Fernando Del Paso

[rich]

good news:

new novel by Del Paso.  Palinuro de Mexico is one of my favorite books

new one comes out in April, 880 pgs. Dalkey Press. sweet

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of Mexican literature, Fernando
del Paso's News from the Empire is a powerful and encyclopedic novel
of the tragic lives of Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, the
short-lived Emperor and Empress of Mexico. Simultaneously intimate and
panoramic, the narrative flows from Carlota's fevered memories of her
husband's ill-fated empire to the multiple and conflicting accounts of
a broad cast of characters who bore witness to the events that first
placed the hapless couple on their puppet thrones, and then as swiftly
removed them. Stretching from the troubled final years of Maximilian's
life to the early days of the twentieth century, News from the Empire
depicts a world of both political and narrative turbulence, and is as
much a history of the advent of modernity as a eulogy for the corrupt
royal houses of Europe. This startling and fevered work of
"historiography" is a tour de force.

Rich