Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Does anyone know of an english translation? I am hooked but can't read Spanish. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Turns out he's actually from the upper-middle class, but has forsaken that to become a detective.
However, this background gives him the ability to move through all levels of Mexican society smoothly; he knows how things are done. The style's easy, the dialogue's not too over-the-top,and the action tends to roll along, minus a couple of scenes that benefit from the slo-mo action. And the case he's taken on in this novel, the first of the series, is one that he's solving without pay or even recognition--just because it perturbs and troubles him.
Someone is going around dirty, gritty Mexico City strangling women--sometimes in the middle of the day. Intermingled with the attacks on his life and the clues that start coming in are reflections on his failed marriage and the possibility of finding love again when one has given up hope.
But wait! Here she comes! Slightly younger than our hero, Hector, she shares a similar background--upper middle class or wealthy, but drives a race car and knows how to fix it try finding that in Mexico City today, and forget about the 70s! Anonymous for much of the novel, and continually referred to as "the girl with the ponytail" even after her name is revealed, she mirrors him almost exactly--she's vulnerable, has been hurt, but is tough on the outside.
It's precisely because of the author's portrayal of this character that I'm reading this series. Not only does Taibo present us with a "sentimental" yet hard-boiled detective, but he breaks with the conventions of traditional detective novels and thrillers, which relegate female characters to stereotypes, cardboard cut-outs. So the novel explores the detective's sensitive side in portraying this resistance to revealing oneself, to being vulnerable again, while it also portrays the female characters as equals to the detective or protagonist--they help him solve the crime he also acquires an assistant, Marina, halfway through.
Taibo's intent was to break the rules of the mystery-writing game, though I don't know that he intended to in precisely this way am looking into that. Known as the precursor or father to the genre in Mexico, Taibo breaks with convention in several ways. Larsson's Dragon Tattoo series comes to mind, but within Latin America and the US, we still find primarily women writing women--if you know of others besides Larsson and the Inspector Lyndley novels, pls let me know!
View all 9 comments. A heavily politicized noir novel that does a very poor job of making you want to visit Mexico, but is also brutally and beautifully honest, and very lyrical and tender when it needs to be. Some elements of the plot are handed out a bit too hurriedly, but overall it made me want to read its follow-up. Fans of Camilleri's Montalbano series will probably love this book. Avoid if you don't like too much politics in your detective novels.
View 1 comment. Apparentemente senza un nesso logico. Per questo motivo subisce diversi attentati da cui esce piuttosto malconcio. Sep 14, Imanol rated it liked it. Y no es que el libro sea aburrido, pero la trama es un poco confusa y el ritmo muy lento.
El escritor acierta con cinco o seis gags a lo largo de la historia que te arrancan una carcajada, pero, desgraciadamente, poco mas. Esta claro que tiene una prosa envidiable, pero no ha llegado a atraparme, y es lo que se busca al final cuando devoras este genero. Y a parte se gana 64 mil pesos. Sin embargo recordando desvanecidos difuntos se nota que la escencia es la misma.
Se describe a si mismo como un detective diferente al resto. The story of the murder he solves is not really that convincing in this first book it gets better in subsequent volumes but his real strength and perhaps purpose is to give a feeling of what Mexico City was like in the mid's and that he does excellently.
He certainly didn't pick a popular genre in Mexico when he wrote this, and he seems to have pioneered his own approach to novel. His writing style and use of Mexican idiom is quite entertaining as well. La narrativa me causo conflictos. Me supo diferente, tal vez por los saltos de tiempos. Pero la trama, la historia en si, es muy buena. Tiene todos los elementos de una novela negra, aunado claro, del humor negro mejicano. Vamos a seguir la serie, pronto. L'inizio di tutto Come ritrovare dei vecchi amici che non sanno ancora "cosa li aspetta".
Letto per la prima volta nel , non ricordavo un bel po' di dettagli, ma mi era rimasta addosso la sensazione dell'avventura, della solitudine, della stanchezza del protagonista. View all 4 comments. Mar 19, Guille Puerto rated it really liked it. La paradoja de un detective ficticio que se crea a si mismo a base de otros detectives ficticios resulta en interpretaciones llenas de humor negro. Muy recomendable. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
To view it, click here. A la misma vieja ciudad de hierro, tal vez menos poblada, quizas menos hipertrofica, pero con los mismos hijos de puta jugando al ajedrez muy por encima de nuestras cabezas, la misma corrupcion, la misma mala leche, los mismos policias incompetentes, y en medio de ella, Belascoaran, mas jodido que el promedio decide dar un poco la cara por quien esta todavia mas jodido que el, sin demasiadas explicaciones y aun menos metafisica inicia una guerra santa en contra de un sistema al que no puede.
Es una novela corta que se lee rapido, y te hace imaginarte, incansable, aplanado las calles a horas de la madrugada, con un cigarrillo en los dedos y una fanatica determinacion en la mirada; los personajes secundarios rebosan carisma, el antagonista, sin embargo, siempre me ha parecido un poco plano, sin acabar de cobrar forma hasta el final de la novela, pese a ello la calidad del conjunto es incuestionable.
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