Short wild read. I'm discovering the world of translated books.

This story revolves around prisoners being kept in a punishment cell, or apando. Revueltas creates tension in the story by letting us know the prisoners are about to attempt an escape, but by not telling us their plan. This is an effective hook which actually could make a good reboot for Steven Seagal style movies. Anyway, most importantly to me, all of the characters in this book -- guards, visitors, and convicts -- are portrayed as prisoners in this system. And the most guilty of them all? Not...

This brand new 2018 New Directions edition of José Revueltas's extremely short 1969 novel THE HOLE is a very small and very precious object. You can and should read it in one abbreviated sitting. And you should also sit with it, turn it over in your hands, reflect on it. Few books I have grappled with in recent memory are at the same time such rich and fascinating objects. One might wish to call it an artifact, though the fact remains that part of what makes this edition so fascinating is that i...

The Hole by Jose Revueltas (originally published in 1969, recently translated into English) is further proof that either I have a limited vocabulary or the English language isn’t adequate at describing an intense reading experience. At less than 13,000 words, and written by Revueltas while he was a guest at Lecumberri Prison in Mexico, The Hole tells the story of Polonio, the Albino and the Prick and their plan to smuggle heroin into the prison (they’re jonesing for a fix). The story is told in

Every once in awhile you read a book and wonder why you have not heard more about the author - why they have not been acknowledged for the depth and originality of their work. José Revueltas has written one of the best 'prison' novels ever. Tinged with Beckettian and Foucauldian concepts that question the whole concept of guard/prisoner this book is a powerful statement on punishment and crime.

Great, really great. It's astonishing, given the over-the-top praise on the back cover, that this little story lives up to the hype. The translators deserve a prize.

This story is written in real time, the time it takes you to read the story is the time the story takes place in, it’s small and I felt giddy after reading it.

This has got to be one of the finest things I’ve ever read. Written in the prison that is the novel’s setting, a 50 page paragraph tells the real-time story of three men confined and going mad with drug withdrawal and three women making their way through the prison to cause a scene and deliver them heroin stuffed inside an old woman’s womb. That connection of the womb and the cell is incredible. There are so many layers to this story; I immediately re-read it after finishing the first time and I...

hypnotic

An amazingly brutal read, it’ll take u an afternoon. Get into it. The first forty pages are heady and dense and then the last ten are like a gut punch. Subject matter is timely. No more prisons.

One of the best ways to spend an hour or two. Deadpan but lyrical, concise to the point of making you feel caged in along with the characters, funny, and tragic as all hell. The end of the novella, with its description of a brutal contraption of bars and geometry, brings to mind Kafka’s torture machine from “In the Penal Colony.”

That was a weird book

Revueltas' novella, The Hole, is more of a gut-punch than it is a narrative. Here, it is all scarred sensation, self-pity and self-loss. There's no other 'prison' work of fiction like this, and it should be read as a catharsis as opposed to a narrative. Realizing that Revueltas wrote this in prison only makes the work more powerful. Still, not for everybody. However, those who admire the great work of publisher New Directions should find a space for it on their bookshelves.

josé revueltas's the hole (el apando) must have seemed rather outrageous upon its publication nearly a half-century ago (1969). revueltas, a mexican writer and political activist (from a notable family of fellow creatives [composer, painter, and actress siblings]), set his slim, yet hardly slight novella in a prison – seemingly not too dissimilar from the one (lecumberri, near mexico city) in which he served time and penned this work. revueltas was jailed for dissident activities and his partici...

Fascinating. I am grateful for the chance to read this in translation and may have accidentally just become a fan of the translator.

An absolute burst of adrenaline.

I sat down this morning with some coffee, determined to read The Hole in one sitting. This was not a particularly difficult or arduous task; indeed, it took me only about an hour to get through the whole thing, including the wonderful introduction (which I didn’t read until after having read the main text, as is my custom). People who had recommended The Hole to me all insisted that reading it in this way, with no breaks or interruptions, was the only way to read it. Having trusted their advice

Despite its surface-level resemblance, this short, Mexican work is rather different from its French cousins: existentialist prison narratives. In contrast to the prison works of Sartre, Camus, Beckett, et al., Revueltas’s book is a much more immediate, much grittier, and much more grounded work. In fact, it's so uniquely vivid that it is as though it were not written, but instead drawn as a series of charcoal sketches.Rather than turn the small prison cell into a spiritual metaphor or into an oc...

Most of us have at least glanced at one of the “inside look” into prison TV shows. Whether it’s “Orange is the New Black”, “Prison Break”, or “Scared Straight” we think that these TV shows give a somewhat honest portrayal of prison life. But as is the case with most representations, they are processed and edited imitations. We on the outside of the gates can not comprehend the reality of life behind locked doors. What makes "The Hole" so masterful is its vantage point: inside a prison cell looki...

Mexican literature that is brutally honest, can be considered prison literature --