Tula Station

Writing in a fusion of styles and variously indebted to Julio Cortazar, the young Carlos Fuentes, and Umberto Eco, Mexican novelist Toscana has created a text that is as intriguing as it is convoluted. A young would-be novelist, Froylan Gomez, is approached by an old man, Juan Capistran, who claims to be Froylan's grandfather and proposes that Froylan write Capistran's life story. When a hurricane devastates the town of Tula and evidently kills Froylan, Froylan's wife asks Toscana himself to edit and publish the manuscript. (Toscana continues to show up in the text, both as a character and in his editorial footnotes.) But is Froylan really dead, or has he taken advantage of the hurricane to escape his marriage and run away with a mysterious woman named Carmen? Capistran, it seems, had convinced Froyl n to seek out the reincarnation of the love of his life, also Carmen. Froylan finds Carmen number two (at a public reading from this text) and records both his life and that of the old man in the novel/biography/diary that Toscana has been asked to edit. All of this takes place in the mountain town of Tula, once a bustling city, but now bypassed by the railways and time itself, and inhabited by eccentrics who refuse to accept the metric system, among other quirks. Multiple endings, an introduction that is in fact a conclusion, recursive narrative twists, a cast of oddball characters who occasionally function as critics of the text in which they appear, plus the atmosphere of the doomed town itself make this a subtle and thought-provoking--if occasionally frustrating--novel. (Jan.)