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Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers.
In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 23, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593395363
- File size: 475545 KB
- Duration: 16:30:43
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Narrator Gabriel Porras guides listeners through the eloquent essays novelist Juan Villoro wrote to share his wonder at his own Mexico City. Villoro has been exquisitely translated by Alfred MacAdam, the imagistic writing perfectly captured in its move from Spanish to English. Porras narrates with a moderate accent; his pacing and intonation are faithful to Villoro's phrasing so that the overall effect feels like being present with the author while moving about the capital city. It has been built so that its nearly 10 million people are spread over 500 square miles instead of according to more traditionally compact urban plans. Villoro's sentences are studded with gemlike clauses, and passages wind into and away from enclaves, just as Mexico City is revealed by the author's insights. All told, a listening experience not to miss. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine -
January 25, 2021
Novelist and journalist Villoro (God Is Round) delivers an erudite and idiosyncratic look at Mexico City and the “fears, illusions, utter annoyance, and whims of living in this place.” Combining the intricacies and peculiarities of the contemporary city with recollections of his childhood there, Villoro describes, for example, how at the age of “ten or twelve,” he and friend would go on hours-long expeditions by sneaking into the back of a milk truck. For people waiting in line to engage with one of the “infinite tasks of government” that take place in Mexico City, a street vendor’s torta de tama “works as a tranquilizer,” Villoro writes, “but only as long as you’re chewing it... after, it becomes a long-term annoyance, harder to digest than the bureaucratic business itself.” He also describes the city’s cafés, its commuting culture (certain streets “are a parking lot that sometimes moves”), pre-Hispanic mythologies, and the lives of its street children. Throughout, Villoro weaves in literary references (Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Ezra Pound) and offers stinging critiques of the country’s plutocracy, whose “luxury depends on poverty.” Though Villoro’s fragmentary approach can be disorienting, this is a stimulating portrait of one of the world’s most mind-bending metropolises.
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