From Publishers Weekly
An ailing Mexican president, two years into his mandated six-year term and manipulated by everyone around him, has banned oil exports to the U.S. and called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from occupied Colombia. In retaliation, American President Condoleezza Rice has, through the magic of an unimagined technology, shut down all of Mexico's telephone, fax and Internet communications. That's the fanciful but not entirely implausible futuristic backdrop for this corrosive political satire from Fuentes (
The Old Gringo), considered Mexico's leading novelist (and one-time ambassador to France). His darkly comic tale of backbiting, double-crossing, murderous duplicity, sexual scheming and outright assassination is primarily epistolary, and it's a format that suits Fuentes's flowery prose style, though the voices of his various characters tend to blur into one another. Readers with even a smidgeon of familiarity with Mexico's unkempt political traditions will wallow in this caustic indictment.
(May 16) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* As politics and history imbue the Latin American consciousness, so do they play a major thematic role in Latin American fiction. In his new novel, world-celebrated Mexican novelist Fuentes immerses himself in the political history of his homeland. The title of his new novel refers to the office of the Mexican presidency; the plot centers on the question of who is to succeed an ineffective incumbent in that office. The time is the 2020s, and a disagreement with the U.S. has led to the severance of satellite power to Mexico, leaving communications defunct. People must rely on an old-fashioned medium: letter writing. And that is the conceit of the novel: it is in epistolary format, as a host of politicos discuss what is wrong with the regime and what should be done about it--each person, of course, holding an opinion based on their own preservation and advancement. The tension builds inexorably as letters are fired off, revealing political and personal secrets, private ambitions, and sexual liaisons. Dissembling is the game of the hour as jockeying for power is the obsession of all who have a hand in the federal government. Their various plots
become the novel's plot, and characters spring to life as true individuals, fully developed in Fuentes' beguilingly unorthodox fashion. A novel that is truly a tour de force.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
