| | |  Entertainment | Books | July 2008 
Frank McLynn's Top 10 Books About Mexico
 Guardian UK
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Frank McLynn is the author of Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution. His previous books include biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Gustav Jung and Napoleon, and several works relating to the Jacobite movement.
1. The Poems of Juana de la Cruz
(perhaps especially Rendonillas)
What Emily Dickinson is to the Protestant feminine sensibility, Sister de la Cruz is to the Catholic. Both were notable exceptions to Robert Graves's rule that the poet, needing inspiration from a muse, must be male.
2. The Eagle and the Serpent by Martin Luis Guzman
My favourite of all books written on the Mexican revolution. Brilliant on the events of 1910-20 and positively eye-popping on the personalities, especially Pancho Villa and Rodolfo Fierro.
3. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
What is there to say about this novel that has not been said dozens of times before? Even more than Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, Greene's whisky priest is the locus classicus of the sinner nearer to God than are the devout.
4. The Plumed Serpent by DH Lawrence
Not one of Lawrence's best novels, but containing some of the shrewdest insights ever penned on Mexico. For example: "a country where men despise sex and live for it... which is suicide."
5. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
Again, comment seems superfluous after all that has been said about this masterpiece. If you want to know what Latin America does and does not owe to Spain, this is the book. For my money Fuentes, even more than his exact contemporary Garcia Marquez, is 'the' Latin American novelist.
6. The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
A briliant, fictionalised account of Ambrose Bierce's last days - what might have happened and even, given Bierce's final letter, what should have happened.
7. Mornings in Mexico by DH Lawrence
If you read only one book of travellers' tales on Mexico, it must be this one. A magnificent blood-and-ganglion pagan response to the primeval savagery south of the Rio Grande.
8. Lawless Roads by Graham Greene
As Mornings in Mexico is to The Plumed Serpent, so is this to The Power and the Glory and, to make things even more 'organic', it in turn contains reflections on Lawrence's original observations.
9. Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
As a one-time gringo in Latin America my taste reflects an abiding interest in the clash between Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic cultures. This novel is currently underrated but the alcoholic consul and his night-sea journey on the Day of the Dead make a unique impact.
10. Beyond The Mexique Bay by Aldous Huxley
The patrician Huxley's de haut en bas attitude, evident even from the title (a quotation from Marvell), can at times be wearying. Even so, this most jaundiced view of Mexico ever written by a talented outsider is continually incisive, stimulating and argumentative. |
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