8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Snow White beats Dr.Frankenstein, February 18, 2010
This small collection is quite a fast read. It is filled with completely different styles and the translation is very good. It has a lot of interesting typical "mexicanisms" (spanish local terms) and all the stories endings will keep you at the edge of your seat, leaving you to resolve many and others keep your mind spinning.
The difference in styles will sometimes make it difficult for you to finish a story and quickly move to the next. But that is good too. I don't believe the level of talent across writers or stories is the same. It is a little bit more than taste, it has to do with depth. Nothing wrong with it, just that -in my opinion, out of the 12 stories I believe nine are excellent and three are just fillers. That is why I rate them 4/5.
I particularly liked the most modern stories since they all are somewhat contemporary. I think the titles and the way they were classified is not the best. As a Mexican living in this great city I find most details impressively familiar and easy to relate with. So if you have been in Mexico City this book will make you feel you came back and knew a little bit more than you wanted to do in person.
The noir 'genre' or 'sub-genre' if such, requires you to fill in many blanks and that's what makes it so interesting. I believe this aspect is very well executed across the different stories in this short book. All of them, even the fillers.
My personal favorites of the 12 stories are Myriam Laurini's and Oscar de La Borbolla's. They are so real and depict the everyday life of this city so right they are quite compelling. Right at the end of the introduction, which I think is excellent -you'll see why Snow White beats Dr.Frankenstein. Highly recommended.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A City Best Loved from Afar, June 14, 2010
This review is from: Mexico City Noir (Akashic Noir) (Paperback)
"Mexico City Noir" is a collection of 12 crime-related short stories with settings in the various neighborhoods of Mexico City, from its richest to its poorest and most dangerous ones. The most intriguing idea behind publisher Akashic's Noir series, of which this book is one of many, is that each collection strives to give the reader a good feel for life in the city in which the stories are set. I did not get much of a feel for the city of Boston when I read "Boston Noir" (the only other book in the series I have read), but this collection is a different story, pun intended. The tales vary widely in tone and style but they all seem to have one theme at their core: the corrupt police system of Mexico City is more dangerous to the common citizen than the criminals the police are supposedly trying to control.
This collection is unusual in another way. This is one of the rare times that the best thing about a short story collection just might be its preface. Editor Paco Ignacio Taibo II has written a striking description of life in Mexico City in the book's preface entitled "Snow White vs. Dr. Frankenstein." Taibo obviously loves his city and he correctly finds it to be an exciting and exotic locale in which to set contemporary Mexican fiction. However,Taibo is quick to describe how life for the average citizen of Mexico City is governed by the ever present reality that the local police are to be more feared than trusted. The stories that follow his preface illustrate just how dangerous local policemen can be and why they are such a threat to those they are paid to protect, even to the point that victims of petty crime are often afraid to report the crime to authorities.
Some of the stories are set in contemporary Mexico City; others go back decades in time. Some are told in a rather straightforward manner, some are a little harder to grasp, and one of them reads like something imagined during a bad trip on LSD. What they have in common is an excellent translation into English and the theme that the real danger in Mexico City is a police force that is so very often itself on the wrong side of the law.
These are stories of police brutality, forced confessions, bribes, rapes and assassinations by police gangs, corrupt priests and nuns, transsexuals, homosexual rapes, gangs of children on the city's streets, homeless people who dare not stop moving during the day for fear of police harassment, and much worse. Those responsible for promoting Mexican tourism cannot be happy with books like this one because the overall impression it leaves with non-Mexican readers is a warning for gringos to stay the hell out of the city for their own good.
Bottom line, this is pretty good noir style fiction but it is definitely of the more depressing variety.
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