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

01/25/2021

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. (Mar.)

Villoro recounts his adventures with a mix of irony and empathy, with a sense of humor and a feeling for the absurd. He is exquisitely attuned to the capital’s contradictions and nuances, and he knows how to listen to its inhabitants. There are deeply moving moments in this book.”
—The New York Times Book Review

"One of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary writers offers an affectionate exploration of the country’s capital city. [Villoro] does not shy away from issues of poverty, class, and gender, and the result is an enthralling, often funny depiction of a city that ‘overflowed urbanism and installed itself in mythology.’”
—The New Yorker

"Horizontal Vertigo is the best—wittiest, wisest, most detailed and enlightened—book I've read about Mexico City. It is both deeply personal and scholarly, and most of all humane and humorous - Juan Villoro's triumph as a chronicler of Mexican life."
—Paul Theroux, author of On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

"The joy of Horizontal Vertigo is that it offers a unique entry into Mexico City’s ‘inexhaustible encyclopedia’ of people, places and old traditions, complementing the history books and outperforming the tour guides... Villoro is so closely identified with Mexico City that it’s impossible to imagine how one can be known without the other, which is why his writings consistently employ the communal ‘we,’ as in this telling statement about the unbreakable bond between Chilangopolis and chilangos: ‘What was once a cityscape is now our autobiography.’”
—The Los Angeles Times

"Juan Villoro, one of Mexico’s leading novelists, delivers a contemporary portrait of Mexico City that is as diverse and labyrinthine as the city itself. In Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico, he weaves together voices, styles and disciplines in a personal and expansive exploration, a flâneur through geography, history and culture."
—The Guardian

“Deeply learned . . . Along his leisurely, illuminating path, Villoro delivers an essential update of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). He can be both brittle and funny . . . Celebrating food, wandering through earthquake-struck ruins, reflecting on literary heroes, Villoro makes an excellent Virgil. An unparalleled portrait of a city in danger of growing past all reasonable limits.″
—Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“This is a stimulating portrait of one of the world’s most mind-bending metropolises.″
—Publishers Weekly

“Villoro applies his witty and incisive pen to the monster that is Mexico City . . . Villoro’s voice is engaging, and the subject matter, fascinating . . . An unusual and rewarding read for all who love or are intrigued by Mexico City.″
—Booklist

“This is Villoro’s masterpiece . . . His great achievement in Horizontal Vertigo resides in his ability to understand and make the city known through different characters, occupations, and beliefs. Although many writers have been interested in Mexico City, such as Carlos Monsiváis and Carlos Fuentes, Juan Villoro finds a new, postmodern way of portraying the contemporary city.”
—World Literature Today

“One of the ten best nonfiction books of the year. A superheroic effort to tame the urban chaos that was born of an ecocide: the drying up of a lake. No city is wilder, more monstrous than Mexico’s capital. And few writers know it with more precision and passion than Juan Villoro.”
—The New York Times en Español

02/01/2021

Journalist and novelist Villoro has been writing about Mexico City for over 20 years. Originally published in Spanish in 2018, his latest book brings his wealth of experiences to bear. Through a collection of personal stories, geographical essays, social histories, and biographies, he weaves a nonlinear account of Mexico City—because the story of Mexico City is nonlinear. It is a city that exists in and out of chronology and is both defined by and defines its space. He explores the city's vast history, from prehistory and Spanish colonial entradas to the present, and wanders through its spaces in what may appear to be a haphazard format. But he has a reason for grouping the stories by places, characters, ceremonies, and more. His design gives readers the opportunity to decide on their own where to start and where to end, much like a traveler or visitor would decide what spaces to explore. In so doing, readers create their own personal version of the story. VERDICT Villoro is not for the casual reader but for those who are interested in a deeply complex yet personal social history of Mexico City. The book serves as a nice complement to The Mexico City Reader (2004).—Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX

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

★ 2020-12-25
A deeply learned appreciation of the author’s native Mexico City.

Trained as a sociologist but well known to Spanish-speaking readers as one of Mexico’s most acclaimed novelists, Villoro writes appreciatively of a city that is constantly changing—and whose landmarks are different for each generation, if they haven’t been torn down in the course of rebuilding or destroyed by earthquakes. For him, the “outstanding sign of the times is the Latin American Tower,” built in 1956, the year of the author’s birth, and then one of the rare buildings in Mexico City to be more than a few stories tall, since the plateau on which the city sits is both tectonically active and so sandy that building collapse is a real danger. In his lifetime, Villoro notes, the territory embraced by the city megalopolis “has spread out like wildfire” and “grown seven hundred times.” Growth, he adds, “meant spread,” so much so that to find Villoro’s house, located on a street named for the revolutionary figure Carranza, you would have to know which one of 412 streets and avenues named for Carranza it was on. Natural and cultural landmarks are matters of memory and nostalgia, he writes, and since “Mexico-Tenochtitlán buried its lake, and the smog blotted out the volcanoes,” there are few points of orientation. As such, memory has to make up for the destruction of the environment. Along his leisurely, illuminating path, Villoro delivers an essential update of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). He can be both brittle and funny, as when he dissects the overstaffed and bureaucratized retail sector. “Although overpopulation is one of our specialties,” he writes, “we have an abundance of stores where there are few customers and an excessive number of workers,” one of whom, the manager, serves as “a final potentate, a Chinese emperor in his Forbidden City.” Celebrating food, wandering through earthquake-struck ruins, reflecting on literary heroes, Villoro makes an excellent Virgil.

An unparalleled portrait of a city in danger of growing past all reasonable limits.