Inez

Two narratives twine through this superb novel: one introduces Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great passion, Inez Prada, a red-haired Mexican diva; the other is a mysterious telling of the first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. Berlioz's music for The Damnation of Faust brings Gabriel and Inez together, while the emerging love of neh-el and ah-nel--the original lovers--echoes the Faustian pact of love and death. Linking these narratives is a beautiful crystal seal that belongs to Atlan-Ferrara, its meaning an enigma that obsesses him. And like the light refracted through the seal, these stories begin in prehistory and spiral out into infinity.
In Inez, we find Carlos Fuentes at the height of his magical and realist powers. This profound and beautiful work confirms his standing as one of the world's pre-eminent novelist.
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PRAISE FOR INEZ

"This is language made astonishingly new."-- San Francisco Chronicle

"Inez is rife with lurid myth, with philosophy, with anger, with metaphor, with a mixing of the fantastic and the quotidian. . . . It offers proof of Fuentes' still hungry and inventive mind."--The Baltimore Sun

"Fuentes is masterful. . . . The effect is a grand, passionate, poetically written book that plays out on the page much as the opera it centers on would play out on the stage."-- Orlando Sentinel