Cuentos de Mala Fe.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Bad Faith Stories

German Castro Ibarra's collection of twenty-four short stories offers a varied and sometimes humorous view of life in Mexico. Castro takes his reader from a middle-class living room to an alley in the slums, from the Mexican Caribbean to a landing aircraft, from the cafe to the bedroom to the bathroom. His fast-paced prose captures the frantic, absurd quality of modern existence, and while his characters are distinctly Mexican, many of the situations he describes will be familiar to any. North American or European urban-dweller.

Most of Castro's characters are unexceptional people who lead ordinary lives. In "Cosmopolitan", for example, he describes a few hours in the day of a secretary. Told in the second person with short, cryptic sentences, the story builds to a frenzied pitch as everyone from the boss to his wife to his] girlfriend hurls orders. Amid ringing telephones, demands for coffee, and the rrrr of uncooperative machines, the secretary dashes from one task to the other, trying to keep everyone happy, What emerges is a portrait of a lonely, frustrated woman who is dealing with her own personal tragedy while juggling the requirements of those in control.

In one of the funniest stories. "Rescate de Betamax" ("Rescued from the Betamax"), Castro turns a ritual of modern middle-class life - renting videos - into an absurdist farce. Two couples are passing the evening watching movies at the home of one. The first two films - a cowboy picture and War of the Galaxies - are uneventful, but the third turns out to be porno. The two wives are amazed enough when the action begins, but totally dumbfounded when first one leg and then another works its way out of the television set. Before they know it, the movie characters have left the screen and are standing there naked right in the living room! The men quickly dispose of the male nude,the host couple's unconventional solution to the problem of what to do with the female newcomer is recounted with the a kind of deadpan matter-of-factness that puts Castro in a leaque with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In "Las nalgas mas apetitosas del vuelo" ("The Most Appetizing Fanny on the Flight") Castro explores a primal emotion that will be familiar to many of his readers: fear of flying. On a business flight with his...