In the following essay, author Luis Leal reviews Carlos Fuentes' novel Where the Air is Clear and his unique use of combining myth and fiction to create a synthesized biography of Mexico City.

Gabriel García Márquez, in his Nobel lecture, stated that Latin American reality is a reality not of paper, "but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes creativity, full of sorrow and beauty. . . . Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."

Latin American writers, truly more than any other group, have rendered those lives believable by means of their creative works, especially their novels. Alongside the names of Garc...