Juan García Ponce - mystical, cruelly poignant situations; labyrinthine prose style

Juan García Ponce, Encounters. Eridanos Press, 1989.

Combining mystical, cruelly poignant situations with a lyrical, labyrinthine prose style, Mexican author Garcia Ponce makes a tantalizing English-language debut. In "The Cat," a young couple's mesmerizing erotic bond is first interrupted, and then eerily controlled, by the presence of a stray cat they befriend. Both "The Square" and "Anticipation" depict aging men in thrall to memory. "Anticipation" is especially striking because most of the story consists of a nostalgic monologue delivered by one of the two characters: A-1 tells A-2 of an experience of his youth that is "the total image I have of the perfection of life, of its supreme beauty, when it is life alone and at the same time something more than life because it includes it. . . . " In the novella The Seagull , adolescents Katina and Luis discover each other's--and their own--sexuality one summer at the beach. They confront a simultaneous knowledge and ignorance, a fierce empowerment and a gaping impotence.



Juan García Ponce, The House on the Beach: A Novel . Trans. by Margarita Vargas. University of Texas Press, 1994.

read it at Google Books

www.garciaponce.com/textos/index.html
 
Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.
This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan García Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary "Mexican School" with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society.
                     

As its title suggests, this novel by the Mexican writer Garcia Ponce makes perfect summer reading. The narrative describes a world in which everything and nothing happens at the same time and can be read either simply for the story, or, if a reader feels ambitious, for its insights into Mexican society during the 1960s. The narrator, Elena, a young lawyer from Mexico City, visits her school friend Marta whom she hasn't seen in years. Now married, Marta lives beside the ocean in provincial Yucatan with her husband Eduardo. Elena soon becomes aware of the deep tension and unhappiness between Marta and Eduardo and, to complicate things further, she falls in love with Rafael, Eduardo's oldest friend. Written in 1966, but translated into English for the first time as part of the Texas Pan American Series, the novel explores the pull of convention: each character is trapped in a web of family duty and tradition. Garcia Ponce writes simple, sharply edged sentences; and, though his characters sometimes seem overly disingenous, he consistently conveys the oppressive heat and erotic tension engulfing this foursome of friends and lovers. Garcia Ponce has a painter's eye for the surrounding landscape, and the cumulative effect of his meticulously described scenes is a little like scrutinizing a medieval Flemish painting--there are moments when every detail shimmers with crystalline elegance. - Publishers Weekly