Ratings

How far is television willing to go in its search for audiences? This question seems to fill the pages of this story. Ratings is a novel that explores the moral limits of the crude world of reality shows and rumages in the successful Latin American soap opera industry.
The novel alternates, then fuses, the voices of Manuel Izquierdo, a scriptwriter having a mid-life crisis, who after two decades of writing televised melodramas has become cynical and distrustful, and Pablo Mnzanares, a literature student who wants to be a poet and has an unimportant job in the channel. Using the words of these two characters and their experiences, Barrera Tyszka sets out a narrative which develops a single story and, finally, a single voice.