Horizontal vertigo A city called Mexico

Review by Booklist Review

Mexican novelist and journalist Villoro (The Reef, 2017) applies his witty and incisive pen to the monster that is Mexico City, aka Chilangopolis. Villoro put together this collection of essays written throughout his career to create a narrative that most resembles a road map and that should not necessarily be read from front to back but, rather, unfolded at random or with specific intent. Intentional reading can be guided by recurring categories: "Places" (Tepito, Santo Domingo), "City Characters" (the milkman, the quack), "Ceremonies" (coffee with poets, the Passion at Iztapalapa), "Shocks" (street children, the influenza epidemic), "Living in the City" (Villoro's memories), and "Crossings" (changes in the city over time). Villoro roves through a variety of genres, from high comedy involving a bureaucratic encounter to memoir to the tragedy of the 1985 earthquake. Villoro's voice is engaging, and the subject matter is fascinating. Unfortunately, the translation is clunky and over-literal, making some passages difficult to follow, but overall, this is an unusual and rewarding read for all who love or are intrigued by Mexico City.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist and journalist Villoro (God Is Round) delivers an erudite and idiosyncratic look at Mexico City and the "fears, illusions, utter annoyance, and whims of living in this place." Combining the intricacies and peculiarities of the contemporary city with recollections of his childhood there, Villoro describes, for example, how at the age of "ten or twelve," he and friend would go on hours-long expeditions by sneaking into the back of a milk truck. For people waiting in line to engage with one of the "infinite tasks of government" that take place in Mexico City, a street vendor's torta de tama "works as a tranquilizer," Villoro writes, "but only as long as you're chewing it... after, it becomes a long-term annoyance, harder to digest than the bureaucratic business itself." He also describes the city's cafés, its commuting culture (certain streets "are a parking lot that sometimes moves"), pre-Hispanic mythologies, and the lives of its street children. Throughout, Villoro weaves in literary references (Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Ezra Pound) and offers stinging critiques of the country's plutocracy, whose "luxury depends on poverty." Though Villoro's fragmentary approach can be disorienting, this is a stimulating portrait of one of the world's most mind-bending metropolises. (Mar.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Journalist and novelist Villoro has been writing about Mexico City for over 20 years. Originally published in Spanish in 2018, his latest book brings his wealth of experiences to bear. Through a collection of personal stories, geographical essays, social histories, and biographies, he weaves a nonlinear account of Mexico City--because the story of Mexico City is nonlinear. It is a city that exists in and out of chronology and is both defined by and defines its space. He explores the city's vast history, from prehistory and Spanish colonial entradas to the present, and wanders through its spaces in what may appear to be a haphazard format. But he has a reason for grouping the stories by places, characters, ceremonies, and more. His design gives readers the opportunity to decide on their own where to start and where to end, much like a traveler or visitor would decide what spaces to explore. In so doing, readers create their own personal version of the story. VERDICT Villoro is not for the casual reader but for those who are interested in a deeply complex yet personal social history of Mexico City. The book serves as a nice complement to The Mexico City Reader (2004).--Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A deeply learned appreciation of the author's native Mexico City. Trained as a sociologist but well known to Spanish-speaking readers as one of Mexico's most acclaimed novelists, Villoro writes appreciatively of a city that is constantly changing--and whose landmarks are different for each generation, if they haven't been torn down in the course of rebuilding or destroyed by earthquakes. For him, the "outstanding sign of the times is the Latin American Tower," built in 1956, the year of the author's birth, and then one of the rare buildings in Mexico City to be more than a few stories tall, since the plateau on which the city sits is both tectonically active and so sandy that building collapse is a real danger. In his lifetime, Villoro notes, the territory embraced by the city megalopolis "has spread out like wildfire" and "grown seven hundred times." Growth, he adds, "meant spread," so much so that to find Villoro's house, located on a street named for the revolutionary figure Carranza, you would have to know which one of 412 streets and avenues named for Carranza it was on. Natural and cultural landmarks are matters of memory and nostalgia, he writes, and since "Mexico-Tenochtitlán buried its lake, and the smog blotted out the volcanoes," there are few points of orientation. As such, memory has to make up for the destruction of the environment. Along his leisurely, illuminating path, Villoro delivers an essential update of Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). He can be both brittle and funny, as when he dissects the overstaffed and bureaucratized retail sector. "Although overpopulation is one of our specialties," he writes, "we have an abundance of stores where there are few customers and an excessive number of workers," one of whom, the manager, serves as "a final potentate, a Chinese emperor in his Forbidden City." Celebrating food, wandering through earthquake-struck ruins, reflecting on literary heroes, Villoro makes an excellent Virgil. An unparalleled portrait of a city in danger of growing past all reasonable limits. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Entry into the Labyrinth Chaos Is Not Something You Improvise For almost twenty years I've been writing about Mexico City, a mélange of chronicles, essays, and personal memories. The juxtapositions the cityscape entails--the tire shop opposite the colonial church, the corporate skyscraper next to the taco stand--led me to create a hybrid genre, a natural response to an environment where the present is affected by stimuli from the pre-Hispanic world, the Viceroyalty, modern and postmodern culture. How many different times does Mexico City contain? The area is so huge you might think it consists of different time zones. And at the outset of 2001, we were actually on the verge of creating more of them. The newly elected president Vicente Fox suggested inaugurating daylight savings time, but the head of the government of the then Federal District, Manuel López Obrador, refused to institute it. Since there are streets where the sidewalk on one side of the street is in Mexico City and the one opposite it is in the State of Mexico, the possibility of gaining or losing an hour by crossing the street became a possibility. The politicians stubbornly stuck to their chronological barriers until, unfortunately, the National Supreme Court declared it absurd to have two time zones. So we lost our chance to walk a few yards and pass from federal time to capital time. In this valley of passions, space, like time, suffers variations, begin­ning with nomenclature. For decades, we used the term "Mexico City" to talk about the sixteen neighborhoods that made up the Federal Dis­trict and the new zones annexed to it from the State of Mexico. The term was a handy shortcut, so linguistic academics advised writing the word city with a lower-case "c." After 2016, the Federal District became Mexico City and acquired the same prerogatives held by the other states in the republic, but its name remained ambiguous because it does not include the entire metropolis (as did the moniker Mexico city) but only a part of it, which previously had been the Federal District. Welcome to the Valley of Anáhuac, where space and time converge! Syncretism has been our most helpful formula for creating a city. This is true in terms of both building and remembering it. The different generations of a single family turn the city into a palimpsest of memories, where grandmothers reveal hidden mysteries to their granddaughters. Take, for example, the intersection called Central Axis (formerly San Juan de Letrán) and Madero in the heart of the capital. My paternal grandmother lived opposite the Alameda Central, and her generation's idea of "modern" was the Palace of Fine Arts, that strange deployment of marble evocative of Ottoman fantasies. My generation associated it with a Las Vegas casino. For my mother, the modernity of that zone was embodied in the Lady Baltimore coffee shop, of European inspiration. For me, the outstanding sign of the times is the Latin American Tower, standing on that corner and built in the year I was born, 1956. Finally, for my daughter, the concept of the new is opposite the tower in Frikiplaza, a three-story commercial building dedicated to manga, anime, and other products of Japanese popular culture. So on that corner the "modernities" of four generations in my own family coexist. Instead of a single time and place, we live in the sum and juncture of different times and places, a codex simultaneously physical and one composed of memories of crossed destinies. Without realizing I was beginning a book, I conceived the first of these texts in 1993, when I visited Berlin to present the German translation of Argón's Shot . Since my novel aspired to be a secret map of the Federal District, my publisher suggested I consult an issue of the magazine Kursbuch because it contains an essay on Soviet city planning by the Russian-German philosopher Boris Groys: "The Metro as Utopia." It was a revelation. To my surprise, the Soviet underground's mirror image is our Collective Transport System. The following year, I spent a semester at Yale University. I was guided by Groys's essay and an anthology titled Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte (The Unreality of Cities) compiled by Klaus R. Scherpe, that I found in the labyrinth of Sterling Memorial Library; the book, which tried to understand the city as a unitary discourse, inspired me to write an essay on the Mexican metro system. It was the beginning of a project that grew and changed over the course of years along with its theme and a plan that could accommodate its eventual expansion. Faced with the proliferation of pages, I came to realize that I didn't need an editor so much as an urban planner. Horizontal Vertigo includes various kinds of testimonial devices. This book combines a multitude of genres, and, in a certain sense, it is various books. Structurally, it follows the criterion of zapping . The episodes do not move forward in linear fashion, but, instead, follow the zigzagging of memory or the detours endemic to city traffic. The reader may follow from beginning to end, or choose, like a flâneur or a subway rider, the routes that interest him most: that of the characters, the places, the surprises, the ceremonies, the transitions, the personal stories (they're all personal stories, but the sections gathered under the rubric "City Characters" emphasize that aspect). Excerpted from Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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