Rodrigo likes his vacant lot, its resident chicken, and being left alone. But when passivity finds him accidentally married to Cecilia, he trades Mexico City for the sun-bleached desolation of his hometown and domestic life with Cecilia for the debauched company of a poet, a philosopher, and Micaela, whose allure includes the promise of time travel.
...brief, brilliantly written, and kissed by a sense of the absurd ... a classic slacker novel, a shaggy-dog story about breaking free from the tedium of daily life and finding some sort of aim if not meaning ... For all Saldaña París' sharp wit, Among Strange Victims is about waking up to the world's brighter possibilities.
...luidly brought into English through the polished and effortless-feeling translation of the talented Christina MacSweeney ... [a] darkly humorous and thoughtful novel ... It was especially refreshing to me that Saldaña París depicted adult male characters actually questioning their fascination with and attraction to adolescent girls, which happens too little in life, and probably even less in literature. Among Strange Victims could easily have ended on a more swaggery male-fantasy-gratifying note, and it wouldn't have been surprising. That it is surprising and exciting that he avoids this is one of the great disappointments of the world, but it is also to Saldaña París's credit as an observer of that world.
With little plot or dialogue, this farcical novel about inertia sustains momentum by the wit of its quirky Rube Goldberg prose ... But the scatological humor gets old, and some sentences are maddeningly abstruse ... Spoofing misogynists should be a double negative turned positive, but it doesn’t feel that way.
