Five of the Best Classic Mexican Novels

Thank you for selecting these classic Mexican novels for us. To start us off, perhaps you might talk us through what guided your choices?

I chose the five Mexican novels that were most important to me growing up, that had an impact on my way of understanding literature, and opened up a path for my own writing. They are novels that narrate worlds that are familiar and dear to me, that enabled me to get to know this territory I live in better, to understand a little better my own genealogy, and that gave me a sense of rootedness beyond crude nationalism.

Would you say that there are uniting themes that recur in Mexican literature? Do you return to them in your own work?

In Mexican literature there have always been dominant themes, or each generation has had its own, and in general they have to do with what terrifies us, what gnaws away at us. It is a consolation to know that we have literature as a kind of refuge, as a space for our interrogations. There are novels about the Mexican Revolution, both good and bad, just as there are about organised crime, about gender violence, about femicides. Then there’s the family, the traditional structure as the origin of all that’s good and bad, and there’s our relationship with the land around us. I confess to all these charges, as I feel the need to hide away in this refuge.

Your first book recommendation is Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. It also features work by the illustrator Alberto Beltrán. Why do you recommend this book?

I think it’s one of the most beautiful novels ever written. It’s a love story and also the story of a territory and a very specific moment in the life of the country. It is a metaphor of desolation and despair, where each element is imbued with a very subtle magic, made of voices and memories, above all women’s. In Recollections of Things to Come, the feminine is resistance to a violent, collapsing world.

It’s a work of magical realism, and was published four years ahead of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Could you talk a little about the role of magical realism in Latin American literature?

Sure! I think that for the Latin American novel magic realism operated in that period as an excellent strategy to write fantasy in a particular way, with narrative elements that have prevailed in Latin cultures, such as hyperbole or syncretism between indigenous and Christian religious beliefs. The same thing happens in my head when I imagine Tita’s tears filling a five-kilo sack to be used for cooking in Like Water for Chocolate, as when I read traditional fairy stories about a magic tablecloth that serves food, a flask of oil that never runs out, or boots for walking seven leagues. I believe in both equally and with my whole soul.

The next classic Mexican novel you’ve chosen to recommend is Cartucho by Nellie Campobello, an autobiographical novella first published in 1931. It is published in English together with a second Campobello novella called My Mother’s Hands. Tell us about Cartucho.

There are countless novels about the Mexican Revolution, but what fascinated me about Nellie Campobello’s book is her ability to represent the reality of violent warfare not on from the viewpoint of the conflicting parties, but through the emotions; it is the perspective of a girl that reveals the paradox of violence, both in its significance and its futility. I think Cartucho should be read in schools the world over.

For me, to read Nellie Campobello is to be transported to the adobe kitchen stoves on which my great-grandmother cooked, the Singer sewing machine that all the women in my family learned to use. In the pages of Cartucho I find echoes of my grandmother’s stories about the Chihuahua border, the mythical figure of the revolutionary who gives their life for the right to a decent life, for land, for education, causes that both my grandmothers fought for, one as an agrarian and the other as a rural teacher.

Campobello played a prominent role in a ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican culture during the first half of the 20th century. Would you talk a little about that?

It was a really interesting period. After the Revolution, it was the task of intellectuals and artists to reimagine the country, to create its own narrative with its myths, roots, national values and identity traits, everything we know as folklore. Of course there were nationalist political interests too—the goal of unifying the highly diverse social groups that emerged as a result of colonisation and the subjugation of the indigenous peoples. But beyond that, I think it was very important for the Mexico of that time to acknowledge the marks of identity that enabled them to be defined as part of a human group. In this sense the work of Nellie Campobello as a writer, dancer and intellectual played such an important role in preserving and popularising the dances of the first peoples of Mexico.

Let’s talk about Balún Canán, by Rosario Castellanos, published in 1957. It’s not currently available in English but I think you feel it’s important for us to discuss. Why so?

Rosario Castellanos is much better known as a poet, but my first point of entry into her work was through Balún Canán. I read it when I was 17 years old and it left a deep mark on me. It is also a young girl’s perspective, a sensitive and vulnerable subjectivity that narrates the colonialist violence in the south-east of the country, the subjugation and harassment suffered by the original peoples of the territory that we know today as Chiapas. Thanks to Rosario Castellanos I fell in love with this region; her novel lit a spark of fascination with the indigenous peoples and their languages, which led me to leave home for San Cristóbal de las Casas, trying to get involved with the Zapatistas, though of course I was unsuccessful. In any case something good must have come of it, and I owe that entirely to Balún Canán.

Why do you recommend Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo? I know Borges felt this to be one of the greatest books ever written.

Rulfo’s writing is especially dear to me because we come from the same place, and because reading him was to discover the vast poetic potential of the rural landscape, of forgotten villages, rather than the cosmopolitan world or urban forms of culture. Rulfo does a lot of things in this novel, while endowing a tremendous poetic force both to language and to the events, the characters and the atmospheres he describes; he experiments with a fragmentary structure; breaks down the sense of reality through the idea of the ghost and the popular legends, the people’s sayings. Comala is a powerful mythical universe that represents abandonment and loss from many angles. The characters have an extraordinary strength and reach a very complex degree of conflict, determined above all by the fragility and harm of a very macho way of understanding masculinity. The novel flows between narrative moments, evoking resonances… it’s a dream novel.

One critic suggested that your own book, The Forgery, “pays homage” to Rulfo. Would you agree? Who else do you think of as your literary influences?

Of course, Rulfo inhabits the spaces of The Forgery and the murmurs of his prose echo through the corners of the house. It’s well known that Luis Barragán, who is one of the characters in The Forgery, was inspired by Rulfo’s writings when he built the atmospheric architecture that won him the Pritzker Prize, and there are significant overlaps between the two: they build spaces with the same adobe roofs and walls, they make the same water pitchers resound. I am full of admiration for them both.

Finally, that brings us to your final classic Mexican novel: Aura, by Carlos Fuentes. What do you admire about it?

I read Aura as a teenager and it both terrified and fascinated me, but above all it invited me to join that search among dark corners that is literature. It is a very brief and self-contained novel that maintains the tension in each line. What I most admire about it is its ability to build atmosphere and cause us to feel trapped in this shady house among the smell of moss and decaying plants. Not to mention the character of Aura, who is a horrendous and beautiful witch at the same time; I’m someone who loves stories with witches, that dual aspect that overcomes all boundaries, especially those of good and evil.