The Night Buffalo
A Novel
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Guillermo Arriaga is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer already familiar to fans of his films, the Academy Award -- nominated 21 Grams, Amores perros, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which won a Palme d'Or for Best Screenplay at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Though more famous in the United States for his films, Arriaga is first and foremost a brilliant novelist. Now he is poised to make his mark on the literary landscape with The Night Buffalo, a new novel and the first of three to be published in the United States.
Luminous writing characterizes this novel of love and friendship, passion and betrayal, lunacy and mental illness. The Night Buffalo is set in Mexico City, revolving around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most.
The beautifully rendered narrative is driven by what is concealed and what is revealed. The sum leads finally to the truth of how Gregorio ended up "on his mother's lap, stretched out on the back seat of the car his father feverishly drove to the hospital" and the aftermath of his demise.
Arriaga's insight into human foibles and emotions is apparent in every story he crafts. His work is both universal in the themes it explores and unique in its style and setting located in his native Mexico.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mexican screenwriter Arriaga (Amores Perros; 21 Grams) constructs a humid, schematic novel his first published in the U.S. and maneuvers his characters in a duplicitous web of betrayal and insanity. Narrator Manuel, a university student in Mexico City, mourns the suicide of his best friend, Gregorio, whose girlfriend Tania he's been having an affair with for two years. (Manuel is also having recreational sex with Gregorio's sister, Margarita.) But after Gregorio's slow, fatal descent into madness, his death brings no closure for his guilty friends. Instead, Manuel still fears malice from Gregorio, who leaves him a box of papers "impregnated with vengeance" and torments him with "insane, exact triangulations" by proxy, through a friend of Gregorio from the mental institution. Manuel's behavior grows increasingly erratic and belligerent, while the women in the novel remain inscrutable and reactive ciphers: smooth, desirable bodies; objects of love or lust; excuses the young men use for rage or passion. Arriaga's ominous vision is total perhaps better material for an atmospheric, tightly structured film than for this unsubtle, claustrophobic novel.
