2666 and Murder City

For all you 2666-heads out there, might want to check out Murder City by Charles Bowden. Oscar Villalon reviews:

Charles Bowden, in his highly personal, highly stylized book, Murder City, locks in on Juarez’s stock-in-trade — killing — during 2008, and tries to figure out what, if anything, these numbers mean, and what’s behind the statistics. He employs some traditional journalism tactics to get there, relating the lives of people he believes represent the city’s new soul: Jose Antonio Galvan, a radio evangelist who has set up a ramshackle mental asylum in the desert for Juarez’s castoffs; a former hit man who has found God and is living on borrowed time; and Emilio Gutierrez, a newspaperman who fled the army’s wrath, speeding off to Texas with his young son in the hopes of getting political asylum here.

For what it’s worth, though, you might want to look elsewhere. On balance the review is negative. And I recall reading a long excerpt of this book in Harper’s that was not very impressive. Still though, it is a lengthy piece of reportage on the Juarez murders and drug trade.

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