Palinuro of Mexico - Paperback

by Fernando del Paso (Author), Elisabeth Plaister (Translator)

Winner of Mexico's Premio Novela Mexico, Venezuela's Romulo Gallegos Prize for best Spanish-language novel, and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for best foreign book, Palinuro of Mexico is a masterpiece which ranks with the finest achievements of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Palinuro, a medical student, is born into a polygenetic family: Uncle Esteban, who fled from Hungary during the Great War and traveled across the world to Mexico, clinging to his dream of becoming a doctor; Grandpa Francisco, a Freemason and old-time companion of Pancho Villa; Uncle Austin, an ex-British marine; grandmothers, aunts, cousins--an eccentric menage. Since childhood, Palinuro has loved his first cousin, Estefania, with an overwhelming and consuming passion. They indulge their incestuous desires and bizarre fantasies in a room in the Plaza Santa Domingo.

Drawing from a cultural cornucopia, del Paso propels Palinuro and his companions though the real and the imaginary realms of mythology, science, politics, social comment, the arts, advertising and pornography. This labyrinthine tour de force is a fusion of Rabelaisian wit, Swiftian satire, Shakespearean invention and pastiche ranging from Hawthorne to Galdos.

Author Biography

Fernando del Paso (1935-2018) was a Mexican author, diplomat, and academic. Del Paso studied medicine at the Autonomous University of Mexico before changing careers. Later, he would continue on to become an alum of the Iowa Writers Workshop, then working for the BBC in London, and later, Radio France and as a cultural ambassador for the Mexican government. His works include some of the most important novels of twentieth-century Latin American literature, such as Noticias del Imperio and Palinuro de México.

Elizabeth Plaister is a translator of books from Spanish, including authors such as Manuel Vazquez Montalban and Fernando del Paso.

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer living in New York. His novel Sudden Death received the Herralde, the Poniatowska and the Barcelona prizes. You Dream of Empires was a top ten book of the year for The New York Times, the New York Public Library and The Guardian. He teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University.

Dr. Francisco González-Crussi, (b. Mexico City, 1936; naturalized American citizen in 1987), Professor Emeritus of Pathology of Northwestern University Medical School, wrote numerous articles and two books of his medical specialty. He debuted as an essayist in 1985 with his book Notes of an Anatomist and has since authored twenty-six books (equally divided in English and Spanish), chiefly in the essay genre. Among the awards he received are: First Prize for non-fiction of the Society for Midland Authors (1985); a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000-2001); the Merck Prize in Rome, Italy (2014); the VIth International " Pedro Henriquez-Ureña" Award by Mexico's Academy of the Language (2019).