Rag Doll Plagues

From Publishers Weekly
Mexican fiction writer Morales ( Brick People ) exhibits his range in a novel showing Hispanic doctors battling deadly infectious diseases over three centuries. The first section, a rather formal historical account, tells of an 18th-century Spanish physician sent to Mexico to diagnose and cure a plague, LaMona. The epidemic eventually subsides by itself, but the physician has fallen in love with New Spain and decided to make it his home. A contemporary Hispanic doctor living in Los Angeles affectingly narrates the book's second portion. When his wife, a hemophiliac, contracts AIDS through a contaminated blood transfusion, he takes her to Mexico to participate in an Indian healing ritual; although spiritually uplifting, the ceremony cannot halt the disease's ravages. The second doctor's grandson, also a physician, relates the final story, set in the future. A plague eerily similar to LaMona sweeps the population of Lamex, a U.S./Mexican technocratic confederation. The medical establishment is helpless until the narrator discovers that transfusions from pure-blooded Mexico City residents will cure the disease--the metropolis is so hideously polluted that its inhabitants' blood has genetically mutated, developing an antibody to the plague. Morales's unabashed ethnic chauvinism becomes hard to take: AIDS, it appears, was invented in a U.S. laboratory and exported to Africa; the Anglo-European presence that has oppressed Mexicans for centuries finally gets its just deserts in the SF finale. However, inventive writing and interesting premises spark the work. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this slim trilogy, written in the tradition of magic realism, Mexican American author Morales offers an imaginative, prophetic work that readers will find both intriguing and challenging. He puts forward three separate stories of life, death, and disease in colonial Mexico, present-day Mexico and Southern California, and mid-21st century technocratic Lames (Los Angeles and Mexico). Not only plot elements but the poetic use of language thread the stories together, adding a surreal quality that forces the reader to examine the changing nature of the Mexican landscape, health issues, and cultural values. The stories are further held together by two central characters, Father Gregory and Papa Damian. These three gripping pieces help the reader gain insight into some of the ethical questions facing modern society. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries, particularly those with interests in Hispanic issues.- Mary Molinaro, Univ. of Kentucky, LexingtonCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Swarms of butterflies and hummingbirds, a jaguar on a leash, a hero who's writing himself into existence, beneficent ghosts of ancestors--all the trappings of post-Borges magic realism are gathered in this undeniably derivative and yet often quite funny, quirky meditation on Mexican-American relations, the politics of epidemics and the uses of history. To pack all that into a mere 200 pages, Morales foreshortens, stylizes, and truncates plots and characters, creating a series of rigid allegorical tableaux with the static vitality and crudeness of a barrio mural. In Book One, Dr. Gregorio Revueltas, a physician sent from Spain to Mexico in 1788 (significant date), seeks a cure for a plague ravaging the colony. Spanish oppression of the natives, the Inquisition's persecution of indigenous curanderos, exacerbate the suffering. Only after the outbreak of the French Revolution does the plague, wrought by microbes and compounded by human stupidity, subside. In Book Two, Chicano doctor Revueltas (ca. 1950-85) works in a southern California barrio clinic where violence, drugs, and AIDS are the names of the plague, again both viral and social in its origins. This chapter is the least satisfactory. AIDS is too close and too complex and Morales hasn't thought about it enough. His lack of grounding even in the medical facts undermines his fantasy. Book Three is set in the late 21st- century world of LAMEX, a rigidly stratified hi-tech society that includes both L.A. and Mexico City. The sci-fi social satire is full of vivid scenes and liberating inventions--every pharmacy, for instance, carries the cures for AIDS and cancer. The plague now is environmental. It comes from the sea, and when it strikes, whole cities perish overnight. Another Dr. Revueltas reads his ancestors' plague-year diaries and, fortified by his sense of the past, discovers not only a cure for this plague but a way to turn the social order upside down, putting the poorest Mexicans on top for a while. Morales (The Brick People, Death of an Anglo--both 1988) offers a novel that exhibits the very qualities it celebrates: energy, hopefulness, a reverence for roots. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
a novel akin to Latin American magical realists


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In this slim trilogy, written in the tradition of magic realism, Mexican American author Morales offers an imaginative, prophetic work that readers will find both intriguing and challenging. He puts forward three separate stories of life, death, and disease in colonial Mexico, present-day Mexico and Southern California, and mid-21st century technocratic Lames (Los Angeles and Mexico). Not only plot elements but the poetic use of language thread the stories together, adding a surreal quality that forces the reader to examine the changing nature of the Mexican landscape, health issues, and cultural values. The stories are further held together by two central characters, Father Gregory and Papa Damian. These three gripping pieces help the reader gain insight into some of the ethical questions facing modern society. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries, particularly those with interests in Hispanic issues.-- Mary Molinaro, Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington


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