I’m so happy that the editors of Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction brought the work of Guillermo Fadanelli to me and allowed me to bring it to you. How to capture the voice that tells this story? Transparent and direct in its language and syntax, yet given to creating distance at all times. The voice of a journalist, in that sense, yet not journalistic. And the opposite: the voice of a character so tuned in to himself, so oblivious of others—yet so observant at the same time.

One example, the title: “Interroguen a Samantha.” Literally, “[They] interrogate [subjunctive] Samantha.” So lively and off-the-cuff in Spanish, so deadly flat in English. They who? Subjunctive, full of implications but impossible in English. Interrogate, a dreaded Romance cognate, offspring of conquest (the Norman one) and thus almost always of a different register in English than in the original. The speaker does feel there was an interrogation—but not with that capital “I.” So, finally, “Questioning Samantha.” Questioning someone is what the police do. The title is brief, colloquial, open to some interpretation. I hope it works.