José Agustín Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
José Agustín is a Mexican writer. His first novel, La Tumba (The Tomb) was the brief but provocative story of a Mexican upperclass teen, deemed indecent by the public but gathering praise from older writers. This and his most famous work, De Perfil (Profile view), a fast and detailed view of three days in the main character's life, show stylistic similarities to James Joyce's work, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.He was considered a member of the so-called Onda literature, onda (wave) being slang for current and fashionable views in the eyes of young people.
A common technique in his work is mixing character's speech with narrative, without making any kind of distinction. Thus the reader finds a long dialogue written in a single sentence, and is expected to realize which character is speaking as he reads the words. He also makes use of the stream of consciousness technique.
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The "good people" rejected the novel because it freely touched (and portrayed) topics like abortion and sex, but the writers' community praised it inmensely. Despite Gabriel´s intellectual tone, the book was a huge editorial success, establishing Jose Agustin as a respected and profitable writer.
Being his first work, the novel has some flaws. A distinguished writer said at the time that he liked it, but it was "naively pedantic."
"Profile view" is possibly the best work of Jose Agustin. Placed in Mexico City in the 1960s, 1970s, the novel covers in detail three days in the life of the main character, an unnamed young man who is going to enter university. It opens with the phrase "Behind the rock is the world I live in" and the reader finds him smoking cigarettes in his home's garden, hiding from his parents behind a big rock. (It should be noted that in Mexico it is common but not compulsory to live with one's parents until marriage, even if one has the means to support oneself).
The son of a psychiatrist and a housewife, he has a younger brother he can't stand. His friend Ricardo is timid and naive, having bold ideas he never dares put to practice, and when he does, he usually makes a joke of himself. Ricardo is very attached to X, the closest thing to a name the main character gets in the novel (given by Ricardo in one of his "confidential" plans), but X thinks Ricardo is too childish. X meets many kinds of people: a fledging music group about to make their first record (Los suásticos) and their homosexual manager, a young and rich female singer (Queta) with which he has an affair, and more characters, most with some artistic or intellectual aspiration, including student leaders, highly politicized.
Despite this complexity, the novel is more polished and natural to the reader than La Tumba. It also has a greater length. It doesn't have a particular theme or purpose, following the main character most of the time, in the present, first person. X is rebellious but his naivety and inexperience embarrasses him from time to time. To protect himself he would assume an experienced or indifferent air, but he is aware of his hypocrisy. By the novel's end, the reader has felt what is like to be X, and reads a kind of wild dream of his future as boyfriend of Queta and student leader, and of his past as a tiny baby in his mother's arms.
The narrative is fluid and changing, most of the time X's thoughts in the first person, written in different styles. There are also memories, the point of view of a different character, a few flashbacks from his family past, and finally a technique very common in Jose Agustin's work: mixing the character's speech with the narrative, without making any distinction, typographical or punctuation, leaving it to the reader to discern which character is speaking. Other times spacing and font size delineate speech.
Like La Tumba, De Perfil was a best-seller, and furthered Jose Agustin's reputation as a writer.
A more mature work, this is set in a small city in the United States, around the early 1990s. This is an Article on José Agustín. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About José Agustín Novels
La Tumba
"The Tomb" is a short novel, originally written as a series of tales ("Tedium") in a literary workshop. Situated in Mexico City in the 1960s, its main character, Gabriel Guía, is a teenager holding a somewhat cynic and disenchanted view of life and himself. He has the usual adventures of a mexican rebellious teen in the 1960s, told in slang and a direct tone. He knows French, writes tales and poetry, and makes many references and citations of authors like Arthur Rimbaud and Chejov, some of his more intellectual friends sharing his interest. De Perfil
Ciudades Desiertas
"Empty cities" is the story of a Mexican couple of writers attending an international workshop in the USA. Their marriage problems run alongside their feeling of nostalgia watching those empty cities (because people work in a different city from which they live) and living in the American society, highly regulated compared to their own. This is, however, a fun novel to read. The clash of Latin American writers, wild members of a wild society (in the American view, at least), with a more regulated American society gives raise to many situations. The fact that the workshop is only open to third world writers (not europeans who would look down on the tiny city) isn't unnoticed.