A review by bgg616
McSweeney's Issue 46: Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America by Dave Eggers

4.0

This is a collection of 'crime' stories from several Latin American countries. Few if any of the authors will be familiar to American readers, although a couple have novels translated into English (e.g. Alejandro Zambra). In several stories, it was hard to figure out what the crime was as the entire story was set in a world of crime. Sometimes there was no crime until the very end of the story. Two or more were set in the world of transexual prostitutes, though they were labeled transvestites. This perhaps is a result of translation or may reflect different understandings of the terms in the countries in which the stories were set. My favorite story by Carol Bensimon 'Horses in the Smoke' is set in Porto Alegre, the city I lived in Southern Brazil in 1999. There is no crime, except the beating of a protestor by two skinheads he confuses for secret police. In another story, set in Honduras, '1986', the rebellious son of a rich family is sent to a mental health center that is supposed to use alternative therapies. It is a fraud perpetrated by an American, where inmates are tortured and even starved. The crime/mystery genre is fairly new in Latin America. Most of these writers are young novelists, not mystery or crime writers. The collection gives a sense of the lawlessness that is too common in many Latin American countries. The stories are uniformly dark - no cozy mysteries here. That's fine with me as I am not a lover of what I call the "Agatha Christie" style of 'oh my, there's a body in the garden - how inconvenient'.