Mapped
2666
Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a thin fictional mask over Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican border city facing El Paso across the Rio Grande. The map runs from the international bridges and the old downtown out to the maquiladora factories and the desert lots on the city's edge, where over years the bodies of hundreds of murdered women were found. A European frame, followed here to Bremen, opens the book far from that violence.
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
The novel follows a nameless runaway, the Kid, out of the East Texas pine country and into the desert borderlands of 1849 and 1850, where he falls in with the Glanton gang, a company of scalp-hunters paid by Mexican authorities to bring in Apache dead. Their route runs across the real Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, from Chihuahua City through the abandoned mines of New Mexico to the Colorado River ferry at Yuma, and closes years later on the Texas plains. The map traces that route soberly; the book's violence is historical and extreme.
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Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
Rulfo set his town of the dead at the foot of the volcano in Colima, and the map holds the real Comala it grew from: a white-walled plaza, a parish church, the dusty road that drops down from the north, and the fire-mountain on the skyline. Juan Preciado goes looking for the father he was promised and finds a place where only the dead still speak.
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The Death of Artemio Cruz
Carlos Fuentes
A corrupt press baron lies dying in his Mexico City mansion, and his fevered memory ranges back across the making of modern Mexico: his birth on a Veracruz estate, the Revolution in which he fought and betrayed, the marriage into a Puebla landowning family that founded his fortune, and the empire of newspapers and deals he built in the capital. Fuentes maps a life onto a country, the deathbed in the city holding all the places that made Artemio Cruz.
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The Underdogs
Mariano Azuela
The classic novel of the Mexican Revolution follows the peasant Demetrio Macías, who takes to the sierra to fight the federal troops and rises to a general in the revolutionary armies, only to be swept up in the factional wars and the futility of the whirlwind. Azuela sets it in the real country of the fighting: the mountains and villages of the Jalisco–Zacatecas sierra, the great battle of Zacatecas, and the Juchipila canyon where Demetrio begins and ends.
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