Content area
Full Text
Carlos Fuentes. La frontera de cristal: Una novela en nueve cuentos. Mexico City. Alfaguara. 1996 ((C) 1995). 309 pages. ISBN 84-204-8231-5.
In his 1987 novel Cristobal Nonato (Eng. Christopher Unborn, 1989) Carlos Fuentes created a country and gave it a name: Mexamerica, "la primera republica que se independizo de los Estados Unidos y de Mexico." The geographic locus of Fuentes's fictional country in that novel is la frontera, or, as the author would also have it in that same book, "El Norte, tierra de encuentros." Since 1987 much has happened in real Mexamerica, and so too in Fuentes, whose most recent fiction in La frontera de cristal caps a period in his career that saw frequent exchanges with life and people on both sides of the border. Not a few of the pieces in this collection are inscribed to individuals whose involvement in borderland culture is well known to the public.
Although all nine stories in this most recent book by Fuentes fall under the umbrella of a common theme, and in spite of Fuentes's assertion that this is "a novel in nine short stories," the reader would be hard pressed if he tried to comply with the author's injunction to place La frontera de...