As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi! It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel described by The New York Times...