March 27, 2006
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.
Starred review from May 15, 2006
The year is 2020, and Mexican politics is dirtier and more violent than ever. Condoleeza Rice is the President of the United States, and the Big Brother to the North has just sent troops to occupy drug-infested Colombia. Owing to Mexico's vigorous opposition to the invasion of Colombia, the United States has invoked Operation Cucaracha, whereby all communications to and within Mexico, controlled by the Florida Satellite Center, have been cut off. There are no phones, no faxes, and no Internet, and because Mexicans have had to return to old-fashioned means of communication, the action of this page-turner depends entirely on letters exchanged between a wide array of ruthless intellectual characters, among them two politically gifted women, Maria del Rosario Galvan and Paulina Tardegarda. As the septuagenarian Fuentes tantalizingly reveals the identity and parentage of new interim president Nicolas Valdivia, it is obvious he is at the top of his storytelling mastery, and his insights into Mexico's sad decline into global thuggery will further heighten the fascination for this book. Highly recommended." -Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland"
Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 1, 2006
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)