Book Description

In part the story of its own writing, this quasi-autobiographical, postmodern novel weaves a tale of jealousy, sex, dope and alcoholism around the theme of the narrator’s so-far frustrated literary ambitions. The integral and inalienable setting is the urban Mexico of the mid-1980s, with the Cold War still the international political backdrop to everyday life. Wending his way through angst-ridden erotic entanglements and a session with his Freudian analyst (an anti-Lacanian, we learn), the narrator, who goes by the author’s real name, finally arrives at his dream encounter — and ‘dream’ may well be doubly apt, because the episode’s relation to everyday reality is left undefined — with famed Latin-American author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez. Perhaps the laureate will write a preface to his latest novel. “It’s about a guy stuck in traffic; he wants to be a writer, to be famous, and Mike, one of the characters, tells him he should write the A Hundred Years of Solitude of the eighties. The guy feels happy at first but then in the middle of the traffic and the smog he realizes that there aren’t any Amarantas and Aurelianos Buendías there, there aren’t any José Arcadios, that all there are are drunks, gangs, poor people trampled by the yuppies — that after all, the jungle is gone.”