From Publishers Weekly
Twenty-seven-year-old Bojanowski takes a hard look at death and devotion in 1940s Mexico in this provocative debut. Narrated in a confident, macho-mythic voice ("The dead mens skins had paled some in the moonlight. But more from the dark slits in their throats. Like when a fish is brought from water") by an unnamed young man, the story follows his quest to find-and prove-himself. Raised on the stories of fierce men his grandfather told him, the narrator grows up cruel and strong, unmindful of his mother and disgusted by his sensitive father. He goes to California, kills a man and is sent back to Mexico, where he finds work in Canción, a small Baja city controlled by a corrupt businessman named Cantana. At first a worker on a Cantana construction project, the narrator falls under the spell of the dog fights, in which men, wearing a glove fitted with knives, battle dogs to the death. What begins as a search for fame and respect offers a chance to warm the narrator's heart: Cantana's stunning mistress, glimpsed in the midst of a gruesome dog fight ("Hot from the fighting and angry that I could not find her in the crowd of ugly faces I kicked the dog in the soft of its stomach"). Animal lovers and tenderhearted readers, beware. But the narrator forms a friendship with a sentimental poet, pines for the woman and tries to develop a conscience in a world that seems to have none. Eventually, of course, he must do battle with Cantana himself. Bojanowski is adept at charting the anxieties of a small city on the brink of expansion and the darkness of men's hearts.
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From Booklist
First-novelist Bojanowski tells a nihilistic, extremely violent story about a nameless, physically powerful Mexican who becomes a dog fighter. With his forearm wrapped in a heavy rug and his hand covered in a glove attached to a claw, he enters into mortal combat with vicious dogs. They fight in a ring surrounded by an audience of bloodthirsty men who are accompanied by their mistresses and bet on the outcome. The action is controlled by the powerful businessman Cantana, whose other interests include a hotel currently under construction, which has been firebombed by young protestors angry over Cantana's corrupt and violent business practices. The dog fighter is hopelessly in love with Cantana's mistress and is soon drawn into an ill-conceived political scheme. Told in a kind of formal if slightly fractured English, the story is rife with machismo and ominous overtones. But the narrator proves more interesting as a concept than as a character, which makes the reading much less compelling than initially promised. A flawed but distinctive debut from a writer to watch.
Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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