Horizontal Vertigo
A City Called Mexico
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Narrated by:
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Gabriel Porras
About this listen
At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city.
Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today - one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers.
In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City”, “City Characters”, “Shocks”, “Crossings”, and “Ceremonies”. What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.
©2021 Juan Villoro (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Villoro recounts his adventures with a mix of irony and empathy, with a sense of humor and a feeling for the absurd. He is exquisitely attuned to the capital’s contradictions and nuances, and he knows how to listen to its inhabitants. There are deeply moving moments in this book.” (The New York Times Book Review)
"One of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary writers offers an affectionate exploration of the country’s capital city. [Villoro] does not shy away from issues of poverty, class, and gender, and the result is an enthralling, often funny depiction of a city that ‘overflowed urbanism and installed itself in mythology.’” (The New Yorker)
"Horizontal Vertigo is the best - wittiest, wisest, most detailed and enlightened - book I've read about Mexico City. It is both deeply personal and scholarly, and most of all humane and humorous - Juan Villoro's triumph as a chronicler of Mexican life." (Paul Theroux, author of On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey)
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A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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We Don't Know Ourselves
- A Personal History of Modern Ireland
- By: Fintan O'Toole
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society - perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism.
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Relentlessly Negative
- By John on 06-02-22
By: Fintan O'Toole
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When We Were Arabs
- A Jewish Family's Forgotten History
- By: Massoud Hayoun
- Narrated by: Massoud Hayoun
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism.
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painful to read.
- By Eli Cukierman on 03-13-20
By: Massoud Hayoun
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Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
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Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Balkan Ghosts
- A Journey Through History
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.
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Anti religious/anti catholic hit piece
- By Daniel Calvert on 05-04-21
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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House of Glass
- The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
- By: Hadley Freeman
- Narrated by: Hadley Freeman
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother, Sara, lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz.
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Performance
- By Derek on 08-30-22
By: Hadley Freeman
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Aftermath
- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
- By: Harald Jähner, Shaun Whiteside - translator
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust - and features over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
By: Harald Jähner, and others
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The Buried
- An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
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Papyrus
- The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
- By: Irene Vallejo, Charlotte Whittle - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before books were mass-produced, scrolls hand-copied on reeds pulled from the Nile were the treasures of the ancient world. Papyrus is the story of the book’s journey from oral tradition to scrolls to codices, and how that transition laid the very foundation of Western culture. Irene Vallejo evokes the great mosaic of literature in the ancient world, all the while illuminating how ancient ideas about education, censorship, authority, and identity still resonate today.
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Great read
- By Hunter Pechin on 12-15-22
By: Irene Vallejo, and others
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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
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October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend.
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Juan Villoro relata en La figura del mundo, el orden secreto de las cosas, algunos pasajes memoriosos en torno a su padre, el pensador mexicano-catalán, Luis Villoro. Sin el afán de hacer una biografía en estricto sentido, Juan evoca aquí la vida singular de quienfuera filósofo, luchador social, zapatista y autor de una obra fundamental. En este libro hace una aproximación a una figura a la vez íntima y pública, adentrándose en las complejidades que toda vida tiene, narrando con maestría instantes que se desdoblan para entender el ubicuo presente.
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One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.
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What listeners say about Horizontal Vertigo
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Snorkel Queen
- 11-12-24
A City Always on the Move
This book gave me insight into Mexico City and the people who live there. It’s not an easy place to live because of the crowds and infernal traffic and intransigent poverty and runaway urban development. The city is built on lakes so it is slowly sinking, but new and bigger high rises continue to be built. Earthquakes in 1985 and 2017 showed the folly of this upward growth, but it remains unabated, a disaster waiting to happen. But people carry on living ordinary and extraordinary lives. The author painted lively portraits of some of the city’s residents and neighborhoods to help us understand why and how the city goes on in spite of its problems.
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- E. Molina
- 05-05-21
Impressive
The most complex city in the planet found a writer who dared to explain it in all its hysterical majesty.
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1 person found this helpful
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- James Hanley
- 12-11-24
modern history of Mexico City and its culture
Great history of the author's life experiences in this culturally rich and yet damaged City
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- Caveat Emptor
- 07-08-23
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of CDMX
Expect about 30% memoir of this accomplished writer and literary critic, 30% history of Mx City, and 30% observations about Mexico and modern life. The book is less about the city than I expected, but learned a good deal nevertheless, and the Chilango view of the city and the world. Some parts, especially the last chapter, about the 1985 Earthquake, were very emotional, but relevant to the city today, which still shows damage and faces possible destruction in the event of another of such magnitude.
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- Patricia M
- 07-09-21
Mexico City is endlessly fascinating.
I lived in Mexico City for 40 years and this story brought back memories of the diversity and color and contrasts of one of the world's largest city. The author captures both past and present in an authentic rendering of the city. The place,.people and the colors and flavors are all brought to life in this wonderful book. I guess that the story is more relevant to those who have known
this sprawling urban landscape.
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- Colorado shopper
- 01-03-23
Not what I was hoping for
Was hoping for a overview of how the history of Mexico City led to what it is today before traveling there. While it had some small nuggets of this, it was more of the authors specific experiences (some very graphic) and I just didn't care. I made it about a third of the way through and called that done.
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- Jorge Rojas
- 07-25-21
Terrible.
The book itself is disorganized, and does not follow any time line. I grew up in Mexico City, what he describes is a very small portion of the city and his population, which may be what he was exposed to. The reader with a Mexican accent is also disgusting; if it is an English translation it should be read by somebody that can read and pronounce the language correctly. In summary the book is terrible and not factual. I felt I wasted my time listening to it, had to make an effort to finish it!!
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2 people found this helpful