Translation Rights TQE / The Book of Passions

 “Nothing justifies us, there are no explanations, only passions,” says one of the characters, and that declaration gives the measure of excesses that seem about to explode in each of this book’s thirteen stories that, threaded together, compose this shattered social fresco.

In a place called Puerto Solar all passions flow uncontained. The irruption of “El Hechicero”, a prodigious bullfighter, incites a revolt among the fans and lets loose the jealousy among a group of friends that share an ardent lust for Mónica. A journalist, fed up with the corrupt director of the newspaper for which he works, opts to quit only to fall into a trap and see himself involved in various murders. Aldo, a gambler with bad luck, wants to win over Elena for her money; but when she invites him to meet her disturbed family and the frightening nanny, she will throw him into the world of death and madness. While a butcher, in love with a woman out of his reach, turns into a policeman and a pair of twins run away from their widowed father who attempts to kill them. In Puerto Solar, Judgment Day is imminent, under the disguise of a fanatical and brutish war between the blind and the lame. In Puerto Solar there is no pity nor mercy, and the only refuge lies in fury and irony.

de las pasiones (The book of Passions).

Mario González Suárez was born in Mexico City in 1964. He is author of several short novels ant two collections of short stories and is included in recent anthologies of Mexican fiction. He has received three grants from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores and from the Mexican Ministry of Culture.

His fervent readers have praised his truly gripping and original narrative, the effectiveness of his muscular prose, the vividness of his dialogue, the unquieting atmospheres that surround his characters and the element of surprise that marks his short novels. One of the most remarkable young fiction writers in México, he was granted the 1998 Gilberto Owen National Prize for El libro de las pasiones (The book of Passions).