Final Project - Sixth Entry MRojo

Vida con mi Viuda by José Agustín

I just finished Vida con mi Viuda today. And even though I admire José Agustín, in my opinion this wasn’t his best novel. I have read several essays and short stories written by him, and what I like the most about his works is the way he uses the Spanish language, because it’s really funny and easy to follow. His is also recognized as the Mexican author who mixes punctuation signs in his works, so this requires a reader who likes challenges and who has complete knowledge over Spanish, otherwise it gets tricky to understand the ideas. So they recommended me to read a novel instead of essays from him, and I decided to read the Vida con mi Viuda’s trilogy. What I expected to find in this novel was at least a credible Mexican story, but it is in fact a fiction novel with an unbelievable story that combines ancient magic and a Mexican mafia.

Vida con mi Viuda is a Mexican novel, published in 2004. This is the first part of a trilogy, the second one is Arma Blanca and the last one is yet to come. The plot has as a protagonist a film director named Onelio de la Sierra. One day when he was about to leave his job, he sees a man identical to him dying in front of him. At that time he decides to change identities with the dead man in order to know what would happen in his family and in his work after his death. This decision reveals that he has also acquired the commitments of its new identity, which was a mysterious Russian man linked to a well-known mafia. And in order to understand this decision of switching identities the author tells us the whole biography of this character and his ancestors.

The first page of the book contains a family tree. This remained my One Hundred Years of Solitude and since that moment I thought that the novel will be very confusing. And in fact the whole biography of de la Sierra family in my opinion it was really boring and unnecessary for the protagonist current conflict, which was the exchange of identities with this mafia guy.

So I honestly don’t recommend this novel, mainly because it’s difficult to follow and also because the story doesn’t make any sense. Also the publishing house states about his author that he’s one of the most original and provocative of the Mexican contemporary literature (“una de las voces más originales y provocadoras de la literatura mexicana contemporánea”), but this novel in particular affirms the opposite.