Where the Air Is Clear [La región más transparente] is an attempt to extricate a living imagination from the entombed, self-devouring realities of Mexican consciousness, forever mourning its sundered past, incessantly projecting its possible future shapes, and torn between its ill-defined authenticity and the directing pressure of more advanced societies, much as the nineteenth-century Russian mind was caught between panslavism and the cultured West.

Neither a Turgenev nor a Dostoyevsky, Fuentes presses for a transcendence of the quarrel. He proceeds first by a series of bitter portraits of Mexican salon life, where writers, artists and journalists mingle with the nouveau riche and the museum pieces of the older aristocracy, in a brittle Walpurgis Nicht of sensuality, chic French phrases, complaints about boredom, gossip, jockeying for position and interminable discussions about what it means to be Mexican. As set-pieces they are among the most impressive things in...