05 Jul / Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, translated by Katherine Silver, afterword by Fernanda Melchor [in Shelf Awareness]
Mexican poet, writer, and essayist José Emilio Pacheco’s novella Battles in the Desert returns in a glorious 40th-anniversary edition, re-translated by Katherine Silver from her own decades-old original. Award-winning author Fernanda Melchor appends an illuminating afterword that contextualizes the coming-of-age classic in the Mexican canon.
Carlos, still in primary school, becomes enthralled with a friend’s mother, Mariana, a married politician’s mistress. His obsession engenders a clumsy confession – “I was going to die if I didn’t tell you” – which provokes consequences both comical and traumatic: the local priest inadvertently provides “a practical guide to masturbation”; an ineffectual psychiatrist is consulted; Carlos’s older brother warns of possible violence from the Lothario politician; and Carlos lands in a new school where he’s “again … the foreign intruder.” Years later, he’ll find out what happened to Mariana. Pacheco’s seemingly sparse narrative deftly exposes profound observations about race, privilege, power.
Nothing in Battles in the Desert exists anymore: Pacheco died in 2014, his Mexico City has long disappeared, none of the characters – historical figures included – survive. Clues in the opening chapter (despite a first-sentence denial of “I don’t remember: what year was that?”) date the narrative before 1950: postwar cars, the popular song “Amorcito Corazón,” El Señor Presidente Miguel Alemán. Pacheco serialized the story in 1980; the book was published in 1981. This intriguing novella – which refers to the year 2000 as “unimaginable” – remains compulsory in Mexico’s standard middle and high school curricula. It also ironically reveals how little generations change: “The adults complained about inflation … immorality … overpopulation … foreigners, corruption … the limitless wealth of the few and the abject misery of almost everyone else.” Pacheco’s piercing prescience continues to educate.
Discover: Battles in the Desert, a timeless Mexican classic about young, impossible first love, returns in a marvelous 40th-anniversary edition.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, June 18, 2021
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 1981 (Mexico), 2021 (anniversary edition)