Jorge Ibargüengoitia
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Jorge Ibargüengoitia (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimines (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jóvenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award.
Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution's heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las Américas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native town: the brothel-keepers Delfina & Maria de Jesus Gonzales, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a violent end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983.
La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University's International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. The writer himself once said how he felt he never meant to make anyone laugh, for he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time.
