[Macho Camacho's Beat] offers less a narrative than a situation, an image of a stagnant world. It is five o'clock in the afternoon throughout the book, the time of a famous poem by Lorca, only here we witness not the death of an adored bullfighter but the thoughts of people caught in or kept waiting because of a colossal traffic jam…. The jam, [Sánchez] says, is "an active sample of the Latin American capacity for obstruction." That is how they talk in the mirror, Sánchez has caught the tone exactly. They don't really believe there are no traffic jams in Rome, for example, or that there are more obstructions in Latin America than anywhere else. They do like to evoke a special, disheveled destiny, a sense that their failures are more attractive, more peculiarly theirs, than anyone else's successes. These are the tristes tropiques, as Sanchez...