Viva Mexico: Carlos Fuentes' 'Destiny and Desire': Mexican myth from a severed head

Carlos Fuentes' 'Destiny and Desire': Mexican myth from a severed head - KansasCity.com: "I'm the thousandth severed head so far this year in Mexico. I'm one of fifty decapitated heads this week.

Josue Nadal, the colorful, poetic, and exceptionally loquacious narrator of Carlos Fuentes' 'Destiny and Desire,' is uniquely situated to tell his whole life story from beginning to end: He's dead.

More precisely, he's a severed head who, in the opening pages of the novel, finds himself - sans body - dumped on a beach, 'lost like a coconut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, along the Mexican coast of Guerrero.'

Fuentes' magisterial novel of ideas is hard to describe: It's a take on Gustave Flaubert's 'A Sentimental Education,' about the intellectual awakening of two young men.

But it's also an exciting, and ultimately very bloody, Cain and Abel thriller.

It's a potent political and moral critique of contemporary Mexico, which has been embroiled in a vicious four-year drug war that has led to more than 30,000 deaths (12,456 in 2010 alone)."