Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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 all characters is their obsession with Mexican oil. Oil permeates the entire novel, motivating violence and friendship. It is everywhere--smeared between a woman's breasts and spilled in the streets...
...surrealism to express confusion and to perplex the reader. Although this technique is annoying at times, it does not distract from The Hydra Head's quick pace. If the bizarre seems pointless, sometimes, it does not inhibit one's desire to know where it all leads. Ultimately, the novel is frustrating: more and more it tells the reader less and less. Unlike traditional thrillers, the final scene leaves one with new questions rather than resolved mysteries...
Vernon added that the agreement is novel because it also restricts non-tariff barriers to trade including government purchases from domestic firms, subsidies for domestic industry and import licensing...
...more conventional stories tend to find their mark, but here too, the quality is uneven. In "Cortes and Montezuma," Barthelme demonstrates his mastery of a peculiar form that might be called transmogrification of legend, the same form he used in his novel Snow White and several short stories. He takes the fabeled meeting of Cortes and Montezuma and twists it, distorts it, makes it fresh. Among the stories, "Tales of the Swedish Army" relates a sudden meeting of the author and a unit of Swedish soldiers on maneuvers in lower Manhattan, an exercise of the imaginative virtuosity that has characterized...