Distant Relations

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

During a long, lingering lunch at the Automobile Club de France, the elderly Comte de Branly tells a story to a friend, unnamed until the closing pages, who is in fact the first-person narrator of the novel. Branly's story is of a family named Heredia: Hugo, a noted Mexican archaeologist, and his young son, Victor, whom Branly met in Cuernavaca and who became his house guest in Paris. There they are gradually drawn into a mysterious connection with the French Victor Heredia and his son, known as Andre. There is a hard-edged emphasis on the theme of relations between the Old World and the New, as Branly's twilit, Proustian existence is invaded and overcome by the hot, chaotic, and baroque proliferation of the Caribbean jungle.

Explores an array of themes, including the nature of inheritance and heredity, the relationship between the Old World and the New, and the intermingling of European reserve and Latin American delirium.

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

During a long, lingering lunch at the Automobile Club de France, the elderly Comte de Branly tells a story to a friend, unnamed until the closing pages, who is in fact the first-person narrator of the novel. Branly's story is of a family named Heredia: Hugo, a noted Mexican archaeologist, and his young son, Victor, whom Branly met in Cuernavaca and who became his house guest in Paris. There they are gradually drawn into a mysterious connection with the French Victor Heredia and his son, known as Andre. There is a hard-edged emphasis on the theme of relations between the Old World and the New, as Branly's twilit, Proustian existence is invaded and overcome by the hot, chaotic, and baroque proliferation of the Caribbean jungle.

Guy Davenport

In ''Distant Relations,'' a novel in which two boys fuse into one and a man disintegrates in a shower of dead leaves, these tensions operate in a cat's cradle of a plot, crisscrossing each other to make a puzzle worthy of Poe or Borges.... What matters is Fuentes's superb art as a spinner of mysteries and a concocter of startling surprises. -- New York Times

Carlos Fuentes, born in Panama in 1928, has taught at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and many other universities. He is the author of more than a dozen novels—including, most recently, Inez (2002) and The Years with Laura Díaz (2000)—as well as several works of nonfiction. In 1987, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor given to a Spanish-language writer. Mr. Fuentes divides his time between Mexico City and London, and lectures frequently in the United States.