Eclipse Fever Book

Eclipse Fever is as complex as Abish's avant-garde masterpiece, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning How German Is It. Set in Mexico today, in a high-gloss world of intellect and society, Eclipse Fever explores the reaches of corruption and the limits of power in politics, in business, in culture. A constant course of suspense and psychological tension underlies its concern with art, emotional attachment, and the differing needs of men and women.

The people whose lives interlock: Alejandro, one of Mexico's most respected literary critics; his estranged wife, Mercedes, whom he longs for and suspects of openly conducting an affair with a celebrated American writer; Bonny, the writer's 17-year-old daughter, a runaway, who is made witness to a sequence of calamitous events that culminates in murder; Preston, an American industrialist, and his sexually frustrated wife, Rita; and Pech, the unscrupulous art dealer who is the source of Preston's illegitimate collection of pre-Columbian artifacts.

As the lives and emotional fates of these people press together, as they buckle and collapse, the novel holds up a mirror to the moment in which we live: the end of a century, the end of a millennium, the perils, the temptations, the hysteria just below the surface. With the publication of Eclipse Fever, Walter Abish, already the recipient of great critical acclaim, establishes himself as a major American writer.