Tessa Hadley writes:

The subject matter of the stories is richly diverse. A fictional president of Mexico, worried about his disaffected son, confronts the leaders of a demonstration of agrarian workers. A middle-aged gay couple is torn apart when one partner is unfaithful because ‘he’s just like you when you were young.’ The impoverished mother of a mariachi singer paralysed in a riot prays to the Virgin for him to get his voice back (she gets it instead). The collection seems to aim at offering almost an anthropological survey of its society, though it mostly deals with the middle classes, intellectuals and politicians and arrivistes and bureaucrats, and a few of the old gentry. Perhaps in order that these subjects – and the very convention of a succession of self-sealed freestanding stories – shouldn’t misrepresent the reality of the swollen inchoate present of Mexico, between each story there are choruses written as free verse, purporting to voice the perspective of the multitudinous remainder: the dispossessed, the ‘good families’ and the ‘savage families’ among the poor, the intoxicated fans of pop idols, the disregarded victims of political murder, the criminals and the drug-users. As a solution to the problem of representing a whole society, this is interesting but not quite comfortable; as in a Greek tragedy, the chorus maintains the segregation between those whose individual stories are told and those whose lives make up an undifferentiated collective background.

(LRB 12 February 2009)

Bloomsbury | hardback 332 pp. |ISBN: 9780747595281