“Of course some people believe that women are as human as men but still. . .”
This was the last novel written by the famous Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and it was published posthumously. As you can guess from the preceding quote, you don’t get more typical than Fuentes. The novel is OK, he definitely tried to move past the “magical real” crapazola. In the end, Achilles does slip into the cloying magical realism type of thing but most of the novel is not useless.
What I hate about these Boom writers is not even the obsessive sexism but the desire to create the most shocking scenes of violence possible to outdo the predecessors. They pass from horrific violence to blubby sentimentalism and back and spice it all up with teary pontification about the fate of Latin America. Brrrr, they almost put me off contemporary Latin American literature altogether. I’m glad they were gone.
But all that being said, it’s not a horrible novel. It could be much worse given who Fuente was.