By Fernando del Paso
Translated by Elizabeth Plaister
ISBN: 9781628975635
Publication Date: 01/06/2026
Winner of Mexico's Premio Novela Mexico, Spain's Romulo Gallegos Prize for best Spanish-language novel, and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for best foreign book, Palinuro of Mexico is a masterpiece which ranks with the finest achievements of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Palinuro, a medical student, is born into a polygenetic family: Uncle Esteban, who fled from Hungary during the Great War and traveled across the world to Mexico, clinging to his dream of becoming a doctor; Grandpa Francisco, a Freemason and old-time companion of Pancho Villa; Uncle Austin, an ex-British marine; grandmothers, aunts, cousins—an eccentric menage. Since childhood, Palinuro has loved his first cousin, Estefania, with an overwhelming and consuming passion. They indulge their incestuous desires and bizarre fantasies in a room in the Plaza Santa Domingo.
Drawing from a cultural cornucopia, del Paso propels Palinuro and his companions though the real and the imaginary realms of mythology, science, politics, social comment, the arts, advertising and pornography. This labyrinthine tour de force is a fusion of Rabelaisian wit, Swiftian satire, Shakespearean invention and pastiche ranging from Hawthorne to Galdos.
Praise
“Palinuro of Mexico is an immense book in scope, length and beauty . . . pages of romantic lyricism, heady erudition, unbridled eroticism.” —L'Express
“This tour de force is the novel of modern Mexico and its sprawling capital....warm and very funny . . . Elisabeth Planter’s translation is brilliant.” —Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Truculent and epic, Palinuro of Mexico follows in the great tradition of those universal masterpieces by Homer, Rabelais, Virgil, even Joyce. A fascinating book.” —Humanité Dimanche
“Gargantuan, not to say Dantean and Ulyssean . . . [it] exudes the art and craft of loving care and infinite labor.” —Manchester Guardian
“At its deepest level, the narrative of Palinuro of Mexico embodies a totalizing ambition, reminiscent of Joyce, to investigate the conditions of culture and knowledge, to explore the relationship between myth and history, and to demonstrate the potential of literary language to revolutionize our ways of seeing the world.” —Times Literary Supplement
“A vast encyclopedia of sensuality and farce.” —L'Événement du Jeudi
“A firework display of culture and jest.” —Le Canard Enchaîné
“Joycean and surreal.” —Libération
“This is lush, jewelled and confectionary writing.” —Books (London)
“An excessive novel and an encyclopedic compilation of data on the human body. This is what makes the book unique: nowhere in literature can we find a book anything like it, a book into which such vast knowledge, organized by language, has been poured in an overweening aspiration to totality. . . . Palinuro of Mexicoviewed from the perspective of future years will be perceived as a milestone in Mexican narrative for having achieved ‘passage’ through cultural barriers to what lay beyond, to universal discourse.” —Latin American Literature and Arts
“A novel that, more than fifteen years after its original appearance, remains a puzzle, an enchanting homage to confusion, and, in my judgment, a perfect embodiment of Calvino’s hypernovel. . . . His work is about Mexico’s difficult history and arduous present, about the ambitions of an all-encompassing knowledge, about freedom of body and mind, and about the demons of possibility.” —Ilan Stavans, editor, The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays
“Grotesque, macabre and Dionysiac . . . del Paso is a great and unorthodox writer.” —Le Monde
“Read it: it is a breath of fresh air, it has a universal voice rarely heard . . . it runs the gamut from laughter to tears, from the crude to the tender, with an incredible virtuosity.” —Madame Figaro
Biographical Information
Fernando del Paso (1935-2018) was a Mexican author, diplomat, and academic. Del Paso studied medicine at the Autonomous University of Mexico before changing careers. Later, he would continue on to become an alum of the Iowa Writers Workshop, then working for the BBC in London, and later, Radio France and as a cultural ambassador for the Mexican government. His works include some of the most important novels of twentieth-century Latin American literature, such as Letras del Imperio and Palinuro de México.
Elizabeth Plaister is a translator of books from Spanish, including authors such as Manuel Vazquez Montalban and Fernando del Paso.
Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer living in New York. His novel Sudden Death received the Herralde, the Poniatowska and the Barcelona prizes. You Dream of Empires was a top ten book of the year for The New York Times, the New York Public Library and The Guardian. He teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University.
Dr. Francisco González-Crussi, (b. Mexico City, 1936; naturalized American citizen in 1987), Professor Emeritus of Pathology of Northwestern University Medical School, wrote numerous articles and two books of his medical specialty. He debuted as an essayist in 1985 with his book Notes of an Anatomist and has since authored twenty-six books (equally divided in English and Spanish), chiefly in the essay genre. Among the awards he received are: First Prize for non-fiction of the Society for Midland Authors (1985); a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000-2001); the Merck Prize in Rome, Italy (2014); the VIth International “ Pedro Henriquez-Ureña” Award by Mexico’s Academy of the Language (2019).