THE HYDRA HEAD

In marked contrast to Fuentes' last novel, the broad-keeled and mythic Terra Nostra, this is a spy mystery, a sort of object fable linking the subterranean and inherently puzzling Mexican character to shady, cloak-and-dagger goings-on. Felix Maldonado, a Mexican bureaucrat specializing in the nationalized oil industry, finds one day that no one he works with seems to recognize him. At a reception for the Presidente he faints, later waking up swaddled in bandages and the victim of unasked-for plastic surgery. His identity, it seems, has been permanently borrowed: the old "Felix Maldonado" has been put to use as a sacrifice by a cell of Mexican Intelligence that's attempting to fend off attempts by both the Arabs and Israelis to neutralize a recent Mexican oil find. Triple agents, a clear-stoned ring that contains laser holographs, old flames of Felix's, various murders—and meanwhile Felix doesn't really know what the devil is going on. Fuentes, not completely comfortable with the form, provides another narrator three-quarters of the way through to make the action intelligible (as well as to add a long discourse upon the Arab-Israeli problem, the idea of terror in modern society, the suitability or unsuitability of the Mexican temperament to such high-stakes power). Either the clarification ought to have come earlier or been left out completely; as it stands, the book's gears—spy-story vs. think-book—don't mesh: it zooms, stalls, smokes, chugs. A bumpy ride, then, serious but unsure of itself, neither smoothly entertaining nor genuinely provocative.