Initial Reaction

My initial reaction to Aura was entirely dependent on its second person narrative voice. I felt as though I was being told to do things--in my opinion, it is written in a way that allows the author to make direct contact with the reader, to grasp the reader's attention immediately and drag the reader right into Senora Llorente's house as if he or she were Senor Montero. I have not yet read a book written in the second person, and thus was expecting it to be a difficult adjustment to make, but it proved to be easier than I imagined.
Before dialogue was provided, it was hard for me to tell if Fuentes's descriptions of the happenings were to be considered reality. Although countless details were provided, the first several pages of the book seemed vague. In my opinion, everything fell on the border between magic and reality. The haziness of it all--"You try to retain some single image of that indifferent outside world" (11)--initially made the general plot line unclear to me. The dialogue, however, then served as a method to ground the reader in some sort of reality.