Adan en Eden (Spanish Edition)

Fuentes does not cease to amaze. This latest work is an uproariously comic novel that deals head-on with many of the gravest issues of 21st-century Mexico. Key to its hilarity is the idiosyncratic, self-absorbed voice of the narrator, an ambitious attorney who made his place in the public sphere by marrying the flatulent daughter of a biscuit magnate. When his wife, a woman prone to bizarre non sequiturs, begins a romance with a loutish official who oversees a barbaric and fraudulent government crackdown on crime, all hell breaks loose. Meanwhile an apparently heaven-sent child prophet appears at a busy Mexico City intersection, stopping traffic while starting a national debate. Adán en Edén is entertainingly freewheeling with its themes and cultural references, which include poverty, drug violence, sex, Mexican history, telenovelas, U.S.-Mexican immigration, and the Palm Pre smart phone. Fuentes even finds room for a precisely measured burlesque of Octavio Paz's role in promoting dogmatic factionalism in Mexican letters. The reader marvels throughout that the author of this fiercely perspicacious and laugh-out-loud funny novel is in his eighties: Fuentes's familiar wit and breadth of experience are here in spades, but he also packs a high-velocity edginess worthy of a writer a third his age. Recommended for readers of dystopian political fiction.—Bruce Jensen, Rohrbach Lib., Kutztown Univ., PA