Book description
P>The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting as if in a
Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the underbelly of modern
Mexican life, offering a raw but richly textured glimpse of the
inequalities of that society - street children, junkies, dead rock
icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone wrong, a child suicide, a man
faking his death and beginning a new life - that throw the middle-class
dramas of the linked stories into harsh relief.
Happy Families
is a dramatic polyphony of the many conflicting strands of Latin
America and the modern urban world. I>.<
A choral novel on the
hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family life in Mexico. A rich
Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become priests, while the boys
themselves have other plans; a bereaved mother explains her daughter's
life to the man who killed her; three daughters meet up around their
father's coffin for the first time in ten years; a middle-aged couple
meet by chance on a cruise-ship and wonder if they were once young
lovers. The result is a picture of contemporary Mexico seen through a
violently fragmented narrative, not unlike the internationally
successful film Amores Perros<
'The country's living national treasure ... These
and other tales add up to a powerful indictment of the unhappiness
caused by family life ... The stories overflow with the kind of
insights that only maturity brings. They are also painfully topical
... Fuentes keeps his finger on modern Mexico's pulse' Angel
Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times 'Fuentes, now 80, is still
masterful in evoking the lives of damaged characters ... beautifully
observed ... a book seething with timeless rancour' Independent
'There are moments of dry humour, intense beauty and startling
emotion in his books, Happy Families included, distilled from an
extraordinary and at times tragic life ... Happy Families is
Fuentes's twisted lullaby.' Siobhan Murphy, Metro 'What makes this
book doubly and triply beguiling, beyond the challenging
storytelling and stylistics, is our feeling that Fuentes is trying,
yet only implicitly and subtly, to probe deeper into this malaise
... This is an exacting literary journey. But there are, as always,
magic and poetry in Fuentes' prose (not overlooking the very
accomplished and natural translation of it by Edith Grossman) that
make the journey worthwhile.' Andrew Staffell, The Times
P>The stories are punctuated by a chorus, commenting
as if in a Greek tragedy, crudely and unsentimentally on the
underbelly of modern Mexican life, offering a raw but richly
textured glimpse of the inequalities of that society - street
children, junkies, dead rock icons, the ideal wife, a honeymoon gone
wrong, a child suicide, a man faking his death and beginning a new
life - that throw the middle-class dramas of the linked stories into
harsh relief. Happy Families is a dramatic polyphony of the
many conflicting strands of Latin America and the modern urban
world. I>.<
A choral novel on the hopes, disillusionments and betrayals of family
life in Mexico. A rich Catholic rancher wants his four sons to become
priests, while the boys themselves have other plans; a bereaved mother
explains her daughter's life to the man who killed her; three
daughters meet up around their father's coffin for the first time in
ten years; a middle-aged couple meet by chance on a cruise-ship and
wonder if they were once young lovers. The result is a picture of
contemporary Mexico seen through a violently fragmented narrative, not
unlike the internationally successful film Amores Perros<
