Me so Hornby: novelist Alberto Fuguet photo: Valeria Zalaquett The Movies of My Life By Alberto Fuguet Translated by Ezra E. Fitz Rayo/HarperCollins, 287 pp., $24.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Fuguet is best known as the polemicist behind the McOndo movement, a punning challenge to García Márquez's Macondo. Movies doesn't develop this supersized attitude beyond an oppositional pose—an eerie premonition is defensively described as "befitting a bad magical realism novel." One wonders, too, if a writer who can so unblinkingly rope Yul Brynner into his protagonist's extended family (for the King and I chapter, no less) has any business complaining about levitating grandmothers. The strain of freighting every movie with a real-life parallel takes its toll—did Beltrán really need to see The Sound of Music with a neighbor's all-singing brood? Still, Movies straddles its most traumatic fault line with aplomb: 10-year-old Beltrán is uprooted from Encino, where kids re-create The Poseidon Adventure in the tub, and whisked to post-coup Chile, where the first movie he sees is Soylent Green, a vision of authoritarian atrocity that causes him to flee the theater in a panic.