RENÉ AVILÉS FABILA
Writer
WORKS
COMPLETE WORKS
Volume II
THE GAMES
HOME
(2001)
[Primera edición: 1967]
About these novels the specialized critic has commented:
It deceives deceiving the writer that would have seemed too young for it, he/she calls to chapter to an entire generation, literary and pictorial, and also politics: he/she examines, with smiling severity, not only to our letters, but to our institutions. And it amazes for the security and the aim of many of their trials.
Rafael Solana
Volumen I: Tantadel and The song of Odette
Volumen II: The games
Volumen III: The great alonely of Palace
Volumen IV: Memoires of a communist (Machinescript found in a trash of Perisur)
Volumen V: Fantasies on carrousel I
Volumen VI: Fantasies on carrousel II
Other editions:
First edition (1967)
Second edition (1968)
© Copyright, 2002
I consider between the biggest privileges and satisfactions of the last years, to have read the novel originals of my young friend René Avilés Fabila, The Games… in the novel we find deep fondness, passionate revelation of the attributes that not to still be in process they are less real in the new Mexican generation.
Manuel Mejía Valera
... The games are a bomb that explodes amid the Mexican intellectual atmosphere: all those that have reached some fame are satirized without mercy in an amusing book that reproaches to our intelligence the life among endless cocktails that are a competition of mutual commendations while a rural leader is murdered with all his family in a humble shack and a leader union ferrocarrillero rots in the jail.
Humberto Musacchio
The games are a first written novel as if it will be the last, conceived, structured with a methodology of the humor on the specific object of all art that is the man, their human reality, their unpublished universe. Avilés Fabila exercises a clarification power about the clan, of what the Argentinean called "the mafia", and about his procedures and his characteristic figures. In this exercise there is a pendulous essence that takes it of the creative act from the story to the reflection on the own act and the acts of the other ones; he/she ends up to face I get same, with to the man's stability that has lost their candor and it already distinguishes between the art and the publicity, between the day of the creation and the day of the final trial, between the vulgarities of the almost red area and those of the one that could be denominated tri-colored area in the neighborhood of Tepito or of the Lagunilla. ... the only rule is that there are not rules for The games of Avilés Fabila.
Antonio Magaña Esquivel
... The Games, novelizes satirical-social, linked closely with the picaresque one, it represents the coming of a novelist that knows how to conjugate the tragic thing with the humorous thing that is the so much of the contemporary techniques and he/she has known how to assimilate their influences and that, for it same, it should arrive quickly at the hands of the great public.
Gerardo de la Torre
The games... before "I document", before I testify of an irritated spirit, it is, simply, a novel, an inhabited world, a square in which happen the shades of our time, a "circumstance" surrounded of mirrors, a conscience that you full with horror and you transcends, he/she becomes purified... and it illuminates us. ... it is also the "I relieve" more effective and more versatile, the most realistic allegory and "collective" of our anthropology "literary."
Raúl Cáceres Carenzo
Exists a brief but intense relationship of the polemic reaction taken place by the publication of The Games of René Avilés Fabila in Jorge Volpi's work.
(Immagination and power, an intelectual history of 1968, Ediciones Era, México, 1998.)
The meritorious of The Games - that calls this way you René's work -, it is that he/she makes an interesting critical dissection of our so(u)ciedad and the false sofismas in which it is sustained. It is necessary to read the comparison that makes lack of the religion and the politics: it is a passage teacher.
Luis Antonio Arteaga
A ferocious irony and a vital inconformismo allowed him to be written The games. Only through the irony it was possible the analysis of a world that you cannot qualify as decadent since he/she doesn't know the maturity. The inconformismo was necessary for not crossing the arms before a political and cultural situation that, in essence, it rollicks with the characters that converge in her.
The Games, first novel of René Avilés Fabila, reflective a half intellectual one anodyne, but not by means of the parody, but through the balanced handling of certain facts that you/they mix with the creation of real characters: alive literarily. Their existence allows a cruel resemblanza with our intellectual and political world. This attitude, so not very frequent in our writers, it is dignified by the desire of transforming to the language into a means of expression able to dynamite structures settled down in the language, the politics and the intellectuality.
In The Games we attend the destruction of the myths, of the underdeveloped talents and of the pusillanimous attitudes; this destruction is carried out by means of a wild humorism and a structure original novelística. In René's work Avilés is recognized the malice and the handling of the literary weapons that bury the label of work primeriza and that they impose it like open novel, brave and necessary to clean up the atmosphere that we suffer.
For their objectivity it is a bitter book, nevertheless their humorism. In The Games the restlessness of the creation of a vital, conscious and enriching literature flows.
José Agustín