Hay Festival Xalapa: Mexican crime novels centre stage

One of the great excitements of Hay’s international festivals is getting to know major writers who are often barely known, if at all, in Britain. The oldest of these figures currently in Xalapa, Mexico, is Sergio Pitol, a 79-year old Mexican who hobbles round the town in a faded grey suit and tie, looking like an intellectual from another era.

The winner in 1995 of the Hispanic world’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Cervantes, Pitol has led perhaps the most nomadic life of all the many cosmopolitan authors at the festival. His intensely poetic The Art of The Fugue, with its journeys ranging from Italy to Central Europe, from Barcelona to the conflict-ridden Mexican region of Chiapas, is a wonderfully uplifting book of travel and memoirs expressing the author’s view that we “live in cruel times, but also in an age of marvels”. While many of the young generation of South American writers present at the festival, such as the precociously talented Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli, have been published now in Britain, Pitol hasn’t.

Nor has the Chilean writer Roberto Ampuero, to whom I was introduced on the Friday morning in the intellectually vibrant corridors of the Hotel Xalapa. Ampuero, the author among many other books of a Chilean crime series involving Inspector Cayetano Brule, belongs to a distinguished line of Latin Americans who combine writing with diplomacy. He is now the Chilean Ambassador in Mexico, following in the footsteps here of his compatriots Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. Writing, he explained to me in his amiable, enthusiastic manner, is the perfect occupation for the diplomat.

Crime fiction dominated the rest of the morning, being the subject of one of the most extraordinary events I have ever witnessed in any literary festival. The event, moderated with great showmanship by a brilliant young Mexican crime writer, Martin Solares, was a conversation with Mexico’s leading exponents of the “novela negra” of an older generation, Elmer Mendoza, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Mendoza, whose works are shortly to appear in English, proved a fluent proponent of crime novels that extend into a greater world of corruption. But the morning belonged to Taibo, one of those rare writers who can embrace the intellectual with the popular, and do so with a wit and beauty of expression that keep you hooked on to their every word. Taibo’s popularity in Mexico is so enormous that the packed theatre hall was interrupted after a few minutes by loud chants from outside of TAIBO! TAIBO! TAIBO! So many people were protesting outside to be allowed into the theatre that eventually Taibo had to get up from the stage and walk out to greet these “fellow sympathisers of the Left, like all of you here”.

In the end the event had to move on to the larger stage next door, where the outspoken and impetuous Taibo railed against the domesticity of Scandinavian crime fiction, and urged Mexican crime writers to tackle a theme that has hitherto been relatively neglected by them – the world of the cartels and drug traffickers. After two days in which the current political climate in Mexico has been spoken about in almost hushed tones, it was a cathartic moment when Taibo went on damn his country’s “fraudulent’ last elections”, and the “stagnant presidency of Calderon” and his journalist stooges.

But Taibo’s humour was as relentless as his virulence, and he talked about the necessity of humour in a Mexico where “just when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you see a train rushing towards you”. If the writings of Mendoza and Taibo are anything to go by, I look forward to the time when Mexican crime fiction becomes the new craze.

The Catalan novelist Vila-Matas was engaged immediately afterwards in brilliant intellectual conversation with Valeria Luiselli, but I couldn’t help being reminded of Taibo’s line that “it’s difficult to maintain an intellectual conversation for more than twenty minutes”.

I later wished that the French political writer and journalist Frederic Martel had taken heed of this message. Martel, the author of a massive tome arguing for the continuing dominance of “American cultural goods and services in the global cultural marketplace”, was one of a panel of four authors, including Peter Godwin and Jeanette Winterston, responding to some of the 25 key questions marking the Hay’s 25th anniversary.

After listening to Martel’s complex and highly cerebral answers, I could understand why his Mainstream has been translated into twenty languages but not into English: certain books do not transcend certain frontiers. But the spirit of Taibo was fortunately present in the much applauded decision of Peter Godwin to open the event by reading out the names of all the journalists who have been killed in Xalapa since last year’s festival. This is set to become one of the festival’s recurring themes.