Happy Families Carlos Fuentes Bloomsbury, 352pp, £17.99

It’s tough at the top

As Mexico’s leading novelist over the past 50 years, Carlos Fuentes has written prolifically about class and cultural identity in Latin America. In Happy Families, he tells a set of short stories about love and family relationships in central America’s high society, sometimes to us and sometimes in second person to the characters themselves. A woman explains to her lover why she won’t leave her husband; a priest punishes his god-daughter for his own wicked thoughts; siblings squabble about and with their parents.

While the characters all fight with each other, they also battle to conquer their personal failings, which we come to understand through their internal monologues. “In reality, good people are the largest population in hell,” reads one. “Being good may deceive god but not the devil.”

Splicing the richer characters’ at times self-indulgent and frivolous emotional analyses of their own lives are poems that jab us with concise, brutal narratives of poor Mexican lives. Drugs, rape, incest and death abound.

Most chapters stand alone, but similar emotional themes bind them. Each story is told poetically, often with surprising outcomes, and many will find familiar ground in themes of nostalgia, ageing and the loss of beauty.

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