{"id":286686,"date":"2011-10-31T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/10\/31\/three-messages-and-a-warning-contemporary-mexican-stories-of-the-fantastic\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:16:52","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:16:52","slug":"three-messages-and-a-warning-contemporary-mexican-stories-of-the-fantastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/10\/31\/three-messages-and-a-warning-contemporary-mexican-stories-of-the-fantastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

If nothing else, Three Messages and a Warning<\/em> proves that anthology editors hold far more power than the individual authors. The problem is not so much that Three Messages<\/em> fails to offer any excellent Mexican \u201cstories of the fantastic,\u201d but that those tales are few and poorly placed within the book as a whole. For example, a number of above-average stories are clustered toward the end of the book, so that anyone prone to reading anthologies chronologically will be tempted to give up reading before they find gold.<\/p>\n

If anything, it just seems like the people editing Three Messages<\/em> forgot to pay attention\u2014how else would a poem (and a mediocre poem at that) find its way into a book of short stories? How else would so many mediocre stories make the cut? Overall, the thirty-four \u201cstories\u201d in Three Messages<\/em> provide a study in quantity over quality, a survey of Mexican literature that does little credit to Mexican authors. However, whether by purpose or chance, there are some diamonds in the rough, tales with original voices and surprising endings, the kind of stories you find yourself telling your friends about later. Rather than leaving you to sort through the entire collection (or skip it entirely) I\u2019ll offer you what, in my opinion, are the highlights. The stories sort themselves into three categories:<\/p>\n

Category One: The Very Good.<\/p>\n

1. \u201cThe President without Organs\u201d by Pepe Rojo. <\/p>\n

In retrospect, this story captures exactly what I was hoping to find in Three Messages<\/em>: an imaginative subject explored by an expert storyteller. The story unfolds through a series of press releases detailing the various surgeries the President undergoes in order to cure his increasingly bizarre illnesses, as well as mini-narratives about citizens reacting to the news. Witty and controversial, the story is a hilarious parody of the roles of citizens, government officials and the media in religious and political systems. Then again, I\u2019m bound to love any story that contains a section that reads only, \u201cNATIONAL TIME<\/span>–OUT<\/span> DAY<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. \u201cPhotophobia,\u201d by Mauricio Monteil Figueiras.<\/p>\n

You can tell from the start that \u201cPhotophobia\u201d is more sophisticated than most stories in this collection\u2014the vocabulary is complex, the concept unquestionably cerebral. An apocalyptic narrative is told through stream-of-consciousness storytelling that cleverly distracts from the story\u2019s premise until the ending begins to shed some light on the narrator\u2019s purpose and motives. The tale stands out in this populist collection of stories like a sore thumb, but I\u2019m glad it was included. Here is a typical (and excellent) sentence:<\/p>\n

\n

Eternity, he thought, pocket apocalypses: man has not learned the lessons of history, he is still the ignorant student who recorded his confusion in the caves of Altamira\u2014it\u2019s just that the caves have become tabloids.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

3. \u201cNereid Future,\u201d by Gabriela Dami\u00e1n Miravete.<\/p>\n

Imagine a modern, Mexican version of Margaret Oliphant\u2019s short story from 1869, The Library Window<\/a> and you\u2019ll arrive at \u201cNereid Future.\u201d The story, told in the second person, is about a girl who falls in love with a long-dead author through his books. The narrative gets increasingly meta as the girl begins to believe that the author loves her back. Intertextuality and female identity earn the spotlight in this short story, which contains one of those perfect endings where you should have seen it coming from the start, but still catches you by surprise.<\/p>\n

4. \u201cThe Drop\u201d by Claudia Guill\u00e9n.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Drop,\u201d a depressed young woman refuses to leave her room, watching drops of water fall to the floor. Her mother (the stated villain of the piece) claims that if the dripping stops, her child will die. A visiting doctor learns about himself as he studies the girl. That\u2019s it, the entire premise. But the story is well-told, the ending surprising, and it\u2019s the kind of eerie tale that sticks with you.<\/p>\n

5. \u201cVariations on a Theme by Coleridge,\u201d by Alberto Chimal.<\/p>\n

Three Messages<\/em> includes plenty of short-short stories; this is my favorite example, a page-and-a-half-long gem. It begins, \u201cI got a call. It was me, calling from a phone I lost the year before. I asked myself where I had found the phone. I answered myself that it was in such and such cafeteria that I couldn\u2019t remember anymore.\u201d The story gets increasingly meta and hilarious, drawing its premise from the capabilities of modern technology, its humor from repetition and its pathos from the ways we judge ourselves.<\/p>\n

Other favorites: \u201cLions\u201d by Bernardo Fern\u00e1ndez, \u201cWittigenstein’s Umbrella\u201d by \u00d3scar de la Borbolla, \u201cMr. Strogoff\u201d by Guillermo Samperio.<\/p>\n

Category Two: The Mediocre.<\/p>\n

Most of the book falls into this category: stories that build up but go nowhere (\u201cThe Guest\u201d); stories that you swear you\u2019ve read before (\u201cThree Messages and a Warning in the Same E-mail\u201d); stories with one original gimmick, a clever premise or punch line that amuses without earning long-term appreciation (\u201cA Pile of Bland Desserts\u201d, \u201cWolves\u201d); even a few pieces that don\u2019t fully cross the cultural divide (\u201cThe Nahual Offering\u201d).<\/p>\n

These are not awful stories. I enjoyed reading some of them. But when I forget they existed in a week or two, I won\u2019t feel the loss.<\/p>\n

Category Three: The Ugly.<\/p>\n

In my opinion the worst of the collection (besides that very random poem, \u201cMannequin\u201d) are the stories that are unbearably trite, the stories that fit a shallow American understanding of Mexican culture to a T. I\u2019m speaking mostly of the first story in the collection, \u201cToday, You Walk Along a Narrow Path,\u201d a tale about D\u00eda de los Muertos with the most predictable \u201csurprise\u201d ending in the entire book. There are others that fit this category, of course . . . but the line between \u201cmediocre\u201d and \u201cugly\u201d seems awfully thin in my mind, so I think I\u2019ll let future readers sort out those stories on their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If nothing else, Three Messages and a Warning proves that anthology editors hold far more power than the individual authors. The problem is not so much that Three Messages fails to offer any excellent Mexican \u201cstories of the fantastic,\u201d but that those tales are few and poorly placed within the book as a whole. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[42196,42186,2756,41376,29556,6516,42176],"class_list":["post-286686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-chris-brown","tag-eduardo-jimenez-mayo","tag-mexican-literature","tag-sara-cohen","tag-small-beer-press","tag-spanish-literature","tag-three-messages-and-a-warning"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342516,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286686\/revisions\/342516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}