Mexico: Stories

Read 2 1/2 stories. All the characters seem too complacent to me.

Taken individually, these are terrific stories. There's a kind of sameness to them, however. Always there is a terrible crime, a killing or maiming, usually carried out by a gang or drug dealer. The author knows Mexico better than I do–I haven't been there for ten years–but he paints a very bleak picture. I still recommend the book, but I wouldn't read it all at once the way I did. Read a story, savor it, and wait a bit before you read the next one.

I enjoyed the writing but was turned off by some of the generalization of Mexico. It felt very focused on providing an outside perspective of life in Mexico but sometimes the “insights” cane across as wrong or stereotypical. For instance in the third or fourth story the line “the older men - say about fifty-five - they don't care about being faithful to their wives.” This is a sweeping generalization that is relatively problematic.