'Mexican literature will be great because it's literature, not because it's Mexican,' yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes's magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels - one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century - but for the fact that both try to explain something about how Mexico got where it is today.

LRB 14 May 1992 | PDF Download