Hard, dense, fouillu!

Difficult to blame an author for being too documented but the urge takes me after finishing Viva. None of the articles read in the press stated that he had already known the intense cultural and political life that gripped Mexico in 1930 to keep up with this abundance of ideas and the crowd of characters that animates Deville in this novel.
The idea to parallel the life of Trotsky and that of Malcolm Lowry in Mexico is an enticing discovery but now, Deville calls all those who passed by Mexico between the wars, those are crossed, and sometimes loved, those who have come and gone and those who were not there but that could have been there. Their common point: The revolution in the broadest sense of the term and not always ... in short chapters, with quick style, trimmed to the bone, is hosting a sarabande which runs straight to the death or madness. The ghosts come on stage and stand out immediately.
I admit that I have not had fun in this arduous reading and I did not learn anything new about this period. Too much detail, temporality changes, jumps from one continent to another that seduce the reader and do not allow to focus on the two people who should have been at the center of the story, nor even to know them better. I only saw some "big men" in an unexpected light and often not pleasant: poor Breton, sleeping around for each other .... However, on certain pages blow a breath of freedom, unfortunately too quickly suppressed by history.