THE MEXICAN NOVELS

THE ETHIOPIAN EXHIBITION
"I had been living for seven years in California. Inexplicably I was unable to write. One day—it was April 1, 1987—I loaded my typewriter and some clothes onto my motorcycle and drove into Mexico. Crossing the northern deserts, my old Honda had five flat tires, a sure sign, I thought, that I was a fool to be making this journey; or else—such is the ambiguity of signs—that I had been a fool to put it off for so long. I arrived finally in Manzanillo, a seaport below Puerto Vallarta. I moved into an abandoned house in a coconut grove next to the ocean. I wrote daily, unexpectedly, in a cafe on the plaza. In three months the first draft of The Ethiopian Exhibition was complete...."

MAYA.
"Maya is an overlapping palimpsest of media violence and real violence placed ambiguously in the studios of Hollywood, the jungles of Vietnam, and the myth-saturated backlands of Mexico. It projects a dense atmosphere of sexual violations echoing ancient sacrifice, decadent Western interlopers, a pernicious exoticism....."

THE QUEEN OF LAS VEGAS
More soon.

ORIFICE
"The building is shaped like a fat cross. The air, of course, is warm and moist. It is night. A river is nearby, and a jungle. The women cross the field between the river and the northern extension of the building...."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WANDERER
"I was born on—no, that’s not it. I died—no, I am still alive. Someday I will die. Perhaps soon. I am preparing for death. Perhaps my life has been a preparation for death. If I review my life this preparation will perhaps be evident. In any case as an exercise such a review may be amusing..."

HAG
"HAG is a full length movie, but it actually began life as a novel. I wrote hundreds of pages over a period of a few years, trying to make it work. The other day I pulled them out, and saw within these pages the kernal of a story—so I did some editing, chopping, altering, and am now putting together the book. Filled, of course, with illustrations—like these—

—a kind of illuminated novel...."

 

LATE NOVELS

KONGO (in progress)
More soon.

EVIDENCE OF A LOST CITY (in progress)
"I've been experimenting with new characters--Chamelea, Judith, and now Metalica. You can see some photos of these creatures, and some short videos on the Characters and Scenes pages. Here's a photo—

—with much more available at its own website...."

EARLY NOVELS

THE WILDERNESS
“The Wilderness began life in Africa in 1964. I had drifted south, hitchhiking, from Mombasa. At the border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) I was hired by a magician. I studied his work with the same attentiveness I gave to works of prose. Magic, I decided, was the same as art: the same technical tricks, the same interweaving of fact and fiction, of control and misdirection, the deliberate use of confusion to take an audience where you wished, and the same thrill, too, the same miraculous dance at the edge of the world, the same cruel ecstasy of mystery and horror and love. Magic was art, I saw. Art was magic.  I began writing The Wilderness there in Rhodesia. I wrote between acts, so to say, between tricks, a palmed card, a levitating woman, a bullet caught between teeth….”

MOFA
“Mofa (which means 'mockery' in Spanish) is my second novel, begun in Costa Rica in about 1968 and finished in Riverside, California. It drew extensively on the year and a half I spent in Central America. It was my intention to write about sexual repression—to create a sense of strangled desire, truncated passion. After I wrote it, I sent it to an agent. “Books like this,” he told me, “should never be written, and if they are written, they should never be published.” I never sent it anywhere else….”

THE PILGRIM
More soon.

ORPHE
"Orphe is my fourth novel. It actually began as a short story, written in Australia in the early 1960s. It never seemed quite right as a short story--it itched at me for years. In 1968 I took it with me, on my motorcycle, to Panama. I recall sitting in a Chinese cafe, reading it over a cup of coffee. I jotted down a few ideas, a few more lines. I sold my motorcycle to a man on a yacht, and continued south. I followed the Amazon from Pulcallpa, Peru, to Belem at the Atlantic coast of Brazil. I lived on a raft in Iquitos. I wandered the streets of Manaus...."

METROPOLIS
"Early in 1977, I flew with my bicycle—an old French Follis—to Tahiti. This began a two-month foray across the Pacific, to Samoa, Western Samoa, and then Fiji. I slept in a hammock strung between trees. I wandered along mud roads, through rain and tropical sunshine. I sailed around islands on a copra boat. I caught—and survived—malaria. Finally I went on to Adelaide, Australia, where my dreams became filled with images of despair. A series of characters appeared and reappeared: the Fat Man, a sick boy, a strangely beautiful woman. And a city: decaying buildings, mysterious passageways. When the despair threatened to overwhelm me, I decided to turn my dreams into a novel. The result is Metropolis, which followed my dreams over a period of about nine months..."