Battles in the Desert (40th Anniversary Edition)

by José Emilio Pacheco, Katherine Silver (Translator)

Overview

This heart-breaking novella is a key work of 20th-century dystopian Mexican literature and sadly all too apropos today

This landmark novella—one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times—offers a child’s-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in “the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods.” A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child’s left to ponder “how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness.” When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: “So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Alemán’s regime,” with “the face of El Señor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse.” Sound familiar?
      Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend’s young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader’s skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811230957
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Author of the well-known novel Battles in the Desert, José Emilio Pacheco won the Mexican National Poetry Prize, the Premio José Asunción Silva Award, and the Cervantes Prize. He lived in Mexico City until his death in 2014.

Katherine Silver's award-winning translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Daniel Sada, César Aira, Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. The author of Echo Under Story, she volunteers as an interpreter for asylum seekers.

Editorial Reviews

"An intensely felt vision of life: abruptly we realize we have been led—almost trapped—into thoughtfulness. Mr. Pacheco has said he cannot believe his work could be of interest to anyone outside of Mexico City. True, his work is not an export commodity—precisely why it is worth exporting."

New York Times Book Review

"His work is universal, part of the eternal glory of literature."

Carlos Fuentes

"An exceptional poet of daily life, impeccable."

USA TODAY

"What may be the most beloved fictional work to a nation of 130 million people. Battles in the Desert—recently reissued by New Directions to honor the fortieth anniversary of its first publication in Spanish—plays in Mexican culture a role similar to Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in the United States. Everybody has read it."

Book Post - Àlvaro Enrigue

"How can such a tiny novella contain so many lessons in perception? The vessel is a schoolboy named Carlos, whose father owns a soap factory in Mexico City in the late 1940s...70 pages of deep submergence in experience and sensation."

The New York Times - Molly Young

★ 2021-03-31
This coming-of-age story, originally published in 1981, explores the intensity of childhood passion even as it mourns the passing of a version of Mexico City subsumed by the tidal wave of consumer-based globalism.

Carlos is a child of the Mexican middle class, which is made up of “typical wannabes,” according to his brutish older brother, Héctor. During the post–World War II presidency of Miguel Alemán, Carlos’ Mexico City is poised on the dividing line between a way of living informed by traditional culture and the wave of industrialization, importation, and consumer marketing designed to “whiten the taste of the Mexicans.” Carlos’ father owns a failing soap factory which is being outcompeted by North American detergent brands, and his mother “despises anyone who [isn’t] from Jalisco,” which would seem to include Carlos and his younger sister, the only two of her five children not born in Guadalajara. Carlos takes a more egalitarian view of the national and ethnic identities of the people who surround him—whether it is his classmate Jim, who was born in San Francisco and speaks both English and Spanish with no identifying accent; Toru, who is Japanese and spent his early childhood in an internment camp; or scholarship student Rosales, who is from one of the worst slums in the city, Carlos believes that “nobody chooses how they’re born” and manages to float fairly seamlessly among the playground tribes. When Carlos meets Jim’s mother—the beautiful Mariana, rumored mistress of a high-ranking member of Alemán’s inner circle—his aimless drifting develops sudden purpose. In spite of his young age, Carlos falls deeply in love with Mariana. As his passion becomes obsessive, Carlos goes out of his way to gather information about Mariana from her son, to find excuses to stop by Jim’s house after school, and, finally, to sneak out of school in order to confess his love. The subsequent overreaction to Carlos’ actions by his parents, school officials, psychologists, and friends turns the order of Carlos’ life upside down, leading in a circuitous way to the family’s eventual departure from Mexico to a new life as immigrants in America. A tender and unequivocal exploration of the strength of a child’s passion, Pacheco’s work treats the passing of the Mexico City of his youth with the same wistful longing as he does Carlos' love, which, being secret and silent, is the most hopeless type of love and thus also the saddest.

A fresh translation of this classic of 20th-century Mexican literature, ready for a new audience to savor.

Kirkus Reviews