![]() ![]() Meanwhile, a former president fidgets in retirement, hungry for a return to power. But Nicolás is a front, employed to pave the way for María’s longtime lover, Secretary of State Bernal Herrera. Machiavellian beauty María del Rosario Galván schemes to place her handsome, sexually resourceful young “protégé,” Nicolás Valdivia, on “the eagle’s throne” (i.e., Mexico’s presidency, limited by law to a single six-year term). The politically active find they’re able to communicate only by writing letters-and Fuentes’s richly comic premise begins to disclose a teeming little world of interconnected intrigues. Mexico’s conduit to the rest of the world-its satellite communication system (which is routed through Miami)-mysteriously goes down. (and its chief executive, Condoleeza Rice) by formally protesting the presence of American troops in neighboring Colombia, and threatening to follow OPEC’s lead in setting prices for oil shipped north. ![]() In the year 2020, lame-duck Mexican president Lorenzo Terán provokes the U.S. First published in Spanish in 2002, the veteran Mexican author’s ebullient revival of the epistolary novel casts a frosty eye on future (and contemporary) geopolitics. ![]()
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