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This article analyzes the function of letter writing and epistolary correspondence in Gustavo Sainz’s fiction, particularly Obsesivos días circulares (1969) and A la salud de la serpiente (1991). It contends that the personal letter emerges in these novels as a form of expression and communication that breaks with the models of individual and collective identity fostered and consolidated by the Mexican state during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, epistolary writing responds to the political situation in post-Tlatelolco Mexico by contesting the temporal homogeneity needed to imagine the nation as a unitary social body progressing toward modernity. Epistolary writing thus opens the narrative text to competing, unresolved temporalities while at the same time unmooring individual subjectivity from the destinies of a repressive nation–state.
