From Booklist
Padilla, one of Mexico's foremost young writers, presents a handful of eclectic modern-day fables. A Scottish engineer is abandoned in the Gobi desert, and the nomadic peoples that rescue him treat him as a god, rebuilding the city of Edinburgh among the desert dunes. An unusual plague devastates an already devastated tribe in the Amazon. An eccentric Englishman decides to climb Mount Everest as his dying act, and when he mysteriously disappears, he becomes the stuff of legends. A mystical monk of an unspecified era seeks the devil in the desert. A British officer tries to make the trains run on time in colonial Africa, but finds he is thwarted in unlikely ways. Padilla's collection of stories spans the world and the ages, as he brings us from the Mongolian desert to the Dutch East Indies. His stories, placed within history, tell of colonialism gone amok, of spirituality gone awry, bringing a beautiful, surreal narrative to the ways our history has been shaped.
Michael SpinellaCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"A writer of outstanding gifts." --Barry Unsworth, The New York Times Book Review
"Told with irony and zest...All seeming antipodes...are right at home and perfectly natural in Padilla's realm, making for a rich, complex texture against which he weaves his spell." --Los Angeles Times
"Defiantly cosmopolitan...Padilla is a potent voice in Latin American literature today." --The Miami Herald
"Spans time and place as the story moves from one colorful character to another." --Hispanic
"One of Mexico's foremost young writers presents a handful of eclectic modern-day fables...His stories, placed within history, tell of colonialism gone amok, of spirituality gone awry, bringing a beautiful, surreal narrative to the ways our history has been shaped." --Booklist
