One of the best known works of Spanish literature is such a one – Lazarillo de Tormes.  The delightful 16th century satirical novel is standard fare in schools and is frequently used as an introduction to Spanish literature for both students of Spanish and native speakers.

The novel is considered to be a pioneering work of the genre known as picaresca, to which the later, even better-known Don Quixote de la Mancha belongs.  It’s also plugged as a fine example of Spain’s golden century, and serves to introduce the subject of censorship by the Spanish Inquisition, since it was one of the works that made the Index of Forbidden Books, a sort of a sixteenth century hall of fame.

The book is an autobiographical account of the fictional life of Lázaro, an orphaned boy who describes his adventures with a series of masters, each one a typical character of the society of the time.

And while Don Quixote is better known than Lazarillo, it’s probably not better read, on account of the length of it.  One of the advantages of Lazarillo is that it’s very short, so short that anyone can finish it without the excuses and other dubious claims made by those (of us) who made it some distance past the other’s introduction to an “idle reader” and intend to finish it one day.

Lazarillo should probably grace any bookshelf that includes Spanish works, but the text is also available online at a number of sites, both in Spanish and English.

Book corner in Mexico City

In the south of Mexico City, where Miguel Angel de Quevedo avenue crosses Avenida Universidad —about five minutes from the Bohemian hangout of Coyoacán— is a mini paradise for bookworms.

Three major bookstores, Gandhi, El Sotano, and Fondo de Cultura Economica, and a dozen or so smaller ones, line both sides of the street. Outside are wooden trays with books and CDs at throw-away prices, and inside you’ll find special offers on those less likely to be thrown away.

Mexico City remains the place where the widest selection of books and bookshops can be found, and some well-known chains have most of their branches in the capital.

Bookshops are still popular in Mexico

But while in many developed countries bookshops have been closing, Mexican chains have been opening new stores.  Like bookshops everywhere, they have also added DVDs, toys, puzzles and other paraphernalia to their offerings to make the business work.  This may annoy some purists, but somehow it’s hard to get worked up about a model that means the book business can continue going.

• Cafebrería El Péndulo – coffee shop-bookstore – now boasts seven branches in Mexico City, including in trendy neighborhoods such as Polanco, Condesa, Roma and San Angel.
• Librerías Gandhi has expanded with a number of new stores in Mexico City, and also has branches in a few other cities.
• El Sótano and Casa del Libro have more than a dozen branches.
• Gonvill Librerías is the biggest chain in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second most populated city which is also host to a major international book fair each year.

These chains tend to stock the best selection of books, often beyond the capacity of the shelves so that many are neatly piled up on the floor.  You can find most books in Spanish at these stores.

And while many, especially Gandhi and El Péndulo, have one or two shelves of books in English and French, here it tends to be hit and miss.  You might find occasional books of interest, but you are less likely to find a specific title. (For some you can check availability online.)

Alternative options to the chain bookstores

When you are looking for a particular book —such as a new release— the options are to stock-up on a trip abroad, or order it from a book seller online, most of which will ship books to Mexico with no problems—but not necessarily that quickly.  If you want a particular book right now, eBooks are the way to go.

Department stores and big box stores have book sections, but these vary widely in selection and quality. There are several hundred Sanborns stores which have ample book and magazine sections, but not much in English beyond bestsellers.

Often even the most bourgeois of us like to dig around for books in a bohemian atmosphere, and for that there are plenty of elegant bookshops—although that isn’t where most Mexicans go to buy reading material.  This collection of independent bookshops lists a selection of niche bookstores in the capital, curated by a local expat blogger.

Fans of Charles Dickens are likely to enjoy Payno’s novels. The flagship Los Bandidos de Rio Frio (The Bandits of Rio Frio), and the earlier El Fistol del Diablo (The Devil’s Brooch) are works much in the style of his English contemporary. Through many varied and colorful characters, Payno paints a complex picture of 19th Century Mexican society, combining irony and pathos as he takes his readers on tours of plush palaces where the opulence rivals anything in Europe, then drags them out through the large doors and into the grimy streets where misery reigns. Like Dickens, Payno finds both virtue and vice at the two extremes of the social scale.

These two novels of Payno’s also run long, the author having been in the habit of delivering his works for publication in installments. The shorter, El Hombre de la Situacion, (The Man for the Situation) is a satirical story of an immigrant family in Mexico at the end of the Colonial period.

The complete works of Manuel Payno have been published by the National Council for Culture and the Arts, Conaculta.  His novels can be found at most bookshops in Mexico.

What mostly came along, it seems looking back—were pets. Granted, pets aren’t a common window on a country: but they’re still a window, if you’re a kid.  Give a ten year-old a choice between a new video game and a live iguana – I say he’ll take the iguana, or regret it for the rest of his life.

And iguanas in Mexico are barely entry-level mascots; there was a pet shop near me in Mexico City that had a lion one day. It had squirrel monkeys, spider monkeys, and ocelots. It sometimes had a raccoon. Some leopard cubs once appeared. A panther. A Bengal tiger. It was better than the zoo, and you could take the animals home. Coming from my old white-underwear culture, where dogs and cats are the apex of pethood, where a ferret is exotic, this was a Tarzan movie. You didn’t even have to go to a pet shop—songbirds, salamanders, snakes, and turtles sold on street corners.

Then this place near me had a lion one day. And a raccoon. Our nearest Gigante supermarket had piranha. Piranha.

I don’t have to tell you the visions all this can inspire in the young. Me with my lion. My leopard at the supermarket – excuse me could you hold the leopard. I’ll just park the panther. The same equation was playing out in domestic animals as in food, I’d come from a meat and potatoes kind of place to an enchilada and mole kind of place; and consistent with this, dogs and cats were upgraded to lions and tigers. In fact everything was upgraded to something bigger, and freer, when I reached Mexico.

Understand, I hadn’t yet embarked on the lesson of why animals or people should be free. My instinct, surrounded by birds and lions and monkeys in cages, was to free them by bringing them home. And so this was the period when that lesson played out—because I brought home all the creatures I could find.

Now: I never got a lion. And I knew I didn’t have a hope in hell of convincing my father that I’d look after a tiger. Nor a panther, leopard, or monkey. No way, once the maids ended up with the canary. But after climbing the pet ladder through lizards and snakes, through salamanders, rabbits, parrots and hamsters, after moving up into creatures of field and stream —like ducks and exotic chickens— I thought I should have a shot at the raccoon. Well, you could almost pass it off as a kind of guinea pig.  A ring-tailed, flamboyant kind of guinea pig.

I mounted a campaign on my father for the raccoon. I tended my menagerie, did my chores, and worked on him. The raccoon would be my true friend from the wild, the real wild. I admit I was slightly in awe of the challenge because it really was the wild. And the lesson of freedom was already starting to bite, it began when I asked the man in the pet shop how you could keep any of these pets —especially the lions and tigers— without dying horribly. He said their claws had been removed, but I wasn’t convinced they’d feel more kindly towards us after that little procedure.  Plus, looking at three meter-lengths of Bengal tiger, I wasn’t sure it mattered. Anyway what was the point of having a creature you had to disarm in order to even survive? Compared to a raccoon, anyway.

I eventually got the raccoon. He was great and smart, and had a detailed emotional and psychological life. He rode my shoulders to the supermarket. He stole cake from the kitchen but wasn’t an animal, compared to the animal I was. I was humbled by the so-called animals, and slowly tempered by the pain of their passing lives. That’s what pets were for. Still we lived a span, and it was rich because we were animals in Mexico.

The last time I was in Mexico City I went up to the pet shop, but it’s gone. It used to sit just over the corner from Bazar Del Sabado in San Angel. From the cobbled street outside you could see the creatures flash through the dark of the doorway.

But I looked on the internet and saw that things are the same in Mexico, still an Aztec parade with furs and pelts and plumes. Now you can get lemurs, meerkats and sugar-gliders on top of your lions and tigers. So today, although I write from a distant place famous for white underwear and meat and potatoes, from that grey, almost flavorless non-Mexican world where I have no pets – I know just where to go and get one.

I know it’s unfashionable, unliberal. But give a kid a choice between fashionable, liberal, and a live iguana – and he’ll take the iguana every time. Or regret it for the rest of his life.

Greene traveled in southern Mexico during the anti-clerical persecutions of the 1930s, and produced two books, the commentary Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and The Glory.  Lawrence visited in the 1920s, and wrote The Plumed Serpent, while Lowry in the 1940s wrote Under The Volcano, which was made into a film in 1984.

The three can be associated with specific places in Mexico: Greene with sweltering Tabasco; Lowry with Cuernavaca, the land of eternal spring; and Lawrence with Lake Chapala—to this day a popular spot for foreign residents living in Mexico.

The Mexican historian Enrique Krauze considers in a 2015 article on British writers that lived in or visited Mexico that the works of the male authors lean toward what is dark in the country, while the female writers —Rosa King, Sybille Bedford, Rebecca West— tended rather to reflect the day.

More recently, writers like Tony Cohan, author of the memoir On Mexican Time (and its sequel, Mexican Days) show how the country continues to deliver inspiration for writers who come to visit or live here.  A good number of the more contemporary books are about people escaping to a quiet life south of the border —oblivious perhaps to Mexico’s own version of the rat race— and some are fiction.

Another modern-day writer, DBC Pierre of British and Australian parentage, grew up in Mexico in the 1970s.  While Mexico appears briefly in the latter part of his prize-winning first novel Vernon God Little, it’s in a later work, Release the Bats, that he shares several of his personal experiences in the country.

Modern writers are still finding inspiration in Mexico for turning out prose (not to mention blogs), and writing courses are also popular here.

Use the comments below to share your recommendation.

Often when something happens that was or might have been predicted, a commentator, writer, or speaker somewhere will refer to their version of the event as “the chronicle of a ______ foretold.”  So we have had chronicles of soccer matches foretold, chronicles of election outcomes foretold, and if worse comes to worst, we may have chronicles of a credit ratings downgrade foretold.

This use of the “chronicle” puts the title up there with “to be, or not to be,” which people considering dilemmas far removed from outrageous fortune will yet utter as if that solved the problem, and A Tale of Two Cities, practically any dichotomy being prone to the epithet “A tale of two … ”

The late García Márquez, probably the best known contemporary Latin American author, lived in Mexico for many years before his death in Mexico City on April 17th, 2014.  Both he and his works are very popular here, and people could be forgiven for thinking him Mexican.

A traveler on the Mexico City Metro was once overheard explaining to a friend one of “Gabo’s” books.  Not only was that work brilliant, he said, but so were all the others.  The enthusiasm was so contagious that before the train reached the terminal, the friend had stated his intention to buy one at the next opportunity.

This was instructive for the eavesdropper who had become bored after only about 30 years of solitude and laid the book quietly aside, and whose subsequent reading of The Autumn of the Patriarch was abandoned in a second attempt because the author kept messing around with the clocks.

The actual date marks the call to arms by Francisco I. Madero in 1910, as he sought the removal of dictator Porfirio Diaz through elections, with the slogan “effective suffrage, no re-election.” Although Diaz didn’t last much longer in power, and Madero briefly reached the presidency, the next decade was one of great upheaval and confusion. A number of the heroes of the revolution — Madero, Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregon — were at times rivals in the fighting, and all of them ended up being killed by enemies.

To keep it simple, the rogues were Diaz and Victoriano Huerta, the general who overthrew Madero and is widely blamed with having Madero killed. The others were heroes.

For a blow-by-blow account of the shifts in power, the battles and betrayals during this period, there are plenty of history books to be found in both Spanish and English. For a portrayal of what it was like among the ragtag armies of rebels during the turbulent period, the novel Los de Abajo by Mariano Azuela is the book to read.

The book tells the tale of Demetrio Macias, who leads a marauding band of rebel fighters moving across the Mexican countryside. Received at first as heroes, the rebels soon become as resented as the federal army as they go from town to town pillaging “advances” on their non-existent wages.

The short work makes only a passing mention of the renowned revolutionary leaders, focusing more on a handful of fictional characters typical of the time. From the idealistic, and at first naïve, student Luis Cervantes, to the murdering güero Margarito and La Pintada, the author shows the light and the dark sides of the insurgents.

A few military successes are sufficient for Macias to rise through the rebel ranks, but as the sides change (as they often did during the Revolution) it becomes apparent that Macias doesn’t care who he’s fighting against. The book has been translated into English as “The Underdogs,” which makes a better book title than “those at the bottom,” or “the lower classes,”—but doesn’t quite capture the meaning.

Mariano Azuela, a Jalisco native, was a writer and doctor who served in the ranks under Francisco Villa.

Article Image: Night view looking up at the illuminated Monument to the Mexican Revolution, situated in Mexico City.

The book narrates the experiences of Tony and his wife Masako as they serendipitously discover San Miguel de Allende in the 1980s, and soon afterwards spontaneously decide to leave their highly-strung life situations in Los Angeles and move to live in San Miguel.

Cohan’s chronicle is a blend of personal observations about a Mexican culture that is at once alien and alluring to the new arrivals, with narratives that describe some everyday experiences and sentiments foreign residents often pass through as they establish their presence here and begin to settle into their routines and surroundings.

The memoir traverses a 15-year interval of the couple’s life together, which begins around the time of the 1985 earthquake that rocked Mexico City and concludes around the time of the book’s publication date in 2000. The narratives illustrate Mexico as it was in that era, and if you had read this book at the turn of the century, you would have recognized the continuing presence then of what Tony Cohan describes, while also mindful that Mexico was on the cusp of significant change.

To anyone who’s lived in Mexico for a good while —reading this memoir today while reflecting on 35 years of changes— it’s immediately apparent how some things have moved-on and none so much, perhaps, as their constant struggles to keep in touch with family, friends, and associates using the old long-distance telephone kiosks, and the difficulties they encounter trying to get a telephone line working at the house they buy: matters which have been consigned to the annals of history with services like cellular telephony and widespread internet access.

Some aspects of the narrative describe a San Miguel that is now long-gone—and a San Miguel which the original foreign artists who settled there in the 1950s had asserted was gone by the time Cohan’s memoir was published.

The city has changed from being a bohemian sleepy backwater town where artists mustered to cultivate their work, to one of the most popular locations in Mexico’s history; sought-after by wealthy foreigners and Mexicans buying weekend homes in the historic district, and visited by tourists from across the world.

Tony Cohan and his wife purchased their old colonial home in the central historic district of San Miguel for US$65,000—a sum that would not cover the closing costs in today’s market, where property prices easily compete with Mexico City’s most trendy neighborhoods.

Although the story describes a Mexico of three decades past, one of the remarkable aspects of the memoir is that Cohan’s descriptions of now long-gone ways and means blend with those which continue to remain firmly present in the realms of everyday Mexican life and, in that sense, the book today serves as an account that describes Mexico on its own passage through Mexican time.

The book is published in hardback, paperback, and audio versions. It’s also available as an eBook. See the Author’s website.

The controversial law, supported by an apparent majority of leaders of opinion, intellectuals, and publishers, was first blocked by a presidential veto on grounds that it flew in the face of competition and would push up book prices.

It was later passed by a supermajority vote that steamrolled the veto, and promulgated amid speeches  in favor of books and reading. Did it work?

Browsing through a number of bookstores in the capital shows that books in Mexico are quite expensive, and Spanish editions often more so than the original English versions. Books written in Spanish are also frequently more expensive than comparable works in the U.S. or the U.K.

Nominally more expensive, that is, so by applying the Big Mac index which takes into account average wages, book prices border on exorbitant.

It’s perhaps not surprising then that an assortment of survey findings collected and published on the website of the Nexos magazine – shows that only three out of 10 Mexicans had read at least one book in the past 12 months, compared with six Spaniards, and eight Britons.

And the chicken-and-egg dilemma remains: do people in Mexico not read because books are so expensive, or are books so expensive because people don’t read?

An educated guess would be the latter, which in turn may be supported by another of the survey trivia collected by Nexos: 38% of people in Mexico never read a newspaper, and 49% never read a magazine.

But only 15% prefer to watch television in their spare time, according to the list. And 25% of people borrow a newspaper to read.

Several conclusions are possible: You can’t trust surveys. Economic theory doesn’t apply to books.

PS: When U.S. bookseller Borders filed for bankruptcy, the talk was of competition from online sales and e-books causing the problem. Nothing suggests it was a lack of readers.

Mexico, as in many other things, would appear to be a case apart.