Product Description

Conceived exactly nine months before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, the narrator of Christopher Unborn spends the novel waiting to be born. But what kind of world will he be delivered into? "Makesicko City," as the punning narrator calls it, is not doing well in this alternate, worst-case-scenario 1992. Politicians are selling pieces of their country to the United States. A black, acid rain falls relentlessly, forewarning of the even worse ecological catastrophes to come. Gangs of children, confined to the slums, terrorize their wealthy neighbors. A great novel of ideas and a work of aesthetic boldness, Christopher Unborn is a unique, and quite funny, work from one of the twentieth century's most respected authors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2012370 in Books
• Published on: 2010-02-23
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.56" h x 6.12" w x 9.02" l, 1.77 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In a return to the broad, densely populated narrative characteristic of his early work, Fuentes brackets this account of Mexico (and the U.S.) in the near future with the conception and birth of its narrator. Christopher's story begins with his parents copulating on the beach on Epiphany in 1992, hoping their offspring will win a national contest by being the first child born on Columbus Day, the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. An omniscient, participating Christopher tells of a highly diminished Mexico (Yucatan has been sold to Club Mediterranee), so polluted that excrement rains on the beach where he is conceived. With nearly every stylistic device known to modern fictionists, Christopher-the-foetus observes his parents, uncles, maiden aunts, national leaders, tourists, rock musicians, and recounts outrageous incidents, past and present, that defy summarizing. Will Christopher survive them? Will Mexico? Should he want to be born? Despite the wealth of ideas and hilarious inventions (all superbly translated by MacAdam), Fuentes refuses to make a story out of any of this. His novel aggressively advances an esthetics that goes beyond modernism to a kind of deconstruction of events, insisting that the truth of life lies in its circular, spiraling subjectivity. Though witty, erudite and incisive, Fuentes cannot overcome the storytelling obstacle he has willfully set up.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"In Christopher Unborn, Carlos Fuentes has imagined the worst for his country's near future, but he's done it with such humor, verve, invention, erudition and baroque whirligig plotting that the result is a vital, hopeful book, a great salvage operation in the trash heaps of Western culture, Spanish literature and Mexican history."

Ingram
Mexico, 1991: Black acid rain falls on "Makesicko City", the most polluted, most populated city in the world. Amid this apocalyptic landscape a prize is being offered to the first child born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. That child is the narrator of this passionate, savage novel by one of the world's preeminent writers.