A full English translation and critical analysis of the novel by Carmen Boullosa Mejor Desaparece/Just Disappear.

Nonetheless, the issue of the value and meaning of the novel from our present situation remains unresolved for many readers and critics. Clearly, the novel has become in the last three hundred years many different things for many readers as well as for novelists themselves. But for all that, the term itself remains both simple and elusive. So various and so multiple, the novel can be described but never, it seems, adequately defined. A minimalist description of the novel might say that it is an extended (too long to read at one sitting) narrative in prose about imaginary but vividly particularized or historically specific individuals. But however one describes it, the novel has been from its beginnings (themselves a subject of much dispute) for its writers and readers an aggressively and self-consciously new literary category. For many twentieth-century critics and historians of the novel, it is the narrative form that uniquely expresses the condition of Western culture and consciousness since the emergence of what everyone recognizes as the — xi- modern age-an age in which we still live and that lacks clear definition or any sense of single or simple self-consciousness but that nonetheless situates itself, like the novel, as somehow separate and distinct from all that has preceded it ...»