CHANGE OF SKIN

Carlos Fuentes is Mexico's leading contemporary writer and this while probably his most ambitious novel, is also his most amorphous—lacking any narrative action to give definition to the inchoate flux of ideas, images, and endless memories of a past which is at time collective, at times personal. The scene is Cholula, where Cortez once committed his battue of the Indians, now a "living death." But then all of this is death-directed ("To be dead waiting for eternity to put in its appearance, which it refuses to do, to go on, dead, waiting.") and the four characters assembled—over whom the "narrator,"—a sort of anarchic hipster presides—are all landlocked: Javier, who had written one little Foundation winning book; Elizabeth his wife who has been destroying him for years by demanding too much; Franz, a Nazi, with the survival guilt of the crematoria; and Isabel, a kicky chick ("All I'm looking for is orgasms."). The novel has a certain degenerative energy, but more often than not its fragmentation is close to anarchy which makes it a quite often penitential reading experience. Assured critical attention.