Fuentes Epic Given New Life

At nine months, a human fetus has 100 billion neurons at its disposal. While most devote their 100 billion to such mundane pursuits as hearing or kicking, the title hero in Carlos Fuentes’ novel “Christopher Unborn” spins 500-plus pages of giddy prose, interspersed with song lyrics, shape poems, plays, and political ads.

Sixteen years after “Christopher”’s first edition in English, the non-profit Dalkey Archive Press gives this loud and incorrigible work by Mexico’s most famous novelist a much-deserved rebirth in American bookstores.

In the nine months preceding his birth on Oct. 12, 1992 (the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ arrival), Christopher reconstructs the web of romances and hatreds, schemes and coincidences that caused his conception and will shape his destiny.

He begins, naturally, with his parents, but their tumultuous relationship and checkered pasts necessitate layer upon layer of plot that eventually include everyone from an anarchistic hippie-rock band to Mexico’s top echelons of political and social power.

The reasons Christopher cites for his omniscience are hopelessly muddled and one of the story’s weaknesses, ranging from a collective memory stored in one’s genes to the suggestion that the real narrator might be a teenage Christopher forging his past.

The novel runs more smoothly when the bizarre, the supernatural, and the downright impossible are delivered deadpan and unexplained. In this mode we meet a kaleidoscopic whirl of characters: scientist grandparents who invent an Inconsumable Taco to end Mexican hunger, man-eating apocalyptic coyotes, and Machiavellian politicians who hide microchips in sugar to read opponents’ minds over morning coffee.

Christopher’s voice leaps in style from snake oil charlatan to coke addict to dyspeptic political pundit. A prenatal savant, he fires off puns and bawdy jokes with a facility alternately Shakespearean and sophomoric. While the narrator never loses steam—sentences regularly stretch over one hundred words—readers might occasionally wish he’d pause to let the rest of us recover from the latest verbal landslide.

I wish, for example, there were a few more scenes like that of the narrator’s Uncle Fernando air-dropped into a remote and impoverished Native American community. The near-lunar landscape, its equally alien and wordless inhabitants, and the echoes of pre-Colombian rite and myth manage, for nine pages, to hold in thrall the “civilized” characters and, I suspect, Fuentes himself.

Even more stunning are Fuentes’ descriptions of the overlooked wonders of the human body. An elbow, the parting of hair, the scent of an armpit—these details become objects of ecstatic worship or muted reverence.

This exquisite poetry remains miraculously untainted by the surrounding grimy carnival of lust, corruption, and absurdity.

Christopher Unborn anticipates a reader versed in the “Western canon” who will appreciate the novel’s continuous literary allusions and the periodic surfacings of a meta-textual subplot about authors and readers.

It is an anarchic zoo of people, events, and opinions swarming in the monstrous, beautiful, incomprehensible Mexico of the eighties and nineties. Though the narrator’s world is constantly on the verge of hysterical collapse, his storytelling is so magnificent that I only wish readers could follow Christopher, born.

—Staff writer Laura E. Kolbe can be reached at lkolbe@fas.harvard.edu.