is destination, or destiny?” continued the voice I tried to locate, to recognize, in the row of people’s scribes sitting in front of the old building of the Inquisition. “It isn’t fate. It is simply disguised will. The final desire.” Then I was able to unite voice and eyes. A small man, bald but in a borrowed hairdo, his bones brittle and his hands energetic, white-skinned though tending to a yellowish pallor, for a couple of Band-Aids covered tiny cuts on one cheek and his neck, dressed in an old black suit with gray stripes. […] Borrowed apparel. Second-hand clothes.

Once, towards the end of the book, Josué recounts a long dream. Somewhere in the middle of it, I found that I had lost the mental quotes; I no longer knew whether it was a dream or real. I also realized that it did not matter. So much of this book takes place in a nightmare world — a miasma of philosophy hanging over a swamp of manipulation and desire — that it is no longer relevant to distinguish fact from fiction. Except that Fuentes continues to write with verbal brilliance and flashes of humor that do much to illuminate the darkness.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 6 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Carlos Fuentes
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Other:

Related Books:

]]> IRON RIVER by T. Jefferson Parker /2010/iron-river-by-t-jefferson-parker/ Sun, 18 Apr 2010 03:08:30 +0000 /?p=8950 Book Quote:

“One of the dead was a teenaged boy named Gustavo Armenta, who was on a date that night, and as Hood carried another box into the house, he pictured the way Gustavo had led his girlfriend by the hand from the restaurant patio and how a few moments later an errant bullet had found his heart in the darkness fifty yards away, stopping eighteen years of past and sixty years of future dead and forever. The other dead man was a gun dealer with a revoked license.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (APR 17, 2010)

In LA Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Hood’s third adventure, set in the California desert border town of Buenavista, Hood joins an ATF operation to stem gunrunning to Mexico. When an ATF weapons-buy ends in the accidental death of a cartel leader’s son, the bad guys take revenge, abducting and torturing the agent responsible. Naturally a rescue is in the offing.

Meanwhile, the scion of a bankrupt local gun maker, Ron Pace, finds a way to get the family business going again by selling an ingenious untraceable gun – his design – to the cartels. Bradley Jones, son of bandit Allison Murrietta (from Hood’s debut in L.A Outlaw) brokers the deal even as he enters training for the LA Sheriff’s Department Explorers.

Point of view switches quickly among various characters. All but Pace, the talented gun designer-turned-illegal arms dealer, are known to Hood, mostly in a friendly way.

The action is fast and furious but there’s time for a budding romance for Hood and a 3-day wedding for Bradley Jones. Political tension simmers as the two governments bristle at border raids and Parker shows how intractable and complicated the situation is in reality – on both sides of the border.

Parker’s prose is upbeat, even jaunty, but a dark, persistent thread runs through his stories. The characters are all likeable except for out and out villains, such as cartel leaders. But Pace is an engaging, lovesick young man and Jones is full of life and fun.

There’s a whiff of the mythical and mystical in these Hood novels too, stemming originally from the legacy of the outlaw Joaquin Murrietta, and now increased with the introduction of a new character, Mike Finnegan. Finnegan, hit by a car at the beginning of the book, spends most of it encased in bandages in a hospital bed, but that doesn’t keep him from knowing more than he should about Hood’s business. Finnegan and his enigmatic daughter feel like characters readers will be seeing more of in the future.

The plot background is well fleshed out from various angles – the cartels, the Mexican police and soldiers, American drug demand, US gun politics and more. But while it sometimes seems hopeless, it never feels preachy. This is a quirky, desert-steeped series that should appeal to fans of character-driven, politically themed thrillers.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 71 readers
PUBLISHER: Dutton Adult; First Ediition (January 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: T. Jefferson Parker
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

From the Merci Rayborn series:

Stand-alone mysteries:

Bibliography:

Merci Rayborn series:

Sheriff Charlie Hood series:

]]> MEXICO CITY NOIR edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo II /2010/mexico-city-noir-edited-by-paco-ignacio-taibo/ Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:16:43 +0000 /?p=8188 Book Quote:

“I’ve said many times that statistics reveal a surprising city; one that has more movie theatres than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism. Shuts us in our bedrooms with the TV on, creates that terrible circle of solitude where no one can depend on anyone but themselves.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (MAR 11, 2010)

As a fan of author Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the founder of the Mexican neodetective story, I knew I had to read Mexico City Noir released 2/10 by Akashic books. I am addicted to Taibo’s series detective novels which feature the philosophical one-eyed detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne. Hector’s favoured modus operandi is to snoop around and to be a big enough pain that someone somewhere breaks ranks and rattles loose with a clue or two. It’s a method that gets Taibo into a great deal of trouble (hence the one-eye), and keeps him poor, but he never loses his sense of humour. Anyway, add me to the legion of Taibo’s fans who’d read this writer’s shopping list if he bothered to write it on a piece of toilet paper.

So…this brings me back to Mexico City Noir a collection of 12 stories written by some of Mexico’s hottest talent (I should add here that Taibo was born in Spain but has lived in Mexico since 1958). Mexico City Noir is part of Akashic’s Noir Series. Each book in the series is set in either a distinct neighbourhood or location: hence Mexico City Noir. I haven’t read Akashic’s Paris Noir, but when I hear the title, I can’t help but see some elegant, suave noir characters (I’m thinking Jean Gabin or Alain Delon here…), but Mexico City Noir…well…you know it’s going to be hardcore.

The wonderful, insightful introduction written by Taibo sets the scene for what to expect from the rest of the book. Taibo clearly loves Mexico City, and he calls it “the best city on the planet in spite of itself.” Many of Taibo’s introductory, wry observations about the city are affectionate, but others analyze the insurmountable corruption. He recounts how he met a policeman who works a particular corner; it’s “his” corner, and that translates to mean he must pay his supervisor what amounts to a weekly “rent”– a portion of whatever fines he can extract from those who cross his corner. Corruption is everywhere and on every level:

“Survey question: how many citizens do you know who, when assaulted on the street, will call the police? A few, none; maybe one of those boys in blue who patrols the intersections of this newly democratic city? A secret cop? Not on your life. What do you want to be assaulted twice?

How big is the Mexico City police force? They say fifty-two squads. How many are officially sanctioned? How many bodyguards, paramilitary forces, armed groups associated with this or that official unit are there?

You wake up one morning with the uneasy feeling that the law of probabilities is working against you.”

Frankly I expected that Taibo’s story would be my favourite from the collection. Sorry Taibo, no hard feelings, but you come a very close second here. My first pick story is “Violeta Isn’t Here Anymore” written by Myriam Laurini, followed by Taibo’s “The Corner.” Third: (and this is because I am sucker, at least in fiction, for a really rotten dame), Bernardo Fernandez’s “Private Collection.” Yes, there’s money for some in Mexico City and this story goes to show that it’s perhaps bad for your health to question the source of great wealth.

“Violeta Isn’t Here Anymore” is interesting in part due to the fact the story unfolds via cassette tapes of recorded sessions with various witnesses in an investigation of the murder of a well-liked elderly lady. Taibo’s introduction mentions that a “shared element in the stories…is an interest in experimentation, in crossing narrative planes, points of view” and this is apparent in this diverse collection of stories which reflect the harshness and also the brittle brilliance of life in Mexico City.

These Akashic Noir collections are a great way to pick up new authors, and to complement this idea, there are brief bios of the writers at the back of the book. (Translated by Achy Obejas.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Akashic Books (February 1, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Paco Ignacio Taibo II
EXTRAS: Akashic Books website
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Visit our Paco Ignacio Taibo II page

Review our review of:

Philadelphia Noir

San Francisco Noir 2

New Orleans Noir

Boston Noir

Moscow Noir

Bibliography:

Books in the Akashic Noir Series (Alphabetical Order):

]]> IN THE COURTS OF THE SUN by Brian D’Amato /2009/in-the-courts-of-the-sun-by-brian-damato/ Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:24:38 +0000 /?p=6776 Book Quote:

“ In this world, your clothes were your passport, and a gang of javelinmen helped steer us through the plebes. Members only, I thought. We edged past knots of people. By now I could pick out clans and nationalities by their clothes and body mods, and, as a bonus, Chacal’s set of mainly disdainful status associations kicked in automatically: For instance, the orange sort of saris those short, dusty people were wearing meant they were Cacaxtlans, and over there, those tall wiry domeheads with—damn, I’m using derogatories, which was good manners here but bad, bad bad in Century 21—those wiry individuals with the precancerous sun-cracked skin were Chanacu, proto-Mixtecs, from the mountains around Zempoaltépetl. The roped together gang of tall ectomorphs with the fresh scabs and penitential sandbags tied to their ankles weren’t slaves but Yaxacans, people from the far northwest of the valley, expiating a black debt. That line of tiny, pale, furtive nearly naked characters with the big lip plugs and clay-caked bowl cuts had come from the far, far south, maybe even from Costa Rica, and sold little frogs and insects made of hammered gold, which was still a huge novelty in these parts. ”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes (DEC 12, 2009)

The world-building in this speculative fiction novel set on Earth is staggering. Over half the book takes place in Guatemala and Central Mexico at the height of the Mayan empire. The detail D’Amato puts into the pageantry, customs, sights, sounds, smells and tastes truly transport the reader to a seemingly alien world. The story is told by a Mayan descendent with his share of neuroses, gifts and curses. The first person, conversational narration was fresh and often humorous.

In 2012, a multi-national conglomerate, the Warren Group, sends a copy of Jed’s consciousness back to 664 AD to learn how to play the Mayan Sacrifice Game with nine stones or runners which would give them much more information than his three-stone game. D’Amato describes the Game as a Parchessi-like, more complex than chess or go, with number crunching and intuition. In the right hands, it is capable of prognostication with frightening accuracy. When Jed goes back in time, the game takes on a more fantastical aspect that is hard to follow.

The Warren Group has a Mayan Codex from the seventh century AD that predicts what may be global, catastrophic events in 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. Foreknowledge may help the company, and whatever world leaders they choose to include, to prevent global terrorist attacks. A devastating attack at Disneyworld turns things desperate.

“On CNN they were saying that the Disney World Horror—as they were apparently now calling it—was officially a Mass Casualty Incident. Like, glad they got that straight. Drudge’s links were saying that judging from medical radio reports the death cloud, whatever it was, hadn’t been just in the Magic Kingdom but had affected an area extending south to Lake Tohopekaliga and west at least as far as downtown Orlando, with a long plume angling northwest at least to Lake Harris. Symptom clusters had been reported a lot farther out than that, but since people had moved around in the day or so since their exposure, it wasn’t clear exactly how far the cloud had carried.”

The book begins with Jed2 (Jed’s duplicate consciousness) finding himself in AD 664 as planned, but in the wrong body. Instead of being in the head of a Mayan king, he’s in the body of a man about to sacrifice himself. Jed2 struggles to stop the still aware man he’s inhabiting from throwing himself down the pyramid’s jagged stairs created for just that purpose.

Between his pessimistic, irreverent inner dialog and his immediate plight, I was hooked. The irreverence did get a bit extreme at times, causing me to skim ahead. The action and descriptions are compelling, but often graphically violent. I rooted for the underdog protagonist throughout. The ending made me angry, but at least I wasn’t indifferent. D’Amato did succeed in stirring my emotions.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 39 readers
PUBLISHER: NAL Trade (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER: Ann Wilkes
AMAZON PAGE: In the Courts of the Sun
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Brian D’Amato
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More that you might like:

The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks

Empire of Humiliation by James Jens Broussea

Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan

Bibliography:

Sacrifice Game Trilogy:

]]> THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver /2009/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:39:08 +0000 /?p=6758 Book Quote:

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (DEC 10, 2009)

Harrison Shepherd’s odyssey through three tumultuous decades of the 20th century begins in a lonely boyhood between two worlds – America and Mexico. It continues through the Depression and World War II, and culminates in the ugly, surreal hysteria of the Red Scare.

Along the way Shepherd mixes plaster for the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, becomes a confidant of his colorful wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, serves as secretary to the exiled Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, and becomes a celebrity in his own right. Readers will bond with his kind soul, his boundless curiosity, his youthful exuberance and his self-deprecating wit as he experiences the best and worst his times have to offer.

An ambitious, tightly organized novel, Kingsolver’s latest is mostly assembled from journals Shepherd began keeping as a boy – journals in which the pronoun “I” is seldom used. Archivist’s notes, letters to and from friends and enemies, newspaper articles (both real and fictional), and even congressional testimony offer added perspectives.

Uprooted from his suburban Virginia home at age 12 in 1929 and transplanted to an isolated island hacienda in his mother’s native Mexico, Shepherd pretty much brings himself up, making himself useful in the kitchen and spending hours learning to navigate a mysterious underwater cave (the first lacuna). With his feckless mother flitting (downhill) from lover to lover, Harrison’s schooling is sparse, but his reading is prodigious.

When his mother takes up with a man from Mexico City, Shepherd avoids a Catholic school for hopeless cases by putting his bread-making skills to work mixing plaster for Diego Rivera. Eventually his American father is induced to take him back – but only to put him in a Washington boarding school.

Ostracized by the other students, he takes up with an older boy whose formal education has been interrupted by the Depression, but whose knowledge of the world is as fascinating as it is mystifying. Most of this tortuous interlude is expunged (the relevant journal destroyed in 1947), and the reader will surmise that Shepherd’s budding homosexuality has something to do with that.

Returning to Mexico, he joins the Rivera-Kahlo household as a domestic and is treated as a servant or a member of the family as it suits them. Ardent communists, the flamboyant artists are all for workers’ rights – as long as it doesn’t impinge on the smooth workings of their household.

Trotsky takes refuge with them and Shepherd takes to him immediately – a kindly, fatherly, unflappable figure – pursuing his cause despite Stalin’s death threats and rabid persecution by the press. After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd flees Mexico for the U.S., the household in upheaval and under suspicion.

Settling in Asheville, N.C., Shepherd, not yet 30, becomes an agoraphobic recluse, his sexuality carefully closeted, his exuberance taking flight in his writing. His first novel – a swashbuckling tale of Aztec downfall – is an immediate bestseller. He struggles to reconcile his horror of the limelight with his joy in success.

As fame begins to get out of hand, he hires a sympathetic widow, Violet Brown, who becomes his amanuensis and eventually his archivist. A countrywoman with a practical turn of mind, Brown nudges him into the world and discovers a wider world for herself.

Her loyalty and the hysteria of the anti-communist tidal wave drive the last section of the book, while Shepherd guards himself with dry wit and naivety, his privacy battered by rumor, half-truths and lies.

The lacuna – a gap in the whole – directs the flow of this vivid, atmospheric story. From the start Shepherd shapes himself by what’s missing. An absent father and flighty mother make him resourceful. He notes the strangeness of the world around him, makes friends with people unlike himself. He attaches himself by being helpful and acquires skills that come in useful throughout his life.

Sources outside the journal fill in some of the things he leaves out – from book reviews to hints at his sexual life – as well as pointing out the sometimes yawning abyss between truth and perception.

The book is as demanding as it is captivating. The form sometimes leaves a distance (yes, a gap) between the reader and the protagonist, which can be exasperating. And Kingsolver’s left-leaning politics are almost shrill in their insistence on outrage.

These are small quibbles, however, and Kingsolver’s mastery of the partnership between big themes and personal engagement should please her fans and win new ones.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 620 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Barbara Kingsolver
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

And if you like this novel, you may also like:

Bibliography:

Poetry:

Non-fiction:

]]> TROUBLE by Kate Christensen /2009/trouble-by-kate-christensen/ Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:44:12 +0000 /?p=4547 Book Quote:

“Just then, I caught a reflection of a woman in the tilted gilt-edged mirror across the room. She was dressed similarly to me, so I tilted my head to get a better look at her. As I did so, the woman tilted her head to match the movement of mine. I raised my wineglass; she raised hers along with me.

It was then, in that instant, that I knew my marriage was over.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 5, 2009)

Josie is in trouble, much more trouble than she’d ever imagined. She’s in the kind of trouble that eats you up from the inside out, not the kind where you worry about being harmed by outsiders. She is also feeling a sense of sexual freedom and wanting to explore these feelings. This book is best read in a cool place with the air conditioning on – no tight bodices and no long sleeves!

Early in the book she is attending a party, flirting with a stanger, when she looks in a mirror and has an epiphany – – she is going to divorce her husband. She realizes that her marriage of about twenty years is unsatisfying and that she has been sublimating herself the whole time. She remembers the good times she’s had with her husband and realizes that even those were not so great. “We had been good drinking buddies, my husband and I. I remembered sitting hunkered down in a bar years ago, our heads close together, talking and drinking and smoking. Of course, he had done the lion’s share of all three, but I had tried to keep up”.  She worries about her teenaged daughter, Wendy, and the effect that a divorce will have on her. She and Wendy have not been getting along and Josie thinks that Wendy will choose to live with Anthony which will be a huge loss for Josie.

Josie is a psychotherapist in the Chelsea District of Manhattan. She has an upscale practice with educated and insightful clientele. When the book opens, tomorrow is the last day of her practice before she takes her annual two week vacation. She is looking forward to it. She plans to tell her husband and Wendy that she wants a divorce, then find an apartment and move out. She manages to tell Anthony she wants a divorce and they both act oh, so civilized, not a loud voice to be heard. Josie feels “nothing but relief and a slight sadness at the end of my marriage, the emotional equivalent of getting a rotten tooth pulled”.   As she searches for apartments, she is interrupted by a phone call from her closest friend Raquel, a famous rock singer, who is in Mexico City. She wants Josie to come and stay with her, to spend the next two weeks in Mexico City helping her deal with her stresses.

Josie goes to Mexico to be with Raquel who is very emotionally fragile. Raquel has a history of heroin addiction and once came close to dying from an overdose. She’s been in rehab multiple times but has been clean for the past ten years. Despite being in recovery now, her recovery is fragile. Raquel feels like a has-been even though she is putting out a new recording. It is strange to see the two of them drinking and carousing as they do. It would seem that  Josie, a psychotherapist, would be more aware of the dangers of relapse when her friend is drinking so much, but this is not the case. Together they party and spend time with the artists and literati of Mexico City. Josie meets a man who she finds so sexually exciting that she can barely contain herself.

It is here in Mexico City that the real story begins. Josie realizes how much she has repressed herself in her marriage and needs to escape its confines. She comes to the realization that “Anthony had been a seemingly irresistible force I had passively allowed to carry me off; I hadn’t had to think about anything. I had been young, naive, and overwhelmed by the power of his personality. I had subsumed myself in him”.   We also see that she is torn between taking care of Raquel and meeting her own needs. She is intensely drawn to a younger man for whom she feels a huge sexual attraction. She tries to meet her own needs and also care for Raquel but falls short on managing both.

The novel is told from Josie’s first person viewpoint. It catches the reader right from the start. We watch Josie’s “tectonic psyche . . . shifting and heaving” along with huge changes in her outer landscape. She has a lot to do, to learn, and to experience as she moves on in her life. Nothing is going to stop her as she tries to help her friend while also trying to understand what went wrong in her marriage. At the same time, she unfetters herself, shaking off the sexual repression that has governed her life for too long.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 63 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (June 16, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Kate Christensen
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read a review of:

More on female sexual freedom:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

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