Returning as Shadows [Hardcover]

Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Author), Ezra E. Fitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2003

In 1991, Paco Taibo II wrote The Shadow of a Shadow, a book about four men who meet to play dominos in a hotel bar in Mexico City. The time is 1922, and the men are a motley group—a poet who makes a living writing advertisements for patent medicine, a radical Chinese-Mexican union organizer, a lawyer who represents prostitutes, and a newspaper crime reporter who churns out pages of copy "like links of sausage in a chorizo factory." As the story builds, the crime novel becomes a tale of international intrigue.

Returning as Shadows revisits these men nearly twenty years later. Much has changed, in the world and for the four friends. War rages in Europe while the world waits for the in Europe while the world waits for the inevitable entry of the United States. German agents throng Mexico City, working to bring America's southern neighbor into the Axis.

And the four men? They've gone four different ways. Returning as Shadows goes back and forth between these men's lives, slowly drawing the threads back together. Surprises keep popping up. For example, Ernest Hemingway, having overindulged at his Cuban hacienda, is suddenly transported into a poker game with one of the characters.

The men are indeed shadows, their experiences dreamlike but bursting with meaning. Read, and see why Le Monde calls Taibo "one of the best narrative clowns of our time."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Taibo, Mexico's most famous detective novelist, is not your usual plot-bound chronicler of shamuses: "The novel," according to Taibo, "like reality, like the histories we all know and those that befall us, is full of parentheses, pitfalls, ellipses that dance and that jump from side to side with no desire to settle down or to explain themselves." As this sequel to The Shadow of a Shadow (1991) begins, it is 1941, and Mexico, a neutral country, is buzzing with crypto-Nazi espionage. The Germans have three aims: to secure coffee beans for a caffeine-addicted Adolf Hitler, to establish a covert submarine base in the Gulf of Mexico and to complete some occult process involving Hitler's former adviser and guru, Eric Jan Hanussen. Hanussen, who has broken with the Nazis, is disguised as an inmate in a Mexico City nuthouse. His roommate, ex-lawyer Alberto Verdugo, rules as a sort of narrating magus over the story. Three grizzled veterans of radical causes oppose Germany's designs. Tom s Wong, a Chinese-Mexican, is surveilling a German paramilitary cohort deep in the jungles of Chiapas. One-armed Fermin Valencia Taivo ("the Poet"), an intelligence agent in Mexico City, is busting up meetings of pro-Nazi types. Meanwhile, journalist Pioquinto Manterola is getting intimations about the Holocaust from political emigres. Taibo tosses in visits from Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway, cuts quickly between times, places and topics, sprinkles his text with knowing anachronisms, and solves and dissolves his mysteries with a number of deus ex machinas. This is Taibo at his most laid back. His nostalgic radicalism will please some, but others will find the novel's smug attitude and one-dimensional characters a disappointment after the satisfactions of sparkling efforts like Just Passing Through (2000).
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Noirish, funny, with touches of the mystical and macabre, this sequel to The Shadow of the Shadow (1991) stands on its own merits. The shifting points of view of the large cast of characters (including cameo appearances by Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene) and complex plot require close reading. In 1941-1942's Mexico, circumstances spur the efforts of Fermin, a government spy, and Manterola, a journalist, to uncover a bizarre Nazi conspiracy--one that implicates a government minister, is directed by German Nazis, and involves Mexicans of German descent. The minutiae of daily life define the main characters, bring them to life, and create a bond with the reader. Close attention to the novel's meticulous, intricate structure pays off in increased understanding of plot and characters and delight in the author's whimsical clues and cues. Although Taibo writes within Latin American traditions of political fiction and mystical realism, his fiction is highly original and quite distinct from that of any other writer. Not an easy read, but for lovers of involved, knotty fiction, a rewarding one. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (January 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312301561
• ISBN-13: 978-0312301569
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,241,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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