Donde Mejor Canta un Pajaro = Where a Bird Sings Best

This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia M rquez's Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque. The saga encompasses the stories of the author's grandparents and parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants to Chile. It weaves together Jewish philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers, Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who follows the family from the Old World to the New. The author has published and directed numerous plays and movies, especially in Mexico, and currently lives in Paris. This book will have international appeal for general readers in public libraries and bookstores and for readers of Latin American literature in academic libraries. Lisa M. Reynolds, Bloomington, IN