“… a haunting tale of a country that lost the majority of its mass, told from a perspective of an individual who has a prescient obsession with the massless and the extrasensory (not to mention the extramarital). The juxtaposition of the two gives the novel its jarring resonance.”
—Matthew Thrasher, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 2009/2010
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“… a pivotal point in Mexican history … ‘mostly ignored by Mexican literature.’”
—Kathe Connair, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“… Solares re-creates the feelings of the city's residents during war … a troubled romance and an invaded country are the memoirs …”
—Tania Lara, Austin American-Statesman
Great Fiction
Yankee Invasion
A Novel of Mexico City
By Ignacio Solares
Translated by Timothy G. Compton
Introduction by Carlos Fuentes
Literature/Historical fiction
$14.95
6x9, 256 pages, softcover
ISBN: 978-0-9798249-4-4
Publication date: May 5, 2009
Yankee Invasion: A Novel of Mexico City centers on one of the most traumatic periods of Mexican history: the 1847 American invasion of Mexico City. Though just a dark shadow in America’s past, the devastating conflict resulted in Mexico losing nearly half of its land. Crushed under the foot of Goliath, the small country began its descent into poverty.
The story is narrated by a witness to events, Abelardo, who in the novel’s very first pages commits an act of resistance that will haunt him the rest of his life. Now an old man, he recollects on his painful love for both his fiancée and her mother, which plays out against the backdrop of the American invasion and occupation.
This is the first English translation of the 2005 novel La invasión, written by one of Mexico’s most respected literary figures. The author of over twenty books, Ignacio Solares is a leader in Mexican arts and academia. This translation includes a new introduction by Carlos Fuentes, winner of the Cervantes Prize, awarded to Spanish-language authors for lifelong achievement.
A gem of historical fiction, Yankee Invasion both enlightens and entertains. It focuses on a piece of history rarely discussed in American classrooms, with echoes of contemporary military conflicts. Yankee Invasion is a must-read for anyone interested in where we've been—and where we might be going.
“… Yankee Invasion holds a tacit invitation to see … history passing through the sieve of fiction. Solares thus gives us a very rich tale of history relived, the past as present, the wholeness of experience as an act of the imagination directed not only at the past, but also at the future of the final warrior, the reader.”
—Carlos Fuentes, from his introduction
“This is a riveting historical novel of the invasion and occupation of Mexico City by US forces during the Mexican War but more important, Yankee Invasion is an unusual, highly original, and most welcome detectivesque testimony of the nightmarish history we don’t seem to be able to wake up from.”
—Irene Vilar, author of The Ladies’ Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Impossible Motherhood
“Ignacio Solares has written a superb novel.… Yankee Invasion provides readers with a wonderful opportunity to become acquainted with this crucial moment in the shared history of Mexico and the US.”
—Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican Ambassador to the United States
Ignacio Solares, born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1945, is a novelist, playwright and essayist, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Revista de la Universidad de México and the past director of the Division of Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Solares is a prolific writer with over twenty published books, including the novels No hay tal lugar (2003; English translation There Is No Such Place, 2008), Columbus (1996), Nen, la inutile (1994),and Madero, el otro (1989). He has won numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.