The Rag Doll Plagues
Mexican fiction writer Morales ( Brick People ) exhibits his range in a novel showing Hispanic doctors battling deadly infectious diseases over three centuries. The first section, a rather formal historical account, tells of an 18th-century Spanish physician sent to Mexico to diagnose and cure a plague, LaMona. The epidemic eventually subsides by itself, but the physician has fallen in love with New Spain and decided to make it his home. A contemporary Hispanic doctor living in Los Angeles affectingly narrates the book's second portion. When his wife, a hemophiliac, contracts AIDS through a contaminated blood transfusion, he takes her to Mexico to participate in an Indian healing ritual; although spiritually uplifting, the ceremony cannot halt the disease's ravages. The second doctor's grandson, also a physician, relates the final story, set in the future. A plague eerily similar to LaMona sweeps the population of Lamex, a U.S./Mexican technocratic confederation. The medical establishment is helpless until the narrator discovers that transfusions from pure-blooded Mexico City residents will cure the disease--the metropolis is so hideously polluted that its inhabitants' blood has genetically mutated, developing an antibody to the plague. Morales's unabashed ethnic chauvinism becomes hard to take: AIDS, it appears, was invented in a U.S. laboratory and exported to Africa; the Anglo-European presence that has oppressed Mexicans for centuries finally gets its just deserts in the SF finale. However, inventive writing and interesting premises spark the work.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.