Padilla, Ignacio 1968-

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PADILLA, Ignacio 1968-

(Ignacio Padilla Suarez)

PERSONAL: Born 1968; son of an industrial relations manager and a psychologist.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: Diplomat and author. Mexican Embassy, London, England, cultural attaché.

AWARDS, HONORS: Premio Primavero, 2002.

WRITINGS:

(Under name Ignacio Padilla Suarez) Subterráneos: cuentos del asfalto y la vereda, Ediciones Castillo (Monterrey, Mexico), 1990.

(With Jorge Volpi and Eloy Urroz) Tres bosquejos del mal, Siglo Veintiuno (Mexico City, Mexico), 1994.

La catedral de los ahogados, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico City, Mexico), 1995.

Si volviesen sus majestades, Nueva Imagen (Mexico City, Mexico), 1996.

Ultimos trenes, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (Mexico City, Mexico), 1996.

Amphitryon, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 2000, translation by Peter Bush and Anne McLean published as Shadow without a Name, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003.

Las antípodas y el siglo, Espasa Calpe (Madrid, Spain), 2001, translation by Alastair Reid published as Antipodes, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: In his novel Shadow without a Name, Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla explores the nature of identity and the question of guilt. Spanning much of the twentieth century, and covering the ravages of both world wars, the novel presents characters who have unstable and shifting identities due to their wartime experiences. The novel, according to Jim Barloon in the Houston Chronicle, is like "watching a story unfold from deep within Plato's Cave: shadows flitting in kaleidoscopic confusion upon a dumb wall." Edward Cone in Library Journal called the novel "a tale of swapped identities and multiple viewpoints explored over different eras."

The story focuses on three specific events during the twentieth century. It begins in 1916 when two men, Victor Kretzchmar and Thadeus Dreyer, play a game of chess while on a train journey to the Eastern Front of World War I. Whoever wins the game will assume the identity of Kretzchmar, whose job as a railway signalman assures him safety for the duration of the war. The loser becomes Dreyer, who is in the military and assigned to fight on the war's most deadly battlefield. While it is unclear which man wins the chess game, by 1943 World War I hero Thadeus Dreyer is a general in Nazi Germany and in charge of a secret program—the Amphitryon Project—to recruit and train doubles for high-ranking Nazi leaders. These doubles will appear at public ceremonies where the risk of assassination is high. The plan goes well until Goering decides to shut it down and Dreyer and the doubles disappear. Later, Dreyer is seemingly killed by a man who assumes his name. Later, we learn that "Dreyer" has changed his name yet again, and lives on until the 1980s. One of "Dreyer"'s acquaintances even believes him to be a Jewish friend from childhood. "As the novel proceeds," Poornima Apte noted in a review for MostlyFiction.com, "'Thadeus Dreyer' becomes a mere hook of a name that many grasp at, in the process trying to change their own past and seeking out a new identity." This confusion of identity is most pronounced in 1960 when Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann is arrested in Argentina for his role in the Holocaust. He is taken to Israel, put on trial, and executed, but is it the real Eichmann or is this only a leftover double from the Amphitryon Project? Is the wrong man being punished? The real identities of Kretzchmar, Dreyer, and Eichmann remain in doubt at novel's end. As Barloon described it, the novel "chronicles the dissolution, and indeterminacy, of the individual in war-torn Europe."

Padilla raises many questions in Shadow without a Name by obscuring the true identities of his characters and by mixing real with fictional characters. Eichmann was a real Nazi leader who was arrested and executed. Historians have no doubt about his identity. But Dreyer's flexible identity is fiction, echoing the nature of those who have suffered the turmoils of war, immigration, and political oppression. Throughout the novel, the game of chess is used as a metaphor for the manipulation of human beings by unseen forces. Apte concluded that Shadow without a Name "does a brilliant job at questioning identity and its place in the human psyche." "Gracefully and economically written," Michael Kernan stated in his review of Shadow without a Name for the Washington Post, "it is a meditation on the nature of identity and, not incidentally, on the myriad unsuspected tragedies inflicted on people by the chaos of war."

Padilla is a prominent member of Mexico's "Crack" literary movement, a group of young writers attempting to recapture the brilliance of such earlier writers as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. The movement especially decries the commercialization and third-rate imitation of "magical realism," a form of literature created and practiced by Márquez and Fuentes.