We are inclined today to call unhappy families dysfunctional, but that is an inadequate description of the “happy families” found in the latest book from the prolific pen of Carlos Fuentes. These families are often highly functional in very odd ways — like the thalidomide baby who grows up to become, with his movie-star father, part of a moneymaking comedy act.

The book’s title comes from the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps, but there is a similarity in these 16 unhappy households, a common search for the happiness that eludes them. Fuentes, one of the leading writers of our time as well as a Mexican diplomat, has since 1992 been associated with Brown University, where he is a professor at large centered in Hispanic studies.

These depressing, fascinating, ambiguous and ironic stories are set in contemporary Mexico. Each is followed by a chorus like those of Greek drama, and by the book’s end, the choruses have fleshed out the stories into a picture of the evils of dictatorship and revolution, with their attendant brutality, torture, and destruction of societies, and of the fragmentation of families in today’s world.

In “A Family like Any Other,” a trusted employee is dismissed for boasting of his honesty, and his daughter shuts herself away into the “reality” of television reality shows. In another story, a husband befriends his wife’s ugly cousin, to the detriment of his marriage. “Mater Dolorosa” describes a mother’s responsibility for her daughter’s failure to love and subsequent death. In two stories titled “Conjugal Ties,” a lover declares, “Everything I’ve done is for the sake of happy families.” Aging lovers, in “The Gay Divorcee,” let a handsome young Indian boy into their Eden. And three daughters, like Lear’s, wait at their father’s coffin to claim their inheritance.

Fuentes writes fluidly, and this very readable translation by Edith Grossman preserves his flow and style so far as that can be done from one language to another. He often numbers sections, to signal a change to another character.

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who is speaking or thinking, or even what is happening. But his witty asides and ironic comments lighten what is often a somber landscape, as dry and barren as the deserts of his homeland. And he illuminates the world he writes of, which is unforgettable and vivid in its sorrows and occasional joys.

platwood@verizon.net