Off the Tracks By Inge Merkel

A group of middle-class Viennese tourists lands at the Mexico City airport to begin an extended tour of the country and its culture. What could go wrong? A great deal, it turns out, both within the group with its skewed dynamics and between the group and “the locals” in this often hilarious clash of cultures. The professor and the tour guide almost come to blows over the merits of Western classical versus Amerindian art; the tour guide, who has “gone native,” is chased out of the barrio and barely escapes in one piece; the professor’s teenage son becomes deathly ill from a tainted taco at the Veracruz mercado and is “helped” by a prostitute. These and many other misadventures form the comic-satiric patina of a novel that also goes much deeper to probe such profound questions as: Can one culture ever completely know another? What are the limits of cross-cultural understanding? Do Mexicans, with their Aztec heritage, have a better, saner, outlook on death than Westerners with their Grim Reaper mythology? Can a writer in her seventies fulfill a long-suppressed girlhood wish to get “off the tracks” of her own cultural conditioning and explore new territory? Off the Tracks is that rarity among comic novels: a book as profound as it is funny.