![]() ![]() (No one seems to know for sure when he was born.) He was from Jalisco, near Guadalajara, and he’d published one mildly interesting collection of short stories a few years earlier. I suspect no one knew what to make of the new book, since it was entirely unlike-well-anything else. Perhaps the critics were astounded into silence more likely, they were puzzled and a little bit blind. As for the author, he went silent and never wrote another book, though he lived on for more than 30 years, long enough to see himself credited with the invention of an entire movement, to see his only novel sell millions of copies, to receive mash notes from Nobel Prize winners. When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few tepid notices and sold poorly. Its author was 37 at the time, or 38. It’s as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machine-one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja. It’s a very strange book let me admit that at the outset. ![]()
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