El arte de la ironía

A critical witness of everyday events, Carlos Monsiváis is among us the main exponent of that hybrid genre in which literature and journalism mix until their means and ends are defused. Heiresses of a tradition that has its origin in writers such as Guillermo Prieto or Salvador Novo, his chronicles have recorded down to the last detail of the transformations of Mexico throughout the last half century. Nothing escapes his penetrating gaze or the irony of his interpretations: from the political evolution of the country to the uses and customs that become manifestations of faith, from representative men and women to the tumultuous processes turned into rituals of modernity and postmodernity, every phenomenon that occurred in the country is, for Carlos Monsiváis, a matter of analysis, of narrative reconstruction, of stylistic sharpness.

 

It is not strange, then, that during the last decades his chronicles and stories have been the object of attention by colleagues and specialists, who have seen in them a renewal of literary language, a festive synthesis of the history of Mexico and the perfect symbiosis of a writer within the space he inhabits. An encounter of essays around Carlos Monsiváis, this book is a panorama, a siege, an approach to his work, a sample of how the most critical of our writers is perceived, in turn, by the eyes of the critics.