SOURCE: Jones, Julie. “Text and Authority in Elena Garro's Reencuentro de personajes.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 18, no. 1 (March 1991): 41-50.

In the following essay, Jones explores notions of identity—particularly Mexican identity—and authority in Reencuentro de personajes.

Reencuentro de personajes involves a cast of Mexican expatriates whose sense of self is based on their having met Scott Fitzgerald years ago and their conviction that he has described them in Tender Is the Night and that they also served as models for characters in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The protagonist of Reencuentro, a young Mexican woman modeled on Garro herself, has left her husband for one of this group, “un salvaje vestido a la inglesa” (42), who uses her as a cover for his homosexual liaisons and as an object of humiliation. The plot turns on Verónica's attempt to decipher who, or what, Frank is, and through him...