Palinuro of Mexico

Palinuro is Aeneas's helmsman in Virgil, the man who falls asleep at the rudder and is lost overboard so the rest of the fleet can reach Italy, and del Paso hangs the entire novel on that borrowed name before a single event has happened: here is a hero pre-marked as the one who won't survive the passage he's steering everyone else through. The medical school setting compounds the joke and the dread at once. Palinuro spends much of the book cataloguing the human body organ by organ, bone by bone, as if enough anatomical precision could stand in for the mortality the name already promised.

His cousin and lover Estefanía is the book's other great organizing obsession, an incestuous relationship the two of them treat with none of the shame the word usually carries, conducted in a room off the Plaza de Santo Domingo where they assemble a skeleton from mismatched bones between bouts of lovemaking, itself a small, comic rehearsal of the anatomy Palinuro is meanwhile mastering for his degree. Del Paso lets love and dissection sit in the same room without irony: Estefanía is the body Palinuro actually desires, catalogued with the same hunger for exhaustive detail he brings to the cadavers.

The novel's climactic chapter, staging the October 2, 1968 massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco through commedia dell'arte, Greek tragedy, and Mexico's own popular theatrical traditions, was so politically dangerous while the government still enforced official silence about the killings that del Paso held it back from the novel's first printings. It wasn't published on its own until 1992, decades after he started writing Palinuro in 1968. Everything before that chapter, the puns, the dictionary parodies, the extravagant cataloguing, reads differently once the reader knows where del Paso has been steering the whole apparatus: an encyclopedic style built for centuries of accumulated language finally has to describe a night the state spent years insisting hadn't happened at all.