The city is as beautiful as it is terrible. With parks, avenues and streets that are filled with jacarandas and mango and chili carts; with pools of putrid water and exhalations of trucks or smog that fill our lungs. Adding all this, the capital has inspired great authors who have given space to their stories: Battles in the Desert, by José Emilio Pacheco, or Aura, by Carlos Fuentes. We chose five narrative books that will remind you how iconic CDMX is.
The body in which I was born, Guadalupe Nettel
This novel of growing up inspired by Nettel's own childhood and adolescence is set in the streets of Mexico City and France at the turn of the last century. Highly personal, the housing units, avenues, prisons and schools in a city that is growing rapidly and uncontrollably are the space where a girl with a birth defect that causes her partial blindness begins to discover who she is.
The inner circuit, Francisco Goldman
Mourning is the first place of enunciation in this novel by Francisco Goldman who, after the death of his wife, also a writer, Aura Estrada, brings us a novelistic chronicle about walking in a city framed by violence. Events such as #YoSoy132 to the case of the Heaven bar, in the Zona Rosa, are just some of those portrayed as a spectator.
Ansibles, profilers and other ingenuity machines, Andrea Chapela
This collection of science fiction short stories takes place in a Mexico City of the future; a city whose streets are covered by water after subway rivers revolt and whose technology puts it in check. In a reality increasingly traversed by machines of ingenuity, Chapela wonders what the city we love and fear will look like when technology catches up with us.
Restoration, Ave Barrera
Does love equal sacrifice? This interpretation of Salvador Elizondo's novel Farabeuf tells the story of a young restaurateur who sets out to fix up an old mansion in Mexico City as a token of love in a relationship that is coming to an end. A story of terror, past, memories and loss.
Empty set, Verónica Gerber Bicecci
This novel, which interweaves visual tools such as Venn diagrams with prose, tells the story of Veronica, the daughter of Argentine exiles, whose mother suddenly disappears. The family's house in Mexico City quickly becomes a bunker that no one outside the family can enter. The protagonist's artistic work intermingles with the crisis and desolation caused by the absence of her mother in an innovative novel.
