TRIPLE CROSS

Collected here in one volume, short novels by three of Latin America's most conspicuously, perhaps obtrusively, sophisticated writers. Carlos Fuentes' Holy Place invokes the tentacled chic of art nouveau, Antonioni's expensive anomie, Gucci labels, Scott Fitzgerald — all the current emblems of wealth and wan desire — to characterize an enervated young man's relationship to his movie star mother. The intention is not always possible to gauge since the story veers from parody to pathos and menace. Jose Donoso's Hell Has No Limits is a mellower and more strictly indigenous work in spite of the title, about an aging transvestite and his homely daughter, and the romantic outcast who excites both their hopes. And Severo Sarduy, the most flamboyant experimenter, has launched something like a hallucinated moral allegory or an airborne Cinecitta soundstage with the idea of Help and Mercy, two of the Fates, bungling alone through the world in dynel wigs. There is a conspicuous reference to the international avant-garde in the extreme conceptions and in the priority given to style and artifice, and at times the European model will seem misapplied. But it is better to suspend such judgments and accept these as exquisitely gaudy, unique cultural hybrids.