Reading [the stories in "Burnt Water"] is somewhat like watching people on a carousel—individuals you won't see again…. Two or three or four return long enough to be recognized, then almost at once they curl out of sight.

What remains after you close this book? More than anything else a sense of turbid, vital, gamy, rhythmic human life in Mexico City. Those people who seemed so distinct and unforgettable as they rode by—laughing, waving, shouting, rising and descending with the motion of the gilded wheel—how quickly they dismount and walk away, leaving behind not the singular imprint of personalities we have come to know but an irregular communal web of tracks. Maybe this is as it should be. Possibly this is what the author intended.

In a prefatory note Carlos Fuentes states that he owns an imaginary apartment house in the center of Mexico City...