Aura

Carlos Fuentes published Aura in Mexico City in 1962, and Lysander Kemp's English translation came out three years later. It is a very short novel, running to about seventy pages, and it is usually treated as an early and much-discussed example of magic realism, a book whose effects depend on dreamlike detail and on an uncanny doubling at the centre of it.

Felipe Montero, a young historian, is scanning a newspaper when a notice catches his eye. Someone wants a live-in assistant, fluent in French, young, keen on history and able to handle secretarial work, to sort out and finish the memoirs of a dead general. The advertisement reads as though it had been written with him in mind, and after ignoring it for a few days he gives in and goes to the address it gives, on Calle Donceles.

The house is dark when he arrives and the door is standing open. A voice leads him upstairs to the widow Consuelo, who is lying in bed and who explains the work she wants done, and as she is speaking her young niece Aura comes into the room. Montero is drawn to Aura at once, and the novel follows him into a household in which the old woman and the young one seem to be bound up with each other in a way he cannot account for. Fuentes tells the whole story in the second person, addressing Montero as you throughout, and that choice is one of the things the book is best known for.