Singing into the piano

the long version

Edith, a translator for the UN, and Andrew, an attorney, begin their love affair with an act of sexual display - unpremeditated but not quite innocent - at a political banquet in New York City. Santiago Diaz, a hero and former soccer star now running for the presidency of Mexico, is giving a speech, and from the podium he observes Edith and Andrew in their amorous escapade. As he delivers the address, Diaz is strangely captivated by what he sees, recognizing in the couple's behavior something of himself. Later, he discovers that Edith has left the hall without her purse - and he sets out to find her. From that moment, Edith and Andrew are drawn into the world of Diaz, his wife, and his campaign, a world they find increasingly seductive and disorienting. As the novel moves from New York to Mexico City, where the Diazes have their home, to the maquiladoras, cantinas, and strip clubs of Ciudad Juarez at the border, we watch these lives becoming entwined in ways none of them can see clearly. An "exotic" dance in the back room of a cantina; a do-or-die battle for the presidency; a bungled assassination; the shooting of a Mexican boy as he scales a border wall to the United States; and the legacy of Montezuma and Cortes, the Aztec and the European, converge as "a culture that has calculated the exact year of its erasure collides with one that thinks it's the wrath of God."