![]() ![]() ![]() Clarice Lespectre’s cronicas of Rio and Jorge Matillo’s on Guayaquil are among the high points of the form.Īs an American who has lived in Mexico City on and off for more than 20 years now, Goldman brings something new to the form. It is a hybrid of travelogue and reporting, modernist in its sense of time, sketch-driven, and inherently political. In Latin and Central America and Brazil, so many of the best writers have worked in the cronicas form. It speculates on why the violence of the narco wars receded from the DF in 2012, eddying from long expository passages into vivid anecdotes about the disappeared, from a man who drowned during a sudden traffic jam on a flooded road, to another shot in the head on the street not far from where Goldman was living. “The Interior Circuit” energetically covers so much of the city ground, from its traffic and politics, to its bars and streetwalkers. A reporter by trade, a brawler by Bostonian birth, he is a fabulous and wonderfully erratic pilot for this trip across and through the DF, or District Federale, as Mexico City is known. Gradually, Ricardo recedes, and it’s clear our guide is Goldman himself. “When the moon is out in late afternoon it looms low over streets and buildings,” he writes, “enormous and pale yellow in the softer blue sky, like a ghostly school bus coming right at us.” Sentence by sentence, Goldman brings to life a city that is bewitching, terrifying, beautiful. ![]()
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