Word: maldonado
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...FELIX MALDONADO woke up one morning to find he lost his face and name. Or rather, Felix Maldonado woke up one morning and discovered he had undergone plastic surgery and been given an alias. All because he had failed in an assassination plot on Mexico's president's life--an act he had performed against his will...
...begins a crucial section of leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' latest novel, The Hydra Head. Billed as the first Third World spy thriller," The Hydra Head is about the loss of identity of Felix Maldonado, a minor bureaucrat in the Mexican government. In a Kafka-esque world in which he has no autonomy, Maldonado becomes an unwilling assassin in an international spy network competing over Mexico's newly discovered oil supply...
...Hydra Head's plot, like that of most of Fuentes' novels, is practically non-existent. It concerns Felix Maldonado's passive evolution from a petty civil servant in the ministry of Economics to a staked assassin. Events are connected enigmatically--Maldonado returns from his operation to his Jewish wife who is rocking mutely in a nun's habit; a man killed in a meat freezer scrawls the word "nun" in blood on the glass door. The reader, along with Maldonado, wonders whether and why things occur. All the disjointed events arrive at a climactic suspension--Maldonado's second attempt...
Fuentes, as in his others works, does not develop his characters any better than he explains why they exist or what exactly they are doing. Maldonado is the only three-dimensional protagonist--a confused middle-aged stud who resembles a Velasco painting. Maldonado's triad of women--the seductive Mary, loyal Rebecca and unattainable Sarah--fill the traditional female novelistic roles of whore, mother and virgin. Maldonado's purposeless orders come from two spies, the nationless Timon and the clove-smelling Lebanese Ayub, and a Mexican economics professor Bernstein and the bullying Director General. The only thing which binds...
...Chicago, Juan Maldonado capped a drinking bout by beating his eight-year-old son with a shoe, so wife Gloria, 32, shot him three times. The state's attorney ruled there was "insufficient evidence" to warrant her prosecution...