Fricción. (Friction)
Reviewed by Liliana Wendorff, Univ. of North Carolina at Pembroke -- Críticas, 5/15/2008
Urroz, Eloy.
Mexico/U.S.: Alfaguara: Santillana. 2008. 445p. ISBN 978-970-58-0267-6. pap. $17.45. FICTION
In his gargantuan Fricción, Mexican poet, novelist, and essayist Urroz presents a plethora of colorful, complex characters—college professors, artists, housewives, prostitutes, philosophers—to create an irreverent novel that features the reader as a protagonist. The narrator, a frustrated college professor who happens to be “our friend,” addresses the reader constantly (“You, the one holding this book”), letting him know, for example, that the professor’s wife is having an affair with his best friend. Set in the year 2025, the novel immerses the reader in such fictitious worlds as La Rémoras, a town in Baja California that appears in one of Urroz’s previous works. The author presents comical anecdotes about Mexican history (Pancho Villa is almost murdered by Japanese cooks), current urban problems that continue in the future (poverty, corruption, and pollution), and the world of academia (some professors are inept, gossipy, and prone to publishing useless works, while others practice coprophagy). Although the narration can be slow at times, the characters are engaging: reincarnations, demigods, and Aztec and Greek divinities take center stage, and the discussion of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles is also entertaining. Recommended for public and academic (graduate and undergraduate) libraries.
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