Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico by David Lida

From the Publisher

For many Americans, Mexico conjures up images of violence and sensuality, resulting in an oddly seductive sense of anxiety. In his debut collection, David Lida captures the mixed emotions this Latin American country evokes among its northern neighbors, dramatically illustrating what happens when Mexicans' and Americans' expectations of each other are fulfilled - or turned inside out." "In "Bewitched," a woman journalist finds more realism than magic while interviewing a witch in a backwater swamp. "Regrets" depicts a gay video producer who shows an American graduate student around Mexico City and leaves him with a souvenir he will never forget. In "Acapulco Gold," a nine-year-old boy living on the streets of the resort city learns the price of rescue when he finds it in the form of an opportunistic American." "The diverse characters also include a CIA spook contemplating his return home after a Mexico posting, a penny-pinching British tourist determined to have a miserable time on his vacation, and a Mexican of Eastern European descent who considers herself a "JAP" - an acronym that, in this instance, stands for "Jewish Aztec Princess.".

Time Out New York

Gets under your skin...the power of Lida's stories lies in their tawdry, unraveling characters and the uncompromising, even disastrous situations in which they find themselves in this land of sorcery, squalor and seduction.

St. Petersburg Times

About the only people who will not appreciate David Lida's debut collection of short stories are Mexican tourism officlals....These ten stories read like the best non-fiction. Lida slaps the reader with moments of moral ambiguity and then walks away, leaving us wincing with recognition.

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Forget your romantic notions about south-of-the-border idylls. Writer David Lida gets at the contradictory, elusive reality of Mexico in this disturbing and powerful debut collection...elegantly conceived and executed...a powerful and original writer, one to follow, wherever he takes us next.

San Francisco Chronicle

There is no denying the cumulative power of this book. With unembellished prose, Lida drains Mexico of its romance and exoticism . . . these stories offer a dystopian vision of contemporary Mexico: always bleak, sometimes darkly comic, yet fully imbued with a deep regret for what its people have to go through to survive...This is the kind of writing, dark and daring and fully felt, that makes one look forward to what Lida writes next.

New Orleans Gambit Weekly

Vivid, deliberate prose and heart pounding narratives....Wonderfully horrible, a guide to human nature so compelling that you must turn the page despite a reluctance to read of people at their most desperate.

San Antonio Express News

Disturbing, provocative and often darkly funny, the stories in Travel Advisory go a long way toward explaining the duality many of us feel toward Mexico.

Publishers Weekly

True to its title, Lida's collection of 10 disturbing short stories is likely to give pause to tourists heading south of the border. The author, a former resident of Mexico City, portrays Mexicans and travelers alike as treacherous and unhappy, preying mercilessly on each other. In short, mostly slice-of-life vignettes, plump, pink-skinned North American and British tourists patronize their hosts, and servile or hostile Mexicans endure their presence. If the tourists are not being robbed, they are being raped--by the police. If the housemaids are not being treated like slaves, then they are being raped--by their employers. A travel journalist gets more than she had bargained for when she interviews a male witch in a provincial town; a wealthy American pedophile picks up a young street urchin; a woman takes a spur-of-the-moment trip to a Mexican beach resort with a virtual stranger. One of the few foreigners who stays in the country for any length of time is a British photojournalist, a defeated man who is drinking himself to death. The strongest story tracks a taxi driver and his buddies who routinely fleece customers by terrifying them into giving up the PINs of their credit cards. In this case, the gang is robbed by one of its own and the "customer" dies of a heart attack. Even the thieves have a hard time of it in Lida's Mexico. Gritty and unforgiving, these stories revel in the more cruelly exploitative of cross-cultural relationships. Lida's tone is sometimes shrill, but when he eschews easy satire he paints a convincing, unvarnished picture of a struggling country. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The dark side of life in contemporary Mexico is vividly portrayed in these short stories. In one of them, Aldrich Ames, a drunken, inept American intelligence officer, decides to give up alcohol after being asked to join the KGB. In another story, a scantily clothed American beachcomber is attacked and raped by locals, and in yet another story, a young native boy is rescued from a life on the street by two American men who molest him in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing. The Mexico of these stories is not one that the reader will want to visit anytime soon. Alcoholism, hunger, oppressive servitude, and an overwhelming feeling of loneliness are common elements in these bewildering tales. Lida's stories have been published in the New York Times, The Literary Review, Harper's Bazaar, and other periodicals. He is a former resident of Mexico who now lives in New York City. This collection offers well-crafted, riveting glimpses of life that will fascinate the reader. Recommended for all libraries.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Paper - Carlo McCormick

These short stories by travel writer and journalist David Lida capture New Mexico at its essence, in intimate glimpses rather than generalities...With an east narrative style that flows freely from devastating satire to equally insightful compassion, Travel Advisory reveals the cultural pathology by which all ineractions trade in counterfeit and deal in some form of injustice. Lida choreographs every wrong step of native and visitor alike, as opportunity stumbles into exploitation and the sun sets on some very dark places, indeed.

Time Out New York - Anderson Tepper

The power of Lida's stories lies in their tawdry, unraveling characters and the compromising, even disastrous, situations in which they find themselves in this land of sorcery, squalor and seduction.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Bewitched

When Rhoda arrived at the Posada del Tigre it was already ninety degrees in Quetzalmaco and, typical of Gulf Coast towns in the summer, deeply, stultifyingly humid. The air in the lobby was still. The man behind the desk seemed to be asleep with his eyes open. Rhoda stepped around a skinny orange dog dozing heavily in the middle of the stone floor. It was ten-thirty in the morning.

She had come to Quetzalmaco to investigate magic, witchcraft, enchantment. But first she would have to attend to the prosaic. Arousing the blank-faced man from his stupor, she asked for a room.

Eusebio-manager, bellboy and desk clerk in one-noted the straight blond bangs of her neck-length pageboy and her aqua-marine eyes under gold-framed glasses. A gringa. "I have a room with air-conditioning," he said. Rhoda, after long experience traveling in Mexico, asked to see it before agreeing to spend the night.

Dutifully stepping from behind the desk, Eusebio, slender and short with copper-colored skin, a crown of leonine gray hair and heavy-lidded eyes, gripped Rhoda's two suitcases. As he expected, they were heavy. Gringos owned many things and didn't like to leave them unattended while they traveled.

"Pasele," he said, gesturing so she would walk ahead of him as he guided her outside the lobby and down the Posada's motor court. The bags might be cumbersome, but at least he could watch her stride before him, pleasantly scrutinizing her hips and buttocks, encased in roomy seersucker shorts, cinched by a white cotton belt.

He opened a forest green door and Rhoda regarded what she characterized as a standardhundred-peso Mexican hotel room: on the dark side, with a slightly dank odor of disinfectant. There were heavy green curtains, a cracked tile floor, and a phone and a TV that might actually work. In the bathroom there would be two flimsy towels and soap but no shampoo. She could stay in this room but wondered if she could do better within the hotel's confines.

"May I see one of the rooms upstairs with a view of the lake?" she asked. She spoke Spanish accurately, but like a child: slowly, precisely, one word at a time, with a gringo's untrilled r's and flat vowels. She had thin lips and an odd grimacing smile that seemed permanently engraved onto her face, revealing gleaming white dental work.

"A sus ordenes," said Eusebio, grabbing her luggage and signaling for her to walk ahead. As they climbed the staircase, he watched her buttocks shift and imagined them as milky pink as Rhoda's face.

In Philadelphia, where Rhoda lived, men tended to eye her forty-two-year-old body with what they considered cold objectivity. They regarded her as over-the-hill, accustomed from TV commercials and magazine spreads to surgically enhanced proto-types half her age. She exercised habitually when at home, but was on the road much of the year, so couldn't keep up a perpetual schedule. Her skin had started to roughen and a network of tiny wrinkles had formed around her face. She noted with alarm that gravity had started to work on her neck, breasts, and buttocks. Her unpredictable diet on the road had widened her hips and thighs, and given her belly a convex shape. On the other hand, Eusebio found her adorable, if lamentably lean for a woman her age (which he figured at about thirty-five).

Each of the rooms upstairs had a little terrace with a metallic table, a white plastic chair, and a vista of the muddy freshwater lake that was one of Quetzalmaco's main attractions. Eusebio, one suitcase in each hand, urged her to the end of the hall, to show her one of the floor's largest rooms. But it had a stronger smell of disinfectant and peeling paint on the walls. Rhoda asked to see another.

"The others don't have air-conditioning," he warned. "They only have fans."

"No problema," Rhoda assured him. "I prefer a fan." She didn't like to sleep with air-conditioning; its chill made her feel like a side of beef in a meat locker. She also knew the rooms with fans would be cheaper.

In the next room that Eusebio displayed, there was a tiny cluster of minuscule black ants crawling around the drain in the shower. Rhoda, concealing revulsion through her perpetual tight-mouthed smile, asked to see yet another. "Whatever you like," said Eusebio.

The next room was closer to her standards. Proudly, as if it were his own house, Eusebio showed her the terrace, the tiny bathroom with its shower the size of an upright coffin, the carafe filled with purified water on the bedside table. The rooms with air-conditioning, he explained, cost a hundred pesos, but he could let her have this one for eighty.

"I'll take it," she said.