Adonis Garca: A Picaresque Novel

Zapata is best known for this groundbreaking novel, orignally titled Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la colonia Roma (Adonis García) (1979), published the year of the emergence of Mexico’s homosexual liberation movement. This text combines narrative tropes from the picaresque novel and the counter-cultural stylistics introduced by the 1960s urban literary movement of La Onda. Written as a transcribed series of recorded interviews, Zapata’s effusive fictional documentary narrative on the life of Adonis García, a notorious homosexual hustler in Mexico City, marks the era of sexual euphoria before the advent of AIDS. The novel’s unapologetic celebration of same-sex desire was the target of vituperation in the press but was also hailed by influential contemporary critic-novelist José Joaquín Blanco as the best novel of his generation.

Adonis García lives for the enjoyments and pleasures his body can offer and receive. Fleeing the stultifying atmosphere of the provinces, he looks for the brightest lights of paradise and finds life on the streets of Mexico City a banquet of adventures and passions from which he eagerly samples at will. In the promising glow of each streetlight, Adonis seeks enounters with the men who savor the hours of darkness to fulfill the sexual fantasies repressed or disguised (in more acceptable forms) during the day. The central districts of this urban capital become a carnival of carnal delights for him, with no need for apologies or jutifications ever entering the narrative picture. Adonis García, a living ode to the beauty of the human body and all of its surfaces, radiates youth, energy, and exuberance; even when he becomes the victim of economic exploitation (orgies of wealth and luxury vie with pleasures of flesh on these pages), he looks with optimism toward the next experience and admonishes those who would wallow in self-pity.