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Loading... Happy Families: Stories (2006)by Carlos Fuentes
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A remarkably broad overview of Mexican society, mainly focused on the upper echelons but with a chorus of the downtrodden reflecting the division in society. I was blown away by this- he was such a gifted chronicler, able to picture the inner lives of Presidents aswell as streetchildren in a number of disparate writing styles, using stream-of-consciousness, poetry, different tenses and persons, all wrapped in a visceral language that takes no prisoners. The many references to Mexican history, personages and locale were sometimes lost on me but it didn't derail the narrative and invited research. Fuentes is also a marvellous storyteller here and adds many philosophical reflections too. The subject matter is dark and far from uplifting but its delineation is rich in insight and replete with the shock of reality. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesGallimard, Folio (5111) AwardsDistinctions
In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy's classic observation that 'happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. In A Family Like Any Other, each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In The Mariachi's Mother, the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son's wounds. Sweethearts reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes's trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)863.64Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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