Murder in a Mexican village realigns the boundaries between fiction and reality

The Last Reader (cloth)

David Toscana, translated by Asa Zatz

Praise for David Toscana’s earlier work

“Deserves to join the ranks of the great Latin American authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Amado” —New York Times Book Review

“Introduces American readers to a gifted writer who seems poised to inherit the postmodernist mantle of Carlos Fuentes.” —Kirkus Reviews

In tiny Icamole, an almost deserted village in Mexico’s desert north, the librarian, Lucio, is also the village’s only reader. Though it has not rained for a year in Icamole, when Lucio’s son Remigio draws the body of a thirteen-year-old girl from his well, floodgates open on dark possibility. Strangely enamored of the dead girl’s beauty and fearing implication, Remigio turns desperately to his father. Persuading his son to bury the body, Lucio baptizes the girl Babette, after the heroine of a favorite novel. Is Lucio the keeper of too many stories? As police begin to investigate, has he lost his footing? Or do revelation and resolution lie with other characters and plots from his library? Toscana displays brilliant mastery of the novel—in all its elements—as Lucio keeps every last reader guessing.

Mexican novelist David Toscana describes his narrative aesthetics as “realismo desquiciado” (unrestrained realism), breaking with the Latin trend of magic realism through a prose that keeps an eye on the concrete experience of life in all its absurdity and lavish strangeness. In its original Spanish El último lector was awarded the National Colima Prize, the Prémio José Fuentes Mares, and the Antonin Artaud Prize and was also shortlisted for Latin America’s most important literary award, the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize. Asa Zatz has translated more than seventy-five Spanish-language books, including works of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

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