Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power

In 1970, recovering from a knife wound, Nestor, a journalist and partisan of the Mexican Movement of 1968, enlists his friends to help him recall the details of the protests, which culminated in the massacre of 49 students by army troops. Later, feverish from a kidney infection, Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth--Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D'Artagnan among them--to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination. Taibo ( An Easy Thing ) skillfully interweaves facts and reverie in a profoundly stirring portrayal of the euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure. This brief, unconventional work has little narrative continuity (the story of the Movement of '68 is told by way of interviews, letters, newspaper clippings and poems) and the reader may become confused by the haphazard, impressionistic prose. Yet Taibo's writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge. (July)