Just Passing Through

Rating:
Summary: Paco's Postmodern Play
Review: I've long admired Paco Ignacio Taibo II's detective fiction, particularly his series featuring Hector Balascoran Shayne (and even more particularly the book Some Clouds, with its existentialist overtones). When a new Taibo comes into translation, I feel a palpable excitement and anticipation; his hard-boiled characters are strikingly human and his Mexican settings are rich with atmosphere and dense with detail. But I'll admit that I've grown to experience some trepidation about Taibo's non-detective fiction. While his experiments with style and structure are often playfully challenging (take Leonardo's Bicycle, for example), they are just as often difficult to navigate. And while his knowledge of Mexican culture and history (specifically political history) is admirably broad, I've sometimes felt at a loss to understand his allusions to historic figures and, because of this, at a loss as well to fully understand the context of these tales. Such has been the case with Just Passing Through, which mixes fact and fiction, reportage and postmodern play, in exploring the story of revolutionary Sebastian San Vicente. While I've enjoyed the book on one level (it's been advertised as an adventure tale, which is not entirely the case), I had a lurking suspicion that I was missing another level of the story -- even with the annotations provided by translator Martin Michael Roberts to help readers like myself less familiar with Mexican history. While Just Passing Through is a good read, it's not Taibo's most accessible work. And with this in mind, I'd have to say that I'd recommend this one to more serious readers, to those a little more up to a modest challenge, than to fans of Taibo's brilliantly engaging mystery fiction.

Rating:
Summary: eclectic and a fun but short read
Review: Not Taibo's best work but an insightful view into differences between anarchists and communists of the 1920's and 30's. Overall a fun, short read.