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He spent his formative years as a worker in Tijuana’s maquiladoras, light-industry sweatshops that bloomed like poisonous mushrooms in the Mexican borderlands after the passage of NAFTA. This is perhaps why so much of Yépez’s critique of the Mexico City literary establishment focuses on money: who gets it, who doesn’t, and who decides who belongs in each category.
I did not drastically alter the structure of the book when editing the manuscript after the larp. The story still seemed like a world-machine that I could not intervene in so much as decide how to portray. And the most crucial event that occurred in the book occurred in the larp, too.
I do not want violence. Not in any form. I do not want teachers’ hands down schoolgirls’ underwear. I do not want drunken fathers’ fists beating the bodies of their wives and children. Were I to list all the violence that I am aware of, there would not be enough days, weeks, or years. To start seeing violence one simply has to open their eyes.
This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power.
The pages in Proust's long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. It has no equivalent in any contemporary fiction I know when it comes to an account of a first email read, or first social networking profile posted. Even so, it can't tell us much about what we may really wish to know about technology: never mind losing your virginity—what is it like to live with someone?