“I come from a family in which each member hurt the others in one way or another,” says a priest in one of the stories in Carlos Fuentes's new collection. “Then, repentant, each one hurt himself. Each one constructed his own prison.” The priest, intent on passing on to his young ward the psychological damage that his own upbringing imposed on him, is just one of a parade of self-imprisoned characters (committed to the tormenting of themselves and others) who pass through the pages of Happy Families.

The title and epigraph of Fuentes's book refer to Tolstoy's famous opening sentence in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Like Tolstoy himself, he's more interested in the particularities of the unhappy families than he is in the bland indistinguishability of the happy. As Mexico's most internationally admired writer enters his ninth decade, he has lost none of his sting. These are stories that resolutely refuse to charm his readers or to indulge any lingering sentimentality they may possess.

In the Mexico that Fuentes presents, mismatched couples, ungrateful children and rivalrous siblings abound. There is little room for familial affection and plenty for the kind of psychic violence that tears apart the ties that supposedly bind. In each story, Fuentes carefully, almost lovingly lays bare the miseries and hypocrisies that characterise his wildly dysfunctional families. A father is so blinkered in his determination to dictate the future of his sons that he becomes blind not only to their wishes but to the ways in which they are secretly subverting his own. A husband perversely destroys his marriage to a beautiful woman by embarking on an obsessive affair with her ugly and ill-favoured cousin. An ageing film star, unwilling to admit that his advancing years preclude him from leading roles, is eventually forced into an ambivalent partnership with his disabled son. A general marches an army into the mountains in pursuit of guerrillas led by his eldest son. When his other son, more interested in his financial future than fraternal solidarity, betrays his brother to the authorities, the father is forced to choose between them.

Each story is followed by a chorus of voices from the wretched of the earth who inhabit Mexico City's slums and barrios: a free verse interlude that Fuentes uses to echo the mainly middle-class miseries of the stories. The final one in the collection reads like a summary of all that has gone before. In Eternal Father, three daughters remain in thrall to the testamentary tyranny of their late father, whose will imposes responsibilities on them that they feel unable to ignore. On every anniversary of his death, as he stipulated, they gather at the place of his birth to hold a wake. Each sister dislikes the other two, each shudders at the memory of her father's domination of her during his lifetime, but none seems able to escape it now that he's dead. As a narrative illustration of the inescapable and lasting wounds that the members of an unhappy family inflict on one another, it would be hard to better. Yet, as Happy Families concludes, its most appropriate epigraph seems not the quotation from Tolstoy but the reference to Heart of Darkness with which Fuentes brings it to an end. In what he calls his “Choruscodaconrad”, Fuentes fades out with the words “the violence, the violence”. It is what readers will most remember of this bitter and unsettling volume of stories.

Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes
Bloomsbury £17.99 pp352

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