Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms and Loops
A master of narrative brevity, Chacón collects several short fictions, from stand-alone koans to connected vignettes, under the apt subtitle, Stories, Rooms and Loops. As in the refractive labyrinths of Borges, Chacón creates parallel characters and perpendicular plots, ensnared in “hidden dimensions, twisted and curled up like water snakes,” according to one narrator. Chacón’s many storytellers weave tales of sexual tension and disorientation that play with ethnic and national identities. A young man born in the U.S. to Mexican parents tries to convince a woman in Paris that he’s anything but American but admits to the reader, “I wasn’t sure she would understand what it meant to be a Chicano. I wasn’t sure I understood.” Another set of linked passages enters the infamous city of Juárez, plagued by ultraviolent homicide and savage drug trafficking. While Chacón spares us the gyring viscera of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2008), Mexico’s unsolved murders haunt a long sequence in which an English instructor risks a visit across the border. Throughout, Chacón’s prose moves swiftly, doubles back, and echoes itself with tessellated, Alhambra-like layering. --Diego Báez