Antipodes: Stories [Hardcover]

Ignacio Padilla (Author), Alastair Reid (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374105332 | ISBN-13: 978-0374105334 | Publication Date: May 12, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

From the author of the award-winning novel Shadow Without a Name, comes Antipodes, the first collection of his short fiction to be translated into English. This lively, eclectic, and highly imaginative volume spans time, place, and culture as the narratives move from the scorching heat of the Gobi desert to the glacial heights of Mount Everest.

Here, among others, are the stories of a great Scottish engineer, left to die in the middle of the desert, who is rescued by a tribe of nomads and inspires them to build an exact replica of the city of Edinburgh in the dunes; of a dying, cross-dressing pilot who allegedly climbs Mount Everest and then mysteriously disappears; of an English colonel who swears on his life to make the trains in Zambezi run on time, only to be forced to honor his word when they are always ten minutes late; of a monk who conjures the devil to prove the devil's existence; and of a young administrator of a psychiatric hospital who is appalled by the treatment of the patients, and devises his own bizarre solution.

Based on history, legend and an awe-inspiring power of invention, Antipodes delights, terrifies, and entrances.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Padilla, one of Mexico's foremost young writers, presents a handful of eclectic modern-day fables. A Scottish engineer is abandoned in the Gobi desert, and the nomadic peoples that rescue him treat him as a god, rebuilding the city of Edinburgh among the desert dunes. An unusual plague devastates an already devastated tribe in the Amazon. An eccentric Englishman decides to climb Mount Everest as his dying act, and when he mysteriously disappears, he becomes the stuff of legends. A mystical monk of an unspecified era seeks the devil in the desert. A British officer tries to make the trains run on time in colonial Africa, but finds he is thwarted in unlikely ways. Padilla's collection of stories spans the world and the ages, as he brings us from the Mongolian desert to the Dutch East Indies. His stories, placed within history, tell of colonialism gone amok, of spirituality gone awry, bringing a beautiful, surreal narrative to the ways our history has been shaped. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Praise for Shadow Without A Name:

"The novel proceeds at a feverish pace with a rush of secrets, revelations, mysterious documents, reversals of fortune, exchanges of identity. All these machinations take place in a world without detail or depth. It is here, Padilla suggests, that history--elusive, unknown, and perhaps unreal--happens." --The Boston Globe

"An intricate and hypnotic novel...in its complexity and multiplicity of resonances about past, present and future, suggests that modern Mexican literature, having produced an intellectual thriller of such high quality as this, has advanced to a new level of maturity." --Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

"Brilliant young writer, Ignacio Padilla, spins an incredible web of ambiguities and puzzles....Gracefully and economically written, it is a meditation on the nature of identity and, not incidentally on the myriad unsuspected tragedies inflicted on people by the chaos of war."-- Michael Kernan, The Washington Post

"A complex, intriguing novel... Ingenious." --James Polk, Chicago Tribune

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (May 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374105332
• ISBN-13: 978-0374105334
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,602,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story Teller, May 12, 2005

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Antipodes: Stories (Hardcover)

In this little collection of stories-- his second book to be published in English, the Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla establishes himself as a fantastic teller of tales. They are set all over the world and no two of them have anything in common with each other except they are all inventive and brilliant. In the story "Ever Wrest: Log of the Journey," we have a pilot into women's clothes who climbs Mount Everest and then disappears: "The Chineses say nothing about how Wilson's [the cross-dressing climber] body was clothed but it is still possible to view, in the Alpine Museum of the Communist Party, a voluptuous high-heeled shoe that the legendary mountaineer Chu Ying-hua swears he found under the snow only a few paces from the British flag that Sir Edmund Hillary planted on the summit of Everest just a few days before Princess Elizabeth was crowned in Westminister Abbey." Another favorite of mine is "Chronicle of the Second Plague" in which inhabitants of St. Martin believe that since they have survived the bubonic plague that they are immune from a second plague, a little like the belief many of us hold that lightning would never strike the same place twice. Then there is the narrator in "The Chinaman with the Heads" who meets a gentleman who is trying to get through customs with a box that contains "half a dozen human heads carefully wrapped in linen, with a penetrating odor that led me to believe they had been preserved in formaldehyde."

Mr. Padilla seems to be right smack in the Latin American writers' tradition of magic realism. I understand a new novel will be translated soon into English. I can't wait to read it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a small, well crafted volume, June 5, 2004

By 

declension "adjective" (chicago, il United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Antipodes: Stories (Hardcover)

I came across this slim volume while looking around for short story collections and was pleasantly surpised by the quality of Padilla's writing. This collection reminded me of some of Italo Calvino's stories, with shifts from simplicity to elegance throughout. In under 150 pages you will visit points around globe, including the Gobi desert and a deranged explorer, a sanitorium transformed into a lush garden, and a curious city known for its flour during a time of starvation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Antipodes - Opposite Points on the Earth's Surface, May 19, 2006

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Wildness (Colorado Plateau) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Antipodes: Stories (Hardcover)

Ignacio Padilla really delivers with this collection of eclectic, mesmerizing fables set during various historical times in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Every story is well crafted and character-driven; the settings large, the stories intimate and inviting. Padilla has obviously spent his energies wisely in his choice of words, his characters' plight, and his landscapes' depth.

This book was just a delight to read. It will be one of those books that I look forward to sharing with new people again and again.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.