Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

ISBN: 0593687795

Author: Villoro, Juan

Condition: New

At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city.Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today-one of the worlds leading cultural and financial centers.In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: Living in the City, City Characters, Shocks, Crossings, and Ceremonies. What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico Citys genius loci, its spirit of place.