The Hole, with its singular combination of oneiric horror and documentary realism, helped to galvanize a new cultural sensibility. -- Full Stop
The Hole, by Jose Revueltas, translated from the Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes (New Directions). A classic of what one might call prison literature, this novella, translated for the first time into English, is spiritually connected to the Tlatelolco massacre of more than 300 students protesting the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. It is ethnographic literature in the best sense: each floor of the prison fits seamlessly into a class analysis of Mexican society; each character is embedded in a network of licit and illicit social relations. A dense but rewarding 80 pages. -- Becquer Seguin - Public Books
This dark, disturbing, and powerful novel from Revueltas-who wrote it while imprisoned as a political dissident in Mexico's infamous Lecumberri prison-tells the story of three prisoners trying to smuggle heroin into their prison...everything goes wrong, the dissolution of the doomed plan comprising the book's nightmarish and unforgettable ending. -- Publishers Weekly (starred)
With the government's dehumanizing maneuvers so recently scored into memory, he devised a story in which dehumanization and reality are fastened together. A miasma pervades everything from the novella's prison setting to its guards, inmates, and visitors. His characters' humanity narrows toward nothingness here, surviving only in the fugitive kindnesses, the passing visions, the vestigial maternal instincts. These undulations of gloom and hope are now available to English readers. This translation is the result of a careful, yearlong effort by Amanda Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes. What they have prepared is less like a fusty literary relic than a shout, hoarse with fury and anxiety, that crackles into earshot. -- Slant Magazine
His legendary seventh novel, now in English for the first time, eschewed redemptive pieties. Its single, fevered paragraph is the darkest tale I've ever read....[a] black jewel of a novel. -- TLS
Revueltas's febrile sentences are as concentrated and intense as anything by Thomas Bernhard or Hermann Broch. -- Vulture
Jose Revueltas is the synthesis of the Mexican soul: contradictory, unkempt, inventive, despairing, and shrewd. We love him dearly. -- Pablo Neruda
It is impossible to understand contemporary Latin American literature without Revueltas's masterpiece, The Hole. Its current invisibility in the English language places works like Roberto Bolano's 2666 and Cesar Aira's political novellas in a bibliographical vacuum. -- Valeria Luiselli
Revueltas undertook an examination of conscience that impresses me for two reasons: for the scrupulous honor with which he carried it out, and for the subtlety and profundity of his analysis. -- Octavio Paz
