Mexico: Stories

by Josh Barkan

Selected by Library Journal as one of the five best short story collections of 2017

The unforgettable characters in Josh Barkan’s astonishing and beautiful story collection—chef, architect, nurse, high school teacher, painter, beauty queen, classical bass player, plastic surgeon, businessman, mime—are simply trying to lead their lives and steer clear of violence. Yet, inevitably, crime has a way of intruding on their lives all the same. A surgeon finds himself forced into performing a risky procedure on a narco killer. A teacher struggles to protect lovestruck students whose forbidden romance has put them in mortal peril. A painter’s freewheeling ways land him in the back of a kidnapper’s car. Again and again, the walls between “ordinary life” and cartel violence are shown to be paper thin, and when they collapse the consequences are life-changing.

These are stories about transformation and danger, passion and heartbreak, terror and triumph. They are funny, deeply moving, and stunningly well-crafted, and they tap into the most universal and enduring human experiences: love even in the face of danger and loss, the struggle to grow and keep faith amid hardship and conflict, and the pursuit of authenticity and courage over apathy and oppression. With unflinching honesty and exquisite tenderness, Josh Barkan masterfully introduces us to characters that are full of life, marking the arrival of a new and essential voice in American fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Literary Fiction, Suspense, Latinx

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2017

About the author

JOSH BARKAN won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award for memoir. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He has taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Hollins University and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)—named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His latest book is the memoir Wonder Travels. He lives in Boston.

Reviews

[Larry H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm between 3.5 and 4 stars on this one.

Mexico has taken a bit of a bad rap in the last 18 months or so, with Donald Trump using his criticism of Mexican immigrants as a launching pad for his (now-successful) run for the American presidency. Although Mexico has so much more to offer the world—culture, history, beauty, cuisine—all too often people choose instead to dwell on the incidence of crime, drugs, violence, and poverty they see portrayed in the media.

Unfortunately, Josh Barkan's new story collection, aptly titled Mexico , won't really help the country much with its reputation. But like the country itself, these stories are more than you initially think, much more than violence, crime, drugs, and poverty. While not every story works, taken as a whole, this is a powerful collection that makes you think.

The characters in Barkan's stories are, for the most part, ordinary people caught in the midst of extraordinary, and in many cases, unexpected, situations. The choices they choose to make, the decisions they face aren't always the ones we would choose, but they are often shaped by circumstances driven by the country itself.

Some of my favorite stories in this collection were: "The God of Common Names," in which a schoolteacher is caught in the middle of a Romeo-and-Juliet relationship between two of his students, children of rival drug lords, and he finds himself contemplating his own marriage, which caused its own friction; "I Want to Live," which tells of a woman awaiting a doctor's appointment who becomes immersed in the life story of a fellow patient, once a beauty queen and minor celebrity; "The Prison Breakout," about a man working with prison inmates who gets obsessed with the innocence of one prisoner in particular; "The Sharpshooter," which tells of an American soldier and his best friend, involved in a drug sting operation; and "Everything Else is Going to Be Fine," about a driven young man whose involvement in a bizarre incident forces him to confront what he has been hiding.

The stories I liked most tended to be more character-driven than violence-driven, although violence played a role in each. Some stories I felt were more about violence and crime, and didn't seem to ever rise above that. Barkan is a tremendously talented writer who created characters and plots which packed a punch (no pun intended), and made you feel for the situations in which the characters found themselves.

After a while, though, the stories started to feel very similar and very bleak, and the collection became harder to slog through. There were only so many kidnaps and murders and assaults I could read about, and I felt the stories toward the end of the collection became a little more one-note. But then one of the earlier stories would flash through my mind, and I would realize that while this may be an uneven collection, it's a pretty well-written and powerful one, rooted in the reality of today's world.

NetGalley and Crown Publishing provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....

[Esil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't have a clue why this short story collection has low ratings. Did readers think they were going to read about beach vacations and tasty food? Personally, I thought this collection was really original, engaging, and clever -- it's a bit gritty but it's not over the top. I have read quite a few short story collections lately, and was frustrated by some collections because the stories felt like repetitive variations of the same story -- not so with Mexico. Some stories focus on Americans living in Mexico, while others are about Mexicans with a connection to the US. There is a chef forced to cook for a drug lord, an architect who picks the wrong client to try to impress his father, a teenager who's mother goes to extraordinary lengths to protect her son from gang violence, etc... Life is not easy for these characters -- drug crime and economic inequality create an ever present edge -- but the stories are not gratuitous or sensationalistic. These feel like real people -- certainly not perfect people -- functioning in a world that has much to offer but that is ever shaky because of the threat of violence and corruption caused by drug trafficking. I would recommend Mexico to anyone who likes short stories with an edge that take readers out of their comfort zone. I would be happy to read Barkan's next book and hope this one gets the positive attention it deserves. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are such a great grouping of stories. Not only are they well written but they are complete in and of themselves, the most complete of any I have lately read. Mexico City, drugs, cartels, shootings, jockeying for positions in the drug trade and regular people trying to live and work amongst all this violence.

What would you do if you were a chef in a restaurant and El Chapo walks in, tells you that you must create a dish using only two ingredients that will be the best dish he had ever tasted. If it isn't he will kill not only you, but everyone dining in your restaurant? Or as as a nurse you are told that due to genetic risks you must have both your breasts amputated, sitting in the doctors office, noticing a beautiful girl who tells her a story about her time as the pawn of a drug dealer? A plastic surgeon, an artist and more. Just regular people who despite running in to these drug lords, manage to find ways to improve and live their lives, something good comes out of tragedy. As I said, such good and interesting stories. Gritty and grim at times, but real.

ARC from Netgalley.

[Iris P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mexico: Stories



★★★★ 4 Stars


"I received a free advance e-copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!


In the last decade or so, I've been to Mexico a few times. Like it typically happens when you visit a country on a business trip, I have only been able to get a glimpse of the country's rich culture and its wonderful people. Lucky for me though, my travels haven't exposed me to the dark, violent, corrupt side of the country depicted on Mexico: Stories, at least not directly.

Told mostly from the perspective of characters that are outsiders, they seem to look at the horrific events that are taking place around them with a sort of detachment and matter-of-factness that comes perhaps from the privilege of their passing through, temporary status.

This might be what allows Josh Barkan, who I understand is himself an ex-pat American living in Mexico, to give these stories a uniformly harrowing atmosphere while still showing a combination of compassion and humor as well as a sort of poetic fascination.

Although each story is stand-alone, what they consistently do is expose the devastating consequences of a country plagued by drugs, corruption and violence and the impact this has on regular, innocent people at the moment that they least expect it. The contrast of that reality against the beauty of such a spectacular place is gripping but also profoundly sad.

As it has been my experience in the past, not every story in this collection was equally affecting for me, but I thought most of them were original, beautifully told and engaging. Here's a brief summary of some of my favorites:

The God Of Common Names - Probably my favorite of the whole collection, this is a tragic love story set in contemporary Mexico. The narrator is an American ex-pat who teaches at a private school attended by privilege kids. He's also an agnostic Jew who gets involved in the romance of two of his students with terrible consequences.

I Want To Live - This is one of the few stories that features female protagonists. One of them is a retired American nurse that, after going to live in Mexico, is facing the possibility of a dire medical prognosis. While waiting for the test results, she meets a beautiful young woman. As she listens to her life story, the nurse gets an epiphany that helps her make a difficult decision and puts her life in perspective.

The American Journalist - An interesting story told from the viewpoint of an American journalist covering his newspaper desk in Mexico and the motivations behind what his editors choose to publish. Oh, I forgot to mention, there's also a corrupt governor with a bizarre collection of action figures, a short kidnapping in a dungeon and a horrific shooting in a bar. It's all very Tarantinoesque!

Going back to my initial comment about how in my trips I never came close to this version of Mexico, it seems like the six degrees of separation theory is always at play. A company I used to work for did business with Telcel, the large telecom company owned by Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who is mentioned in one of the stories, so I guess there's always a way to find some sort of connection!

In the last few years, I have to come to appreciate and admire the level of talent it takes to write a compelling short story. The twelve included in Mexico: Stories are a wonderful example of what a skillful writer can do in this genre. I would be interested and curious to read what the author writes next.

The audiobook is well narrated by Robert Fass. I am not sure is Mr. Fass speaks Spanish, but he did a pretty good job with his pronunciation of Spanish words and names.

[Sadie Forsythe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another reviewer said, "To be honest, I'm not sure Americans really need to hear more violent stories about Mexican crime and corruption. Mexico is a beautiful country that still has much to offer. In my opinion, this book concentrates too much on the negative and gives a narrow view of the country in general." And while I went into the book knowing it was focused on members of the drug cartels, I very early on felt the same as this reviewer and by the end my opinion hadn't changed.

Mexico has such a bright and varied culture and focusing so narrowly on this one aspect felt very much like reinforcing the painful stereotype that all Mexicans are involved in the violent drug trade—the women as victims and the men as jefes and/or henchmen. What's more, I went in search of a bio of the author, thinking that my opinion might be altered if he is himself Mexican and writing from a place of emotion and familiarity. But he is a Yale educated, world traveling, white, American male and that just seems to make this writing feel even more like perpetrating a harmful stereotype from a place of safe privilege. When I started the book, I'd hoped Barkan would pull it off but I'm afraid he didn't.

Further, to title the book just Mexico, as if it encompasses all of and only Mexico is adding insult to injury; especially since these aren't stories about Mexicans. They're stories about Americans in Mexico. But Americans, outsiders, who pretend to speak with an insiders' knowledge and authority. They all naturally paint a bleak, unflattering picture of the country (with nothing positive to balance it out), in which corruption reigns supreme, cruelty is pervasive, women are dismissed and plenty of Mexicans die pointlessly, but never the American. Mexico and its people are just props for their northern neighbors to learn lessons and make decisions and act big. It felt VERY judgmental and appropriative to me. How did no one in the publishing process notice this?

As with any story collection, some of the stories are better than others, but the fact that they all have a similar overriding factor, even as the themes and details differed, meant that I felt that repetition and eventually started to bore. Only one had any significant female characterization in it. All the others were full of men who were basically clones of one another. Many of them even had essentially the same transformative experience. The writing itself is ok, nothing to write home about, but not bad. It does tend toward pretension though, and there is a certain subtext of affluence to it that only adds to that impression. I do really like the cover, so there's a positive note to end on.

Note: I won a copy here on Goodreads.

[Joshua Rigsby · Rating 2 out of 5]

These 12 stories follow residents of Mexico City and its outlying areas as they negotiate their inevitable interactions with drug cartels.

We meet a variety of characters: chef, architects (2), painters (3+), migrants, US Soldiers, a beauty queen, a nurse, and writer/journalists (2), most of whom come from the United States, or have strong cultural ties to it.

Nearly every story begins with some version of “down here in Mexico things are different.” Different means things are cheaper, more chaotic, and often corrupt. You can’t expect the same services, justice, or fulfillment of the social contract as you can in the wealthier neighbor up north. Also, subsumed in these pronouncements is the idea that Mexicans generally are just less culturally adept. So far behind the curve are they that a middling New York chef can open a restaurant in el DF and expect to be considered novel because he makes fusion cuisine.

Some of the premises upon which these stories are built are pretty strong. What’s to be done when El Chapo walks into your restaurant and challenges you to a culinary double-or-nothing? How can a plastic surgeon survive after a narco dies on his operating table? How do you recover after being kidnapped and having a finger removed?

There are some scenes in which the setting is startlingly evoked. A runner jogging over the overpasses of the city. A gangster trying to get admission into an art gallery. There are moments of fascinating clarity into the lives of those afflicted by drug violence. As when a private school administrator decides there’s nothing to be done about a narco interfering with a student romance.

We discussed the possibility of expelling both of them, because of the threat of violence in school, but we laughed at the very moment we said this. That may have been the right punishment, but you don’t play God with the cartels, you accommodate yourselves to them.

There are several problems with the book, though, starting with the title. Mexico is problematic, as this book doesn’t do much to define much of the country beyond the American ex-pat community near Mexico City. The Spanish-language translation’s title Sangre, Sudor, y Mexico, is a little more diverse in its purported aspirations. It's possible, though that the author had no choice in the title, so it's not really fair to fault him for this.

My major problems with the book had to do with the craft elements, the generic description, and the underhwelming style.

It was a windy, sunny day three weeks after Jose’s father had come into the classroom. The days were getting longer.Spring was in the air , even though the seasons don’t change all that much in Mexico City. But it felt like a spring day, with a gentle breeze…

Note how the author falls over himself to convey the weather outside (6x!), incorporating the tired cartoon cliché “Spring was in the air.”

And again:

She had caged birds in her house, in large cages I had to regularly clean.p. 47

How else do you define a caged bird?

See this missed opportunity for specificity on p. 65: “I consider myself proudly from Mexico, but I’m a citizen of the world. I’m as happy eating sushi in Tokyo as having a quesadilla on the streets of Mexico City.”

You can have a quesadilla in Disneyland. What makes this character’s view of the world different from stock character expectations? Tell us something we don't know, and couldn't have guessed.


“After spraying bullets back and forth, like the roar of infected lions screaming at each other, one of the cars suddenly drove off…” p. 135

What the hell does an infected lion scream sound like? What are they infected with? Why are they screaming? What sounds like an infected lion here, the bullets? The suddenly driving car? Lord help us.

Again with the pointless, unconsidered repetitions:

“Staring at the canvas, in the descending light of the evening as it bent through the fiberglass patches in the roof and slapped against the canvas in harsh dots of light, the light reflected off the white canvas like emergency lights in bright oranges and reds. He watched the light move across the canvas, lost in the sundial.” p. 148


This, for me, was the coup de grace:

“The day it all began, if you can really pinpoint a single moment when an avalanche begins, was on a soccer field, or what we called in Mexico the fútbol field.” p. 216

C’mon, dude. Everyone knows 'soccer' is called 'fútbol' in Mexico. Tell us the origins or significance de una cancha, instead. This is the problem throughout. A lackluster, under-specificity along with a reliance on stock images and cliché.

Add to this the facile observations and overly-simplified plots, the fact that despite moments of peril no characters are actually harmed or damaged (less one who loses a finger) by their decisions or those of the Mexican cartels. There’s no real risk for anyone here. I know at the beginning of a story that the main character might get a scar on the hand, but will arrive the end mostly unscathed.

There are at least two Mafia-style shakedowns where people are told to take off their pants and dance.

One character opines to another, “It takes two to build a wall.” Even given the relative suddenness of the political reality this printed book now lives in and the relative slowness of the publishing industry, this unconsidered metaphor deserved a second look.

I just wanted, so badly, for this book to be better. I wanted to learn more about the real Mexico than what’s offered in Hollywood clichés and stereotypes. Yes, Mexico is violent, there's no question about that. I don't think the author's portrayal of violence is inaccurate. It's the cardboard version of everything else that I find problematic.

As Publisher’s Weekly opined:

For a collection about such a vibrant, complex country, the writer’s reliance on generalities is disappointing (“Mexico was a place of tamales and tacos, mariachi bands and guacamole”), as if its details were sourced not from experience but from a tour guide.


Alas.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading these stories very much. They're smart and they present a view of contemporary Mexico that, although it plays dangerously close to stereotype, always ends up exposing the stereotype rather than succumbing to it.

The stories here unfold a bit like intellectual puzzles at times, where the author/narrator seems to be trying to fit his storytelling into a given preset theme or thesis. I didn't mind this approach here though because the themes were universally thought-provoking. I didn't mind feeling a bit boxed in by the writer's intent, or bothered by my sense that the writer was laboring a bit to make a point, because the points he made were interesting ones.

The American expatriate-in-Mexico viewpoint was new to me and I enjoyed that viewpoint, especially since I've read several novels-in-translation recently by Mexican authors, including some that are exploring what it's like to be an expat living in the US.

[Gary Inbinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard-hitting, sometimes poetic narratives and strong characterizations reveal how crime and corruption impact a variety of lives in surprising ways. An exceptionally well-written collection of short stories set in contemporary Mexico.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mexico is a grouping of stories set in guess where? Mexico. They're told from various expat Americans. Barkin doesn't exactly have a folksy style but there's something of that feel because his point of view feels intimate, as if you're almost thinking along with each character. There also something of travelogue in that Mexico is almost a living breathing component. I came away feeling I had a stronger take on our close neighbor both positive and negative. Did I mention that Barkan writes very well? "Mexico" is both intimate and off putting portraying Mexico and her people as vicious and loving to the same extent that America and Americans are..just in different ways.

Thank you to the publishers for providing an arc.

[Gary · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's entitled, "Mexico: Stories," but don't expect sombreros and mariachi bands. Each of the stories herein, written largely in the first-person, are accounts of how an individual's life was affected by an encounter with the criminal culture shaped by drugs that has warped contemporary Mexican society. These is certainly not a book you'll likely find stocked on the shelves of the Mexican Ministry of Tourism.

The stories certainly succeed in establishing a sense of place. It's of a place I certainly wouldn't want to visit. But it's hard to say exactly how limited or unfair that portrayal is.

As for the stories themselves, while they contained some interesting premises and vignettes, I can't call them very artful. For one thing, though there is a problem with "voice." Though each of these accounts is supposedly recounted by a different individual, often with a distinctive background from the others, in narrating their accounts, all the storytellers sounded alike. Nothing in their language or style distinguished themselves from any other. Indeed, all the narratives were rather flat and matter-of-fact.

Secondly, whatever epiphanies the characters come to aren't especially profound. Violence is bad. There's nothing wrong with being gay. Mothers love their children so much as to sacrifice for them. Well, duh. While these may indeed be legitimate epiphanies, given the circumstances the characters endure, much comes back to that issue of artfulness again. When the character comes to insight, there are oblique ways of expressing that to the reader, rather than a literal "Here is what I learned" summary. These kind of "spell it out for the reader" endings made too many of the stories conclude with a clunk. It's what you might find in a beginner's writing class.

So alas, while I always hope to find in a book an author who will indulge me, I felt in "Mexico: Stories" I was too often indulging the author just in devoting my time to finish the book.

[Susan Barton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but I'm sorry to say it just didn't hold my interest. I found the stories to be a little too rambling, wordy and far fetched. Grabbing a little girl in order to cut her finger and add her blood to a meal to be served to El Chapo? Come on.

To be honest, I'm not sure Americans really need to hear more violent stories about Mexican crime and corruption. Mexico is a beautiful country that still has much to offer. In my opinion, this book concentrates too much on the negative and gives a narrow view of the country in general. I wasn't impressed with the author's writing or subject matter to give it more than three stars.

I received a complimentary copy of this book via LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't intended to start this book right after it came in the mail, but I decided to just read the first story, and then I decided to read the next one, and so on, until I ended up reading the whole thing in an intense 48 hours. That's not at all my usual approach to story collections, so it's a testimony to Barkan's skill as a writer. Aside from a few issues with point of view, which he switches too often for my taste, he's a very capable writer. In some short story collections, the main characters all seem like variations of the same personality type, but that's not the case here. The narrators of each of these stories are very different people (some American and some Mexican) with widely divergent interests and professions, and yet they all seem fully realized. It takes a lot of skill to do that.

Yet I have some issues with the collection, as well. I'd hoped that the Goodreads description of this book was wrong, and that every single one of these stories wasn't really dealing with drug violence. On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with focusing a collection that tightly, especially since these stories vary so widely in tone and setting. But by making all the stories about drug violence and then giving the book the generic title Mexico, Barkan is reinforcing the stereotype that modern Mexico is nothing but the land of drugs. If he was a native Mexican who chose to do that, I wouldn't mind. But his bio tells me that he's a well-educated white guy from Iowa, and even though he has a Mexican wife, he still comes off as passing judgment on the whole country in a way I don't really appreciate. If one of my Latin American Studies classmates had turned in a collection like this for the thesis requirement, I'm pretty sure that their committee would have told them to dig a little deeper, or at very least to give the thing a different title.

Also, a warning: the first story in the collection is pretty unexpectedly gruesome. I think the publishers moved that story into the first position as a way of titillating the reader into thinking that the whole collection is "edgy" and "dangerous." I have a feeling, though, that it's going to turn off a lot of readers and not let them get further into the book. If you're at all unsure what your reaction will be, skip over the first story and come back to it later when you've gotten a better sense of Barkan's worldview.

If you like good writing, this collection is worth taking a look at, but it wouldn't be my first choice of reading material if you're trying to get deep insights into Mexico, no matter what the title would have you believe.

(Note: I received my copy of this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.)

[Amy Christine Lesher · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, I won an ARC on Goodreads.

Before you sit down to read this book, grab a shot glass and a bottle of liquor (since the book takes place in Mexico grab a bottle of Tequila). Now, play a drinking game: everytime you meet someone who is either an ex -pat or is Mexican but doesn't seem Mexican take a drink; a narco appears in the story, take a drink; violence of any kind, take a drink. If you get to the 10th story and you're still playing stop. Why couldn't Barkan show other sides of Mexico? Not a book I can recommend.

[Melissa Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

The version of Mexico shown to us in the U.S. is all beaches or just poor immigrants. I was pleased to read throughout the stories, however, that this is not what this book talks about. All the stories in Mexico Stories are centered around the drug cartels or gangs in the cities of Mexico. Each story is centered around seemingly normal people and how they get wrapped up in the gory bussinness of drugs and gangs. I enjoyed most of the chapters of the book, which is uncommon for me to realize in books like this. Of all the stories, I enjoyed the ones told by the sharpshooter, the painting professor, and the American journalist the most. They were all poignant, strange, comic, raw stories but above all, they were brilliantly written. All too fantastic to be anything but genuine, these stories contained the power to surprise, haunt, move, or break the reader.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Josh Barkan’s second short story collection, Mexico, focuses on the intersection of cartel violence and daily life in Mexico. Many, though not all, of the stories are written from the perspective of Americans living in Mexico, architects, teachers, journalists, and lawyers. Most blithely assume they will be untouched, like the journalist who writes about murder and corruption for American consumption, assuming his American identity keeps him safe from the corrupt. Even after he is threatened, he assumes his nationality protects him; he is wrong.

The book feels slight in your hands, a mere 242 pages, thinner than the average trade paperback. That is a misdirection, though, like the Tardis “its inside is bigger than its outside.” The stories may be short, but their themes are monumental and sometimes they contain a lifetime. Take “The Escape from Mexico”, a short story that is thirty years in the making, a short story of sacrifice and gratitude that will break and heal your heart.

Your heart will be touched again and again, with “The God of Common Names” the ancient and universal challenge of disapproving fathers-in-law is met with so much wisdom and compassion by the son-in-law, who redefines his understanding of fiath to find common ground.

Real life impinges on the stories. There is an encounter with the notorious el Chapo and an acquaintance with the fabulously wealthy Carlos Slim. Real politics impinge on the stories with Nieto complaining of too little good news.

There is a fire for social justice in these stories, too. Particularly in “The Sharpshooter” and “The Prison Breakout,” both action-filled and exciting stories that could be excellent films in the right hands. “The American Journalist” would make a great movie, too, but no one would make a movie with that ending, sadly enough. Frankly, I can see quite a few of these stories as movies, but I fear directors would change the endings. Barkan has the courage and craft to know we don’t need all our endings to be happy.

I liked Mexico quite a bit. I am fond of short stories. There is a discipline in the short story that is often absent in novels. Because they must limit their words, short story writers consider every single word and don’t waste them on trivialities. They must convey so much with so little. People who write good short stories are often the finest writers there are.

Reading Mexico, I can feel the cacophony of the street markets, the punishing sun, the eerie emptiness of the elevated free-ways. The shock of violence is always shocking. While there is this quotidian acceptance that the violence is always possible, people retain their shock, they are not innured. There is one story, “Everything Else Is Going to Be Fine” that may upset readers by associating homosexuality and molestation. Don’t throw it across the room. Miguel, the narrator is wrong-headed, but Barkan is not, trust him to get you and Miguel to the other side. Miguel’s misapprehension is the crux of the story and freeing himself of that shame is why everything else is going to be fine.

This is an excellent collection of short stories. It is rich in contrast, the austerity of the prose, the contrast between teeming, noisy crowds and the silent solitude of violence. If you like book that are bigger on the inside, that say much with little, you will enjoy this book. Some may criticize the decision to focus every story on the intersection of daily life and cartel violence. However, that choice is not about being exploitive or stereotyping the Mexican people as lawless and corrupt. It is about how the people of Mexico manage to find goodness, love, decency, art, and their humanity in a system that fails them.

Mexico will be released January 27, 2017. I received an advance copy from the publisher in a random drawing at LibraryThing.

★★★★
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...

[Matxalen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3* (rounding up)

Although I really enjoyed some of this stories mostly this read wasn't for me.
Most of all I had problems with the writing... and it just not being compelling enough!

Thanks to Blogging for Books and Netgalley I was able to get a copy of this for review.

[full review now on the blog, here!]

[Adriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made up of a very intense and affecting series of short stories all set in, or very near to, Mexico City, the tales told in this book tell of a country mired in violence thru the people that call it home. It's bloody and violent, yet it still reads a bit like a love story to the things that make Mexico so special.

Each story is told in a voice that feels authentic to the character telling it. Barkan did a great job of putting himself in the headspace of a varied set of characters that help show the complexity of the violent spell overtaking Mexico.

I was born there and (thankfully) my family and I have been spared any of the true violence spelled out in the stories, but I found myself constantly thinking of the stories one often hears about events in the city. What Barkan writes might be made up, but it definitely touches on things that are happening to people on a daily basis.

Mexico is a beautiful city and country that's suffering from an epidemic that might still get worse before it gets better, and I appreciate how Barkan made the stories more about the hope for change and finding optimism in life than the violence itself.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

This incredibly rich collection of stories has a truly original theme. In each case, the central character is a professional American who has relocated to Mexico, and finds themselves embroiled with the cartels. The title of the first story, the Chef and El Chapo, sets the tone. It's intriguing to see how Barkan unspools each situation, all different with different results yet remaining similar as beads on a necklace. For each protagonist, these encounters provide a jolt of today's reality in an otherwise placid life, living in the country of their choice. As one character observes, "People have a length of time they're supposed to live like a tomato until it gets ripe and my ripeness hadn't happened yet."

[Lukas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an eclectic collection of short stories set in Mexico. It's beautifully written, and the realistic characters jump from the page. Highly recommended!

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Josh Barkan’s “Mexico”, each story focuses on a single character who is unique, different, and is faced with a violent or disturbing scenario that forces him to find peace in himself and within his relationships. While each of these stories contains cringe-worthy pain and heart-breaking sorrow, Barkan focuses on his characters and how they respond and deal with tragedy and hardship. Barkan’s collection of stories are meant to be read together, start to finish, as each one expands on the idea of an individual’s resilience and the pursuit of what he values.

I rated this collection 3 stars because some aspects are profound and well-crafted, but some are easy and cliche. Barkan creates characters and story lines that are very original and accessible. He successfully creates a unique voice in each story despite each person dealing with similar horrific circumstances. These horrific circumstances are all bizarre, violent events that often seem hardly believable, but Barkan ensures that these events are not simply violence for the sake of violence, but violence with a purpose. This violence is the turning point in the story and in each character’s internal moral crisis. Barkan also ensures that his readers feel as much fear and disgust as his characters do with incredibly detailed and descriptive language. In “The Chef and El Chapo”, I actually felt myself start to cringe, and I suddenly got very nauseous. This is an excerpt from a rather bloody point in the story: “He took my thumb and squeezed my wound until I cried out, hoping my finger wouldn’t burst. New blood came forth from the thumb. ‘You should be happy just to keep your life,’ El Chapo said, looking me straight in the eyes, letting me know he could kill me every bit as easily as he’d tossed the plate. 'But I challenged you, and you gave me something with two ingredients, and it’s the best thing I have ever tasted’” (17). You need to read the entire story to fully enjoy the cannibalism and torture.

I appreciate Barkan’s irony in how he subtly critiques American society. A lot of reviews mention that this collection may be insensitive to Mexico because it focuses it only on the “bad parts”, but I disagree. While Barkan incorporates drugs and violence, which is very stereotypical, into each story, it’s America that usually ends up looking bad, not Mexico. In “Sharpshooter”, Barkan critiques our blind loyalty to America through the eyes of a soldier who begins to question “what kind of country… makes it easier for you to get an education if you are willing to kill than if you want to talk about peace?” (109). In “American Journalist”, Barkan relays how American society is obsessed with violence and danger as long as we feel secure and cozy at home. He creates interesting perspectives through his character’s dilemmas that force you to contemplate them as you read.

I felt Barkan could have greatly improved at the end of each story. “Mexico” often reads like a bedtime story, where a scary story ends with an easy resolution and a token lesson to absorb after you’re finished. The stories are all captivating and intriguing, but the ending almost always ruined my reading experience. In “Acapulco”, an architect finds himself in a life-or-death situation with a dancer named Gloria, who dies while he survives. The bulk of the story is thrilling, and Barkan successfully evokes fear with his writing. The ending is similar to an epilogue, as all the action ceases and the architect’s internal dialogue is the focus. This epilogue is where Barkan’s story tends to collapse. During Gloria’s funeral, the architect thinks back on the murder, realizes what is important in his life, and vows to change in light of this realization. The last line in the story encapsulates this: “I was going to try to make something of myself while I still had life” (69). This concept has been overused everywhere in our society, and it’s an easy and unoriginal way to end what was an interesting and well-written story. The fact that Barkan chooses to explain this so thoroughly makes it that much worse because it removes the independent reading experience. He hands you the resolution very abruptly, leaving no space for his reader’s to digest the story and leaving them with nothing to take from it. When I walked away from each story, I rarely thought about them, which is unfortunate because I think each story had a great amount of potential up until the end. In “I Want to Live”, the protagonist sits in a plastic surgeon’s waiting room contemplating a double mastectomy to prevent a probable breast cancer diagnosis. While waiting, she listens to a woman’s tragic life story and thinks, “It seemed foolish to try to reduce what she had said to one idea or two”, but isn’t this exactly what Barkan is doing when he ends each story (57)? His characters are complex, but he reduces them by giving them simple resolutions.
Ultimately, I think Barkan’s writing is very captivating, specifically with capturing the essence of fear, but I felt disappointed by each story’s ending. I also feel slightly disappointed with Hogarth because the last two books I read by them (Human Acts and The Lesser Bohemians) were brilliant enough to be future classics.

5/5 for those who welcome disturbing, violent, and sometimes bloody bedtime stories, who like some cheese, reading through multiple perspectives, and who need a resolution.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. Thank you!

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a mind blowing book MEXICO is! Other reviews I read complained about not knowing about the amount of violence this book entails, which boggles my mind due to the fact it is mentioned in the blurb. Nonetheless, the macabre content is just an important aspect of these short stories as humor, courage, and love are also crucial components to shaping the atmosphere of these stories. Additionally, the cartel in one way or another represents a sizable portion of the plots within this book, therefore, causing the gruesomeness but the author contains such skill in his ability to write regarding how the characters in the story grew as individuals overcoming any ghastly incident that occurred to them becoming stronger people. Consequently, not all the stories have a happy ending, but each contains an important premise. Finally, MEXICO consisted of tremendously great writing its as if the book had hands holding on to me as my mind ingested the profoundness of intriguing writing. Oh, wait! Ordinarily for me in a book of short stories, there is one story that slightly rises above the rest, but not in MEXICO each one impressed me uniformly.

HEY, Yes you! Can I get an opinion on how bad this review is?

[Erin Cataldi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been on a short story kick and was definitely in the mood for this. Some of the short stories in here were slam dunks and others were odd ducks, with rushed endings and bizarre plots. For example, the opening story is beyond bizarre and flirts with cannibalism, drug lords, and ancient Aztec gods. All of the stories revolve around Mexico City and many of the characters are Americans or whites living in the city, viewing it through their lenses. Most, if not all, are crime stories as they apply to every day people; teachers, painters, journalists, students, mimes, etc. A lot of gang violence, drugs, rival Narco leaders and more. Dark, gritty, unexpected, this was an interesting read.

I received this book for free from Librarything in return for my honest, unbiased opinion.

[Julian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came across this one while walking around the library. I had zero expectations, but even those were betrayed.

I read one story, and that was enough to stop. The chef of fancy restaurant in Mexico City tries to find a meal that would prevent al Chapo, yes, that Chapo, from killing him. The premise is based on true accounts of El Chapo arriving at busy restaurants and taking over, but after that it becomes silly. El Chapo is portrayed as some sort of ridiculous Bond villain (even boasting about his skills), and everything goes downhill from there. The resolution was even worse.

Two starts just because the writer at least knows Mexico City.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this!! I think the criticism of it on here is a little harsh given how much I enjoyed it. I don't usually like short stories and almost always read novels, but I've been branching out cautiously and am so glad I came across Mexico. It's DARK and gritty, and there were several passages that truly disturbed or scared me. I do have some critiques that look pretty well represented in the reviews, but overall this was a great read.

[Hannah]

***I received an ARC from Crown Publishing (an imprint of Hogarth) via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

I'm a little torn as to how I felt about this book. While Barkan's writing was good and I found the subject fascinating, I expected a wider variation due to the title (an entire country). I appreciated that his characters were different people, but I would have liked more variation in voice and a heads-up that all of the stories were about the effect of drug cartels on their lives. Overall, I think this one would be better read as individual stories with some time between readings, rather than reading through the book in a short time period.

[Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taken individually, these are terrific stories. There's a kind of sameness to them, however. Always there is a terrible crime, a killing or maiming, usually carried out by a gang or drug dealer. The author knows Mexico better than I do--I haven't been there for ten years--but he paints a very bleak picture. I still recommend the book, but I wouldn't read it all at once the way I did. Read a story, savor it, and wait a bit before you read the next one.

[Joan]

You love ,laugh ,cry , all emotions are in this book . Loved reading this book .

[Harker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: 2.27 Stars

The Chef and El Chapo: (3 Stars) while I'm not sure I understood the point of the story, it was well written and full of emotion: passion for cooking, terror when El Chapo takes over the restaurant, and fear/regret once the chef has completed the task set before him. The ending felt a twee bit hollow, but I hope the chef was able to find comfort in his decision.

The God of Common Names: (3 Stars) this is the story of a teacher and the Romeo & Juliet situation he finds between two of his students. While that seemed like it might play a large part in the story, in the end it didn't really. The story of Sandra and Jose was more of a catalyst for the resolution of the teacher's own familial difficulties. I was more interested in the pain and hardship he and his wife and father-in-law were experiencing, due to the teacher being an atheist Jew and the father-in-law an Orthodox Jew. The length of the tale was adequate, though I'm not sure that the ending was quite as tied up as the author would like us to believe. It felt temporary, like there will be more trouble ahead for this teacher and his family, but that is a story we will never get to see.

I liked the thought behind the title, though: how, even though we give different names to the same thing (in this case, the teacher's idea of a greater power and his father-in-law's God), it is should be alright because we should know they're the same thing, just by a different name.

I Want to Live: (2.5 Stars) The summary of this collection insinuates that the primary characters' stories run up against cartel violence, but I would argue that this is an instance in which that was not true. We are introduced to a former nurse from the U.S. who has relocated to Mexico City. Five years later she is in a hospital waiting room, trying to decide is she should have a preventative mastectomy, when she meets Esmeralda, an orphan who grew up and met a rising star of the cartel world.

It is Esmeralda's story that is told through the bulk of I Want to Live and it was her's that was most interesting. The few interjections that the former nurse made made her sound like a selfish character, something that Esmeralda observes more than once herself. She got Esmeralda to tell her her story because she made uninformed observations about Esmeralda's physical characters and, when confronted by evidence to the contrary, she badgers her into explaining how these marks occurred.

This made the nurse an unlikable character to me and I did not care one whit about her decision in the end because it didn't matter. Esmeralda was the person that I was more interested in hearing about, though I am curious as to what she was doing in the same hospital waiting room as our American nurse. There was never anyone in to see her, to take her away to an appointment. It felt like a very contrived meeting arranged just for the nurse's "benefit" in the story. In the end, despite what the nurse decided and her rudeness toward Esmeralda (both in asking about her story and her assumption that Esmeralda wanted to tell the story to her despite no evidence of such), I found Esmeralda's strength profound.

Acapulco: (1 Star) The first couple of paragraphs had me disliking the narrator. In a book of stories that take place in Mexico, this person started off disparaging the country straight away, saying that police reports cannot be taken seriously, older Mexican men are all unfaithful and have lovers on the side of their marriages, but he (the narrator) is better than that because he left that all behind when his parents sent him to study in Harvard. He goes on to try to make it sound like saying this is all okay because he considers himself to be from Mexico because he was raised there, his family is from there, but he is a citizen of the world. That sounds like he is either a) distancing himself from his Mexican culture/heritage or b) someone who was born abroad, raised in Mexico City, but thinks himself better than natives. His arrogance was appalling and had me viewing him with a side eyed expression.

He continued to talk down about the people he came in contact with, especially his client who wore a gold Rolex, which apparently in his mind was bad because it reeked of new money whereas his (the narrator's) money was old (as though that meant something in the grand scheme of things).

This was my second least favorite story because this man, this architect, was an arrogant person that, after encountering a near death experience, seems to have learned something, but that revelation feels false in light of the arrogance he demonstrated in the beginning.

The Kidnapping: (1 Star) This one started doff with a bad taste in my mouth when the author used a derogatory word beginning with a T to describe sex workers in the character's neighborhood. There was no reason for it, no learning from it, just...ick. 😠 The character using this word, the painter who is a kidnapping victim, uses the term again in a reminiscence and once more at the end of the story and it still sucks.

Aside from the offensive language used more than once, there was a distinct lack of characterization that made the story suffer. I didn't know enough about this painter to care when he was kidnapped or when the kidnappers tortured him. All I had to go on was his disrespect for transgender people and that made me dislike him.

The Plastic Surgeon: (2 Stars) The problem I had with this story was that it had the storyline meant for an faster paced piece and the writing did not live up to it. The telling became almost philosophical and that didn't mesh well with story of the plastic surgeon who is forced to makeover a narco boss. With a conclusion that was anything but conclusive, I found that I was bored by The Plastic Surgeon and couldn't really find a facet of it that would save it in my esteem.

The Sharpshooter: (No rating) This story wasn't bad, exactly, it was simply of a type that wasn't for me, thus I found it painfully boring. The story of a young soldier full of ideals, dealing with a friend and fellow soldier who betrays him and their company, didn't interest me; most Army stories don't. If this were a book on its own, I wouldn't give it a rating because this is a case of a story that I can tell is simply not my thing, but there are people that might appreciate it, perhaps people that enjoy reading about soldiers and their personal conflicts.

The Painting Professor: (1 Star) Like the last story The Sharpshooter this one was also ridiculously boring, but unlike the previous story this one wasn't written well, even from an objective point of view. It didn't seem to have a point and what thread of coherence it had got lots in the rambling writing.

The American Journalist: (2 Stars) There wasn't much development in this story, either from a character perspective or otherwise. By this point it seemed all of the short stories in the collection took place in the same area or nearly so, so the setting wasn't as big of a let down, but I didn't care much about the journalist or his friend that was shot.

The most interesting thing about this to was from the beginning, when the journalist talked about how his paper, the Houston Chronicle, and other papers like it, only cared about running stories that fit into a certain narrative. For example, one about bombings in other countries that then make the American people feel safe because they don't live there. It can be incredibly difficult to get a story through mainstream media because of such "comfort" and his pointing that out from a journalistic standpoint was interesting.

Everything Else Is Going to Be Fine: (1.5 Stars) If ever there was a disjointed story in Mexico, it is this one. The character "told" the reader his story and that felt off. The pieces of story we did get might have worked in a better narrative, but combined as they were felt like pages had been ripped out of a book and sewn back together badly. Whats-more, I felt badly that he had been molested and raped as a child, but I felt like the author was using that part of the character's past to explain his possible asexuality. That confused me and made me uncomfortable, upset, and not at all pleased with the story.

The Prison Breakout: (4 Stars) I favored this story for the feeling of non-fiction it gave me. The main character, a man that helps find the history of men on death row in order to explain why they may have committed their crime, starts out the story talking about growing up, seeing crimes happening on a global scale, and knowing they were wrong, voicing his displeasure with them, but ultimately not doing anything about it. That's something that should resonate with a lot of people today, with the atrocities we see being committed against people because of their gender/race/sexuality/etc. For all the talk, what do we really do?

The Escape From Mexico: (4 Stars) When I got to this story, I was feeling rather disheartened by the collection overall. The first few stories had been alright, but then I was hit by a bunch that were, in my opinion, just bad. I felt suckered in and upset about that. This story, while it doesn't save the collection, made me feel at least a little better that I stuck it out to the end.

This is the story about Gordi, a young boy who runs up against another young man, one who is in charge of a gang at the age of fourteen and has marked Gordi for punishment: either death or gang recruitment, for a crime Gordi did not commit, but that this person holds him responsible for. The terror of the weeks where Gordi is searching for the watch, then trying to avoid the gangster, trying to find a way out of this, was palpable. His mother comes into the story too, a true testament to a mother's love and willingness to do anything to save her son.

What I did not like about the story was that, midway through, there was a brief change in perspective, from Gordi to his mother, but it remained in first person and there didn't feel like enough of a difference in the voice of each perspective. If it were not for pronouns or the mother out and out saying that she was Gordi's mother, I would not have realized what happened.

Summary: First of all, this book was mostly a letdown. It felt like it told only about the bad things in Mexico without any of the good, playing upon the stereotypes that Americans have of the country. I'm not saying that these things don't happen, but if all we see in literature about Mexico is the type of content in this book, what sort of view will the readers form?

Second, one of the oddest things about this collection was that the title, Mexico, gave me cause to think that it would be about the people. While it was, in a way, the main characters for the majority of the stories were American. What characters were Mexican were often involved in the drug word, portrayed as some other kind of criminal, or spoken of in slurs by the narrating voice. I expected there to be some violence, as the summary spoke of the narrowing of the divide between the cartel world and the "real" world, but this played too heavily to that theme.

I was disappointed in the overall quality of the stories because it seems like the author really could have written something fantastic.



I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Sean Molloy · Rating 1 out of 5]

unispiring & dry

[marco athie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - I’d prefer less focus on narcos and crime, which every story brings up. But several are thought provoking and illustrate the interconnection of Mexico and the US