Palinuro of Mexico

Like those writers to whom he has been compared--Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, and Rabelais--del Paso draws upon myth, science, and world literature to expand his particular story to universal proportions. Telling the story of a medical student who's engaged in an incestuous affair with his cousin, the novel satirizes advertising, politics, pornography, and mythology, while at the same time celebrating the body with a thoroughness that only a student of medicine could manage.