A city and a child grow, they transform and deform together, dragged along without the possibility of immediate resistance by the force of a historical process that is apparently blind and senseless: individual lives and a collective existence that is dominated by frustration and the impotence that the author discovers in his native city of Mexico. Throughout this exemplary novel, a true masterpiece of short narrative, Jose Emilio Pacheco brings about an implacable and lucid revenge with reality that all of a generation was forced to live. From such a start, rescuing for our collective critical memory one of the most instructive stages in which we now recognise as our long and accidental historical paths, the author offers the best response to the anguished final consideration of the protagonist: "This city is finished. The country has been terminated. There is no memory in Mexico for those years. And no one cares: of this horror who can feel nostalgia."
