Product Description

This truly magnificent achievement (William H. Gass), Walter Abish s first novel since the award-winning How German Is It, set in the high-gloss world of contemporary Mexico s societal and intellectual elite. Eclipse Fever explores the reaches of corruption and the limits of political, economic, and cultural power. Underlying its concern with art, with emotional attachments, and with the differing needs of men and women is a perpetual current of suspense and psychological tension.

Among the multifaceted characters whose lives interlock are Alejandro, a once-prominent literary critic fallen into disfavor; his estranged wife, Mercedes, whom he suspects of openly conducting an affair with an American writer; Bonny, the writer s runaway daughter, who is made to witness a calamitous sequence of events that culminates in murder; Preston, an American industrialist, and his sexually frustrated wife, Rita; and the unscrupulous art dealer Pech. As the lives of these people press together, as they buckle and collapse, the novel holds up a mirror to a moment in which we lived the end of a millennium, of an era and to the perils, temptations, and hysteria that lie just below the surface of the so-called American century.

"May well be one of the handful of essential American works emanating from the decade preceding the end of the second millennium."
Harold Bloom, Washington Post

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1415761 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 335 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Abish's best-known work, How German Is It (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980), was hailed for its complex portrait of modern German society--its slick, rational surfaces and aggressively antiseptic architecture built upon a terrain shifting with historical and pyschological doubt. In his first novel since then, Abish applies the same aesthetic to modern Mexico with equally beguiling if less momentous results ( How German Is It ended with a revolutionary, under hypnosis, raising his hand in a Seig Heil! salute). Alejandro is a Mexican literary critic, urbane and sophisticated; his estranged wife Mercedes, a translator, leaves him, ostensibly to teach in the U.S., but Alejandro believes she is actually having an affair with Jurud, a Jewish-American novelist in New York. Alejandro's crisis unfolds against a backdrop of art theft, political chicanery and pernicious intellectual gossip-mongering among the cultural elite of Mexico City. As with most of Abish's work, the dramatic qualities of the plot are mildly diverting, but what fascinates most is its dynamic: the overall narrative structure (representative of History?) is dependent upon individuals solemnly pursuing the satisfaction of their own needs (capitalism?). How this comes to resemble art and story--and how it eclipses the reality of historical forces--is underscored by the purposefully melodramatic ending.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Abish's first novel since the acclaimed 1980 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning How German It Is ( LJ 9/1/80) is a complex, powerful depiction of the wealthy and intellectual in Mexico City and an exploration of the connection between fiction and history. The self-absorbed characters, both Mexican and American, pursue their obscure and shifting desires for material, sexual, and even gustatory pleasures against a backdrop of historical, literary, artistic, and cinematic references, somehow beyond reach of the crumbling Mexican infrastructure. Their disjointed conversations, misheard or deliberately misleading, take place in the fashionable cafes and expensive homes of Mexico City. Several plot lines advance at once; throughout, mistaken identities underscore the interchangeability of our love objects. The novel culminates in acts of incomprehensible, though not surprising, personal and political violence. Highly recommended.
- Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix, Az.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Preston Hollier, a wealthy American developer, has traduced two young rising-star Mexican intellectuals into doing his bidding under the guise of undertaking restoration and conservation of the Mayan pyramids and antiquities. Hollier means to loot everything, of course (``Ownership in Mexico is a frame of mind''), and has a network that includes a rotten American pre-Columbian art dealer; his wayward wife, Rita; various museum administrators and high government officials. The relative ease with which clerks bow to power is a theme here. But what comes over more strongly, annoyingly for the reader, is the postmodernist (and pass‚-seeming) stylistics. Abish--no surprise from the author of How German Is It (1980)--loves question-sentences so much that he constructs whole paragraphs made of them). There are fractured narrative, hard-bitten dialogue, banal and barren landscapes (``The corroded gas pumps in front had not seen service in years, despite the misleading sign: CHEVRON--SERVICE WITH A SMILE. Above the entrance, the sign in red, its first two letters missing, announced RAGE''), the high-culture milieux of restaurants and galleries. The atmospheric chill is glacial, stiffly enforced (at the cost of a reader's wondering why certain characters, such as a reclusive American novelist and his teenaged daughter, are even in the book in the first place). Everyone's a shard, a fragment of the generalized paranoia--but in the crazing, Abish shatters his novel as well, and you read uninvolved, from too far back, undisturbed (except, easily, by scenes of cruelty). Working with a basic Manichaean palette used before (and better) by William Gaddis, Robert Stone, and Evan Connell, Abish seems to struggle throughout to pull together what he aesthetically prefers to keep separate--and the strain shows. Intelligent but inert. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

ALL ROADS LEAD TO MEXICO
When many events happen at the same time, it takes the human mind a while to sort out the meaning behind them. Such is life and it also goes for Eclipse Fever by Walter Abish. It has a big cast of characters whose lives all intersect at one moment or another. Sometimes I felt lost but the story just kept on dragging me along with it, even when I got confused. It reminded me of life. Chaotic, messy, and beautiful.

Most of the novel is set in 1990's Mexico among the disparate lives of the Mexican elite. We have Alejandro, a literary critic who just happens to be lined up to interview the famous American writer named Jurud, who just happens to be his wife's lover. To tell you how Alejandro gets along with his wife, the first chapter of the novel is called "At One Glance We Can Determine the Years They Will Not Spend Together!" His wife, Mercedes, has gone to America, supposedly to help translate Jurud's newest novel into Spanish but Alejandro knows something more is going on. Jurud's daughter, Bonny, doesn't sit too well with the new living arrangement when Mercedes moves between her and her father. So she decides to run away to Mexico to see a solar eclipse. Preston, an American businessman is designing an elevator in one of the ancient Aztec pyramids as his wife, Rita becomes a nymphomaniac. All these soap opera characters become involved in illegal dealings in Native Indian art which will lead to murder.

The good thing about the book was its spot on characters. They were strongly written, even though Abish's style was not exactly reader friendly. You really got a sense of the Mexican people in the book. It didn't sound like an American writing about Mexico. It's hard to give a good plot summary of any book like this that is more about relationships between characters. This book has it all, love, supense, horror, crime, honor, strength, weakness. Almost anthropological in its richness.

The Best "Latin-American" Novel in English
Eclipse Fever reads remarkably like a translation of a novel by Argentine Julio Cortazar or some other Latin writer. Given Abish's control of language, this cannot be an accident, especially since his previous novel "How German is It?" had the same odd effect of reading like a translation of a modern German novel, by Thomas Bernhard perhaps. Even the melodramatic aspects of Eclipse Fever (as noted by other reviewers) have to be understood as deliberately resonating with the characteristic excesses of Latin-American fiction. In other words, Eclipse Fever is a complex, allusive book with a meta-message aimed at very cosmopolitan readers; the previous amazon reviewers, including the editors, seem to me to have missed the point, so I'm glad to note that the buyers' reviews are generally favorable. If you will imagine a very Mexican image--two boa constrictors in a death struggle, each in the act of swallowing the other's tail--and now transfer that image to North American and Hispanic American cultures, you will have my vision of what Abish is getting at in his novel. I don't want to "tell you the story" but rather to challenge your intellectual curiosity. This is not a novel for casual reading on a flight to Cancun; Abish is aiming for the pallid immortality of writing great literature, and I think he achieves it.