Born under strange circumstances to a high-society teenager and a pentagenarian entrepreneur, Jerónimo Rodriguez Loera is off to an inauspicious start--then things get worse. Through an assemblage of records, letters, and firsthand testimony of Jerónimo's past lives, Álvaro Enrigue creates a rich, observant, and dryly humorous account of class and clashing in Mexican society. Perpendicular Lives opens in 1930s Guadalajara, but as Jerónimo struggles toward maturity in a family plagued with infidelities, vanities, and favoritism, the story delves into Jerónimo's previous lives as, among others, the Mongolian widow of a cloth merchant and a monkhunter with a penchant for gunslinging and public defecation. Under the breakdown of his ostensible parents' marriage, political turmoil, and the hypo...

Born under strange circumstances to a high-society teenager and a pentagenarian entrepreneur, Jerónimo Rodriguez Loera is off to an inauspicious start--then things get worse. Through an assemblage of records, letters, and firsthand testimony of Jerónimo's past lives, Álvaro Enrigue creates a rich, observant, and dryly humorous account of class and clashing in Mexican society. Perpendicular Lives opens in 1930s Guadalajara, but as Jerónimo struggles toward maturity in a family plagued with infidelities, vanities, and favoritism, the story delves into Jerónimo's previous lives as, among others, the Mongolian widow of a cloth merchant and a monkhunter with a penchant for gunslinging and public defecation. Under the breakdown of his ostensible parents' marriage, political turmoil, and the hypo...