Shadow of the shadow, by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Original Language: Español

Year of publication: 1986

Valoración: Okay (recommended for those who want to have an idea of ​​Mexico immediately to their revolution)

1922, a year within a period where Mexican society fought with multiple lands. Crimes, assaults, assonated, armed uprisings, espionage, betrayals, foreign forces trying to intervene political, economic and even militarily to change the course of the Mexican Revolution; popular and workers movements pushing to recover lost directions by it; Press, art, transport, born or reborn after the popular war that changed the country. That is the frame where the novel develops Shadow of the shadow. Paco Ignacio Taibo II manages to describe that framework, makes his tensions feel, allows the reader to live at times his turbulence and, above all, he approaches the understanding of a time still close to the Mexican past, which makes it easier to understand the present of this Republic.

The protagonists of Shadow There are four characters that are every night to play dominoes. During the game they talk and reflect on what happens in Mexico City and in the country. The state of the society in which they live begins to delineate from there, in the description of the personality of each of the four players, who represent a good layer of the Mexican people. Domino players have different trades that will be revealed little by little, while describing their personalities.

There are four very different temperaments, as well as the jobs of those who live. While the domino game is the first thing that unites them, as the plot develops they are involved in events that unite them even more, events through which readers are realizing what happened in those years in Mexico.

It is certainly the vision of those below. No Why about some and others above? On a chess board there is no down and up between blacks and whites, only fights between them. Thus, in the novel, two parts appear: the flat people, with various trades with which they face life and its economic difficulties and the living who have taken advantage of the scrambled river of the Mexican Revolution to accommodate on any side of it and measure economically. Characters or segments of society also appear that cannot be placed in any of the groups described, but that have important results for the narration. The groups that face are, one, that of the faithful to themselves and their jobs and another, that of those who take advantage of the situation for personal benefit, abusing the circumstances.

The group of the faithful to themselves is basically made up of the four domino players, one of whom coincidentally sees a murder and another presence a death that can be taken as an accident or perhaps crime. As both events are related and one of the players is a journalist, the four get involved in the attempt to unravel that relationship, especially that from the shadow they suffer several attacks and threats, finally deciding to become a shadow of the leftover that pursues them. Shadow of which those who abuse the revolution arise.

I don’t know when Taibo II started to use the structure used in this novel, designed in 57 chapters, some very short. Many chapters have similar or identical titles, for example those who start with “the characters play dominoes” adding, sometimes no longer, other indications, or the sections that are called “beautiful stories that come from the past”; The latter complement the personalities of the protagonists or tell us about the background of some plot events. This same structure, of short chapters or with similar titles, is used by the author in other of his works such as Four hands, the distance of the treasure y We return as shadows; The latter, by the way, stars the same four characters but twenty years later and no longer play dominoes. We return as shadows It is commented here.

In summary: Mexico in 1922, when the Mexican Revolution, formally ended with the Constitution of 1917, had left the country in a whirlwind of madness that would be rowing on a rock and whose winds still drive it, without ceasing to be present the madness. If the black police novel is one that paints us a society, this novel is and develops in a stage that was so, although its characters are fictitious.

Signed: David Batista

Also by Paco Ignacio Taibo II reviewed in Ulad: We return as shadows