Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Fuentes, Carlos (Vol. 22) - Jonathan Penner

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JONATHAN PENNER

[Fuentes' scenes in Burnt Water] draw vitality partly from their vivid sense of place: a Mexico City sprawling and ugly, corrupt and provincial, destroyed by, and destroying its people. The stories are mined from various literary veins, of which the richest by far is a closely observed social realism.

That is the mode, for instance, of "The Son of Andrés Aparicio." Bernabé, the main character, lives in a district of makeshift huts, a barrio so tenuous that it lacks even a name. He quits school and becomes a street hustler, winding up as a thug for a reactionary political gang. Life on the margin—economic and emotional—was never made more real, and persuasive connections are drawn between such a life and its political consequences.

But even into this story, so largely successful by any standard, there enters an element that—I propose—the Latin Americans like better than we do. This is superimposed design. In a manner too...

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1. Introduction
2. Richard Gilman
3. Anthony West
4. Saul Maloff
5. Helen R. Lane
6. A. Alvarez
7. Lanin A. Gyurko
8. Joseph Chrzanowski
9. A. John Skirius
10. Evan Connell
11. The Atlantic Monthly
12. Jonathan Penner
13. Michael Wood
14. Copyright

1. Carlos Fuentes