A 1975 Mexican novel that mixes satire and imagination

René Avilés Fabila was a Mexican novelist who also worked as a journalist, and Tantadel is one of his novels, first published in 1975. His fiction belongs to a lively stretch of twentieth-century Mexican writing in which social criticism, satire and invention often ran together.

The book appeared from Fondo de Cultura Económica in its Letras Mexicanas series, the name meaning “Mexican Letters”. For a reader today it is a piece of Avilés Fabila’s work from the 1970s, in the Spanish of its first printing.

This copy is that first edition, a small paperback about 18 centimetres tall. The wrapper and spine are mostly intact, with light rubbing at the edges and slight ageing, and the pages inside are largely clean. The pagination and the glue of the spine have still to be checked.