Points of Departure: New Stories from Mexico

by Mónica Lavín

Points of Departure brings together seventeen Mexican authors born in the 1950s and 1960s, most of whom had never before been published in English.

Magical realism and exoticism are nowhere to be found in this collection of sophisticated, very contemporary stories. Rather, the surreal contradictions and juxtapositions of daily life in Mexico are a permeating presence. A sharp sense of irony, incongruity and hilarity pervades many of the scenarios...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872863816
• ISBN13: 9780872863811
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Usual Mixed Bag

When I saw the subtitle to this book, "New Stories From Mexico," I was excited, thinking I'd be reading invigorating short fiction from young Gen-X or Y writers. So it was a bit of a letdown to learn in the introduction that all the authors were born in the 1950s or '60s (although even this is a little misleading, as only one of the writers was born after 1961). All are well-established writers, most of whom have won various literary prizes yet are little-known in the US, save perhaps for David Toscana who has had two novels published in English in the US (Tula Station and Our Lady of the Circus). In any event, the collection, while not being totally engrossing (few short story collections are), provided a few of pleasant discoveries.Perhaps self-consciously, the collection starts with its grittiest, most urban entry, Eduardo Parra's "Real Life," in which a journalist attempts to shape a sensationalistic story about the murder of a homeless couple who he knows in passing and whose love for each other makes him ashamed of his own life. Depending on one's predilections, readers will find it either exceedingly powerful or borderline cheezy. The following story, Bernardo Ruiz's "Queen of Shadows" is one of my favorites, telling the story of a woman in prison who longs to escape her isolation and connect with someone on the outside. Later on, David Toscana's "The Big Brush," injects a note of forlorn absurdity with its portrait of a failing paint seller which I found oddly compelling. Another of my favorites was Alvaro Uribe's "The Hostage," a dark sketch of interior terror. "Isiah IIV, 14" by Ethel Krauze is a surprising little cross-cultural vignette of a Jewish family going out on Christmas Eve in Mexico City.Several are set in refined upper middle-class circles and concern themselves with sexual relationships, these stories Rafael Pérez Gay's "Night Calls," Rosa Béltran's "Scheheresade," Mónica Lavín's "Why Come Back?" I generally find these kind of stories rather boring, the type of stuff I would never read by an American author and none of these did much for me. A few of the stories veer down surreal, semi-magical realist routes that didn't really appeal to me, these included Josefina Estrada's "June Gave Him the Voice," and Daniel Sada's "The Basilisk," and Francisco Hinojosa's "Marina Dosal, Juice Vendor." Rosina Conde's "Morente" is a somewhat better story in this vein, a riff on the supernatural lover genre.The remainder are nothing spectacular. Juan Villoro's "Coyote" sketches the trip of three well-to-do urban couples out to the desert where they will look for peyote and attempt to rekindle their spirits. It's a rather obvious setup, so it comes as no surprise that one gets lost and has to get "primal" to survive and reenter civilization. It's not terrible, but it's the kind of unoriginal riff one might expect in a college writing class. Juvenal Acosta's "Ginsberg's Tie" takes place at a dinner party of two upper class Anglo couples in Ber