This most innovative of novels is about an instant. While, in the Rue de l'Odeon, Dr. Farabeuf executes an erotic-chirurgical rite, the couple (one couple) remember the moment of execution by torture of a Chinese man in 1901, immortalized in a photograph. Farabeuf's lover assumes herself as the tortured Chinese (who is also Christ), making torture the equivalent of ardent love: the fusion of extreme pain and extreme pleasure.

"What??!!" you'll ask yourself. Don't worry, in this experimental novel the plot is only a vehicle for "pure" literature: a game with words, in an extremely sophisticated fashion. This book is a constant mirror-game of identities, places and times, but in the end it's not more than the "chronicle of an instant": the moment identities merge and ends meet.

This novel is extremely intelligently written, told in a time at the same time isolated from its course but recurring. Everything develops around the moment in which "she" runs to the window and as she passes her foot hits the leg of the iron table over which Dr. Farabeuf has the tools to execute his erotic-chirurgical rite. Filled with multiple solutions, this consummate literary trick is a clinical, almost scientific elaboration with words. Only for real lovers of serious (not necessarily boring) literature. PS: and it shows that Mexican literature is not only "magical realism" or bananas with pineapples.

Salvador Elizondo belongs to the alternative Mexican literature that has nothing to do with magical realism. Farabeuf is his masterpiece. The novel centers on a series of theories exposed by Georges Bataille to create a misterious story closely related to the French movement of "Nouveau Roman". The book has an outstanding control of atmosphere that keeps the reader hooked to its mystery. Also, readers my be interested in the slow revealing of an absolutely misterious and complex plot. The book is the result of one of the obscure readers of Borges. The novel is not a weekend entertainment and it is only for those who look in literature an experience beyond fun. Philosophically, the novel is absolutely fascinating and if it can be accompanied by the reading of Bataille's "History of the eye", the intellectual challenge and experience is nearly impossible to match. It is also highly recommendable to use this book as an introduction to the Mexican generation of Casa del Lago and to other obscure authors (in the best sense of the term) such as Juan Garcia Ponce or Ines Arredondo).