The personal and the political coincide in Agosto y fuga, a novel in which a group of citizens in Mexico’s capital find their intimate lives intertwined with the political events of the day, namely the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the Mexican elections of August, 1994. Though the ‘intense solitude’ of these educated, cosmopolitan characters is convincing, the connection between it and the larger national drama in which this solitude unfolds—the formal axis on which this novel is based--is less so. Unlike Las viudas de los jueves, in which the personal and political are structurally integrated in such a way that the events leading to Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse inform both the novel’s form and the psychological makeup of its characters, I often had the impression that the dramatic historical events of August 1994 were tacked on to an otherwise very engaging novel about relationships. Villegas’ novel requires a seamless integration of micro and macrocosm to succeed, but instead provides a succession of disjunctive registers in which the existential and romantic collide against the political—the latter being replete with acronyms potentially confusing to the Mexican reader. Agosto y fuga is good but only have so.
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Like I said in class, I wonder if these disjunctures are smoother for mexican readers who are familiar with the city and events. Most political references in media and literature are purposefully oblique, leaving half above and half below the surface. I did find it hard to see a connection between them and wondered if it was more metaphorical than literal.
I think that's a really key point here. In Piñeiro's book, the political and economic references seem to keep in mind the non-Argentine reader or at least the reader who is not necessarily familiar with the context leading up to the 2001 crisis. Villegas' book is more local in that sense, and demands more of the reader who is not familiar with the mental and physical maps of Mexico.
I keep coming back to the "mapas mentales", because it is such a striking image. Piñeiro draws these maps for us and leads us through them like María Virginia through the Cascada neighbourhood. By contrast, Villegas seems to want to leave the uninitiated reader on unfamiliar ground, not quite at home in the territory of the book (perhaps like Nora and her father in Mexico City).
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