Like Ishmael Reed, she scrambles historical periods: Ana Magdalena meets Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, deluxe sound systems, and digital phones. Pineda pokes fun along the way at Borges, Garc°a M†rquez, Vargas Llosa, and others. Assuming that he's too busy writing (about a character much like herself) to notice, she transforms the great man's ancestral home into a bordello. In need of cash, seeking love, sex, and adventure (mostly with a pimpish boatman), and anxious to avoid her conjugal duties-i.e., listening to her husband read from his interminable manuscript-Ana Magdalena finds her vocation. She and her genteel mother try various shifts to make ends meet until the child is married off-for money-to an older, world- renowned writer who proves to have financial problems of his own. In Malyerba-like Macondo, a mythic town that ``progress had yet to visit''-a house is taken over by bees, a woman is crystallized into honey, a mummy-like mother-in-law floats toward Heaven, and protagonist Ana Magdalena is expelled from convent school for stripping naked while saving a classmate from drowning.
Sly magic realism if Pineda's novel imitates (and occasionally parodies) instead of breaking ground, it's still fresh territory for the author of Face (1985) and Frieze (1986): a well- crafted, always entertaining read.
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