Gringo

• The Colonist by Michael Schmidt
  Frederick Muller, 125 pp, £5.95, April 1980, ISBN 0 584 31056 0

I don’t find that my children want to hear what things were like when I was young. Publishers, who are sometimes also parents, must find that their families don’t want to listen to them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years.