FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER
By Carlos Fuentes (translated by Alfred Mac Adam)
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 266 pp.Jimmy Smits (NYPD Blue) has reason to thank Carlos Fuentes. The author's novel The Old Gringo, as a movie, allowed the actor to play opposite screen legend Gregory Peck. The likelihood of The Crystal Frontier finding its way onto film is close to zero. The "novel" can be described more accurately as a collection of inter-related short stories straddling the US/Mexico border.
In his new work, Fuentes displays the wide-ranging palette he has called upon in the past.
With "The Capital Girl," the first story, he introduces "...Michelina's long black hair, floating, glistening, scented more from shampoo than from hairspray - the wondrous, fatal annunciation of her other, hidden soft hair." We know instantly that this character's fate will be of a sensual nature. In the same tale affluence and decadence are brought to the fore with "... garage doors that opened with a stench of old gasoline, involuntarily urinated by herds of Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs that reposed like mastadons within the caves of the garages."
Humor comes from unexpected sources. In "Malintzin of the Manquilas," two female characters discuss the lover of one of them - "He's very macho." "So you told me. And what else does he have?" "A cellular phone." Later, hints of allegory surface when an American matron interacts with her Mexican maid, in echo of US/Mexican relations.
These stories blur the Mexican border. The Rio Bravo/Rio Grande becomes "the river of shifting floors" in passages that are reminiscent of James Joyce in the last pages of Ullyses. Mexico's most respected author completes his work with a fabulous word vista that ends "...poor Mexico, poor United
States, so far from God, so near to each other."
A warning: Fuentes' strength is also his weakness. Reading this work is like a rollercoaster ride of style. You may have to step off now and then to catch your breath. But don't chicken out and wait for the movie. It will be a long time coming.
Alan Egerton Ball
Back To Main Contents
Back To This Issue Table of Contents