The Hole [Paperback]

 This dark, disturbing, and powerful novel from Revueltaswho wrote it while imprisoned as a political dissident in Mexicos infamous Lecumberri prisontells the story of three prisoners trying to smuggle heroin into their prison...everything goes wrong, the dissolution of the doomed plan comprising the books nightmarish and unforgettable ending.With the governments dehumanizing maneuvers so recently scored into memory, he devised a story in which dehumanization and reality are fastened together. A miasma pervades everything from the novellas prison setting to its guards, inmates, and visitors. His characters humanity narrows toward nothingness here, surviving only in the fugitive kindnesses, the passing visions, the vestigial maternal instincts. These undulations of gloom and hope are now available to English readers. This translation is the result of a careful, yearlong effort by Amanda Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes. What they have prepared is less like a fusty literary relic than a shout, hoarse with fury and anxiety, that crackles into earshot.His legendary seventh novel, now in English for the first time, eschewed redemptive pieties. Its single, fevered paragraph is the darkest tale Ive ever read....[a] black jewel of a novel.Revueltass febrile sentences are as concentrated and intense as anything by Thomas Bernhard or Hermann Broch.Jos? Revueltas is the synthesis of the Mexican soul: contradictory, unkempt, inventive, despairing, and shrewd. We love him dearly.It is impossible to understand contemporary Latin American literature without Revueltass masterpiece,Revueltas undertook an examination of conscience that impresses me for two reasons: for the scrupulous honor with which he carried it out, and for the subtlety and profundity of his analysis.A classic of Mexican literature in the twentieth century, The Hole is a dazzlingly devastating novellaA classic of Mexican literature in the twentieth century, The Hole is a dazzlingly devastating l“)