Eclipse Fever [Paperback]

Walter Abish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 1994

Alejandro, the literary critic, is the focal point of duplicitous relationships. His wife, Mercedes, is having an affair with Jurud, the American author she has translated into Spanish, and Bonnie, his 17 year old daughter, has run away to Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Abish's best-known work, How German Is It (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980), was hailed for its complex portrait of modern German society--its slick, rational surfaces and aggressively antiseptic architecture built upon a terrain shifting with historical and pyschological doubt. In his first novel since then, Abish applies the same aesthetic to modern Mexico with equally beguiling if less momentous results ( How German Is It ended with a revolutionary, under hypnosis, raising his hand in a Seig Heil! salute). Alejandro is a Mexican literary critic, urbane and sophisticated; his estranged wife Mercedes, a translator, leaves him, ostensibly to teach in the U.S., but Alejandro believes she is actually having an affair with Jurud, a Jewish-American novelist in New York. Alejandro's crisis unfolds against a backdrop of art theft, political chicanery and pernicious intellectual gossip-mongering among the cultural elite of Mexico City. As with most of Abish's work, the dramatic qualities of the plot are mildly diverting, but what fascinates most is its dynamic: the overall narrative structure (representative of History?) is dependent upon individuals solemnly pursuing the satisfaction of their own needs (capitalism?). How this comes to resemble art and story--and how it eclipses the reality of historical forces--is underscored by the purposefully melodramatic ending.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Abish's first novel since the acclaimed 1980 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning How German It Is ( LJ 9/1/80) is a complex, powerful depiction of the wealthy and intellectual in Mexico City and an exploration of the connection between fiction and history. The self-absorbed characters, both Mexican and American, pursue their obscure and shifting desires for material, sexual, and even gustatory pleasures against a backdrop of historical, literary, artistic, and cinematic references, somehow beyond reach of the crumbling Mexican infrastructure. Their disjointed conversations, misheard or deliberately misleading, take place in the fashionable cafes and expensive homes of Mexico City. Several plot lines advance at once; throughout, mistaken identities underscore the interchangeability of our love objects. The novel culminates in acts of incomprehensible, though not surprising, personal and political violence. Highly recommended.
- Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix, Az.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Faber Faber Inc (May 9, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571170269
• ISBN-13: 978-0571170265
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ALL ROADS LEAD TO MEXICO, July 13, 2003

By 

Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eclipse Fever (Nonpareil Books, No 76) (Paperback)

When many events happen at the same time, it takes the human mind a while to sort out the meaning behind them. Such is life and it also goes for Eclipse Fever by Walter Abish. It has a big cast of characters whose lives all intersect at one moment or another. Sometimes I felt lost but the story just kept on dragging me along with it, even when I got confused. It reminded me of life. Chaotic, messy, and beautiful.

Most of the novel is set in 1990's Mexico among the disparate lives of the Mexican elite. We have Alejandro, a literary critic who just happens to be lined up to interview the famous American writer named Jurud, who just happens to be his wife's lover. To tell you how Alejandro gets along with his wife, the first chapter of the novel is called "At One Glance We Can Determine the Years They Will Not Spend Together!" His wife, Mercedes, has gone to America, supposedly to help translate Jurud's newest novel into Spanish but Alejandro knows something more is going on. Jurud's daughter, Bonny, doesn't sit too well with the new living arrangement when Mercedes moves between her and her father. So she decides to run away to Mexico to see a solar eclipse. Preston, an American businessman is designing an elevator in one of the ancient Aztec pyramids as his wife, Rita becomes a nymphomaniac. All these soap opera characters become involved in illegal dealings in Native Indian art which will lead to murder.

The good thing about the book was its spot on characters. They were strongly written, even though Abish's style was not exactly reader friendly. You really got a sense of the Mexican people in the book. It didn't sound like an American writing about Mexico. It's hard to give a good plot summary of any book like this that is more about relationships between characters. This book has it all, love, supense, horror, crime, honor, strength, weakness. Almost anthropological in its richness.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best "Latin-American" Novel in English, May 6, 2007

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eclipse Fever (Nonpareil Books, No 76) (Paperback)

Eclipse Fever reads remarkably like a translation of a novel by Argentine Julio Cortazar or some other Latin writer. Given Abish's control of language, this cannot be an accident, especially since his previous novel "How German is It?" had the same odd effect of reading like a translation of a modern German novel, by Thomas Bernhard perhaps. Even the melodramatic aspects of Eclipse Fever (as noted by other reviewers) have to be understood as deliberately resonating with the characteristic excesses of Latin-American fiction. In other words, Eclipse Fever is a complex, allusive book with a meta-message aimed at very cosmopolitan readers; the previous amazon reviewers, including the editors, seem to me to have missed the point, so I'm glad to note that the buyers' reviews are generally favorable. If you will imagine a very Mexican image--two boa constrictors in a death struggle, each in the act of swallowing the other's tail--and now transfer that image to North American and Hispanic American cultures, you will have my vision of what Abish is getting at in his novel. I don't want to "tell you the story" but rather to challenge your intellectual curiosity. This is not a novel for casual reading on a flight to Cancun; Abish is aiming for the pallid immortality of writing great literature, and I think he achieves it.