The Mexican Flyboy

Abstract

Garro later asks Cárdenas for $100,000 in order to keep Destapes running while also offering to become a business partner at the tabloid; and while he is fully aware of Garro’s veiled extortion, Cárdenas refuses any collaboration and throws the journalist out of his office. A week later, Cárdenas’s photographs are published. As the scandal grows and Cárdenas tries to repair his personal image, Garro is found dead. At this point, La Retaquita, Garro’s closest collaborator at the weekly, accuses Cárdenas of killing Garro to honor the memory of her boss. Cárdenas is arrested but later released on bail. As tensions rise, the true wheels of power are revealed in this fast-paced narrative: La Retaquita is arrested and brought before “El Doctor” (or Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s head of intelligence). He tells her that it was he who ordered Garro’s death and offers her a generous salary if she is willing to become the new editor of Destapes. In turn, she must blindly follow his orders and publish stories on political opponents he wishes to discredit. A tough and feisty woman despite her small height, La Retaquita at first agrees to work for El Doctor. But as she learns of Montesinos’s dark ways to destroy the honor of individuals who oppose Fujimori ’s regime, she unexpectedly turns against him and publishes a final issue of Destapes denouncing Montesinos’s evil doings. While Vargas Llosa effectively uses a counterpoint technique to tell the two stories that make up Cinco esquinas, the text does not display the great narrative dexterity for which the Peruvian writer became known for early in his career; moreover, while there are a number of interesting characters in the novel, at times the story seems to beg for more fully developed and psychologically dense personalities in some of them, including La Retaquita. Nevertheless, this book is in line with some of the most important themes found in Vargas Llosa’s best fiction: political oppression and moral decay, the role of journalism in society, social disparity in Peruvian society, individual heroism, and eroticism, to mention only a few. Such variety of topics, alongside a well-crafted, tense portrayal of one of the most obscure moments in recent Peruvian history, are among the novel’s best features and certainly make for an entertaining read. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Alfredo Véa. The Mexican Flyboy. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016. 338 pages. The Mexican Flyboy reads like a surrealist dream: it is a fairy tale for adults, a novel where clairvoyant superheroes (Mandrake the Magician) and historical figures (Joan of Arc, Jesse Washington, and Ethel Rosenberg , among others) are brought to life by an incantatory language that animates and reenacts a history of unparalleled horrors, unrelenting fanaticism, and crowd complicity. Mo Yan Frog Trans. Howard Goldblatt Penguin Books Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan examines modern China’s love/hate relationship with ideology through this tale of a oncebeloved midwife who seeks political redemption through her unwavering commitment to the one-child policy. Mo Yan continues to fascinate with his unflinching narratives that tackle difficult topics with dark humor. Mark McMorris The Book of Landings Wesleyan University Press Poet Mark McMorris completes his “Auditions for Utopia”trilogy with this ambitious collection that uses lyric poetry as a tool for challenging ideas about how language shapes our identity as conqueror and conquered. Often abstract in conception and boldly visual in execution, McMorris’s poems sketch out idealized spaces where words reign over human frailties. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 87 The lead character is Simon Vegas, a university professor and Vietnam veteran who takes wing on his Antikythera device to each place and moment of execution of persons falsely or maliciously accused in the past, gently transporting the suffering and maimed to a retirement resort in Boca Raton, Florida. A vast mural with satire and irony as the dominant palette, The Mexican Flyboy sketches the life of a skydiver by the name of Sophia Hanlon and reiterates the traumatic memories of her free-falling death in a California vineyard that haunt Simon Vegas most of his...