The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Book Overview

The short stories and novellas included in this volume take the reader through every dark recess of the imagination. Ranging from the theft of a famous statue by a Mexican crime syndicate in New York... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670831778
• ISBN13: 9780670831777
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Mystery

This is a terrific book. It is a very different mystery set in Mexico in 1922, during the Obregon regime, after ten years of chaos and revolution. The protagonists are four friends who meet nightly at a bar in the Majestic Hotel in Mexico City to play dominoes. When I saw that on the dust jacket, I immediately put the book in my buy pile, since in the past I was part of a dominoes-playing foursome. Perhaps part of why I was so taken with the book is the recollections it evoked. At the outset, two of the friends are separately witnesses to murders. The first witness was the poet, Fermin Valencia, who was "just over thirty and just under five feet tall", and who rode as a cavalryman with General Villa in the charge at Zacatecas. He was idly watching a free concert given by a military band in a park, when a man climbed up from the back onto the bandstand, put a pistol to the temple of the trombonist, fired, then escaped. The second witness was Pioquinto Manterola, ace crime reporter for the daily newspaper, El Democrata. He looked down from a third floor office window of the paper and saw a beautiful woman getting out of a car. He eye-balled her as she crossed the street. Not long after, he was startled when a window shattered on the third floor of the building directly across the street, and a screaming man plummeted to the sidewalk. Manterola was perhaps even more startled to see the woman he had been admiring looking at him out of the broken window. After that, bad things started happening to the friends. A device Taibo uses to further the story, provide a thread of continuity and a basis for giving analysis to the reader, is the nightly dominoes games at which the friends compare notes; and as they become enmeshed in seemingly unconnected and random violence aimed at them, try to make sense out of what has been going on. The "shadow of the shadow" is the description the poet gave of the friends as they began to track the unknown forces attacking them. The book is divided into numerous short chapters, each with a title. Recurring are chapters entitled "Workingman's Blues", which recount incidents in the working lives of the friends. Also recurring are chapters entitled "The Way Things Used To Be: [insert friend and past event]" . Both of these devices illuminate the characters of the friends. The other chapters carry interesting titles such as, "Tacos For Dinner, Gunplay For Dessert". As noted, Valencia is a poet. However, he makes his living writing newspaper ads for companies that make everything from patent medicine to mattresses ("Even your wife will look good... etc."). Manterola is a crime reporter who has a highly romantic view of women, and at one time attempted suicide over a lost love. Arturo Verdugo is a lawyer and the scion of an aristocratic family, who has "rejected all that his family wanted him to be and to have." He has a niche practice representing prostitutes and miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells. Tomas Gomez is of Chinese