The Death of Artemio Cruz (FSG Classics) [Paperback]

Carlos Fuentes tells not just the life of a man, but he tells of the life of Mexico. Within the swirling text the reader is drawn from the death of Cruz to his birth, and we learn more than just his story. It is captivating. The story made me cry, it made me hate the protagonist, and in the end, it made me understand and love him. Truly one of the best books I've ever read. It is the type of story that the deeper you go, the more you feel your mind racing ahead to find the answers Fuentes is teasing you with.

If you have any desire to write a piece of fiction then this is a book you have to read. You want to write in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person? Fuentes employs all three within a single novel and makes it work. You want to learn how to manipulate the elements of time and space to create an experiential effect for a reader? Using mere words? Even through a translation, Fuentes can show you that it can be done.

Any analysis will not do this work justice. If you believe that the ultimate function of great fiction writing is to find a way to somehow transcend the limits of the written word, to give the reader an experience that defies material explanation, then Fuentes is the writer for you. You will forget your structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and post-modernist theoretical follies and consider yourself nearly a formalist after this book. You may even be able to read a T. S. Eliot essay without throwing up. This book will change you. If you like to pretend you are a writer, YOU HAVE TO GET THIS BOOK!

...as well as an incisive depiction of the universal human condition. I first read this book 25 years ago, when I was half a world away from Mexico. Figured it merited a re-read now that I am only 250 miles from the murderous violence that is Juarez, now, alas, light years away from Dylan's "Tom Thumb's Blues."

Carlos Fuentes is the essential Mexican writer, and I do consider this his best work. It was first published in Spanish in 1962 and dedicated to C. Wright Mills, of The Power Elite; LISTEN, YANKEE - The Revolution in Cuba and others, and who died in that same year. He called Mills the "true voice of North America" and the "friend and comrade in the Latin-American struggle."

The novel commences with the protagonist, Artemio Cruz, on his death bed. The year is 1959. Cruz was born in the late 19th century. Fuentes tells the story of Cruz, against the background of the story of Mexico itself, in a series of chapters with varying dates over that period, and Fuentes also uses flashbacks from the death bed. In one chapter the author even manages to reach back to the beginning of the 19th century, and briefly covers French rule in the middle of that century. There is the perennial political instability and fighting; with an old elite landowner class being wiped out, and a new class of "revolutionaries" quickly replicating the old class, much as Orwell depicted in Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Much of the novel is set in the early 1900's, when Cruz is a soldier, fighting against the "Federales." But as Fuentes makes clear, the varying factions were often interchangeable, with the idealists generally being eliminated, and the baser elements in the movements rising to the top. This was personified by Cruz, who made a familiar arc in life: from an idealist leftist to a cynical, money-grubbing, filthy rich elitist obsessed with power at the end of his life. Some of the violence depicted in this novel rivals Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West. And one battle scene seems to be inspired by Stephan Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (Wordsworth Classics) The establishment and maintenance of power relationships in society are a constant theme woven into the history, and hence his dedication to Mills.

Ah, there is also much insight into the male - female relationship(s). Cruz's marriage was determined solely based on his economic goals; he marries Catalina, the daughter of a rich, but failing landowner. That determinate led to much resentment on both sides, and the love / hate relationship is intensely characterized. Cruz follows another familiar arc, and seeks solace by philandering, with, among others, a good friend of his wife, (naturally), in Paris, and a "convenience," Lelia, in Acapulco. She becomes a designated in-house mistress, and there is the description of a party that he holds that captures so much of the social and power relationships. And there is the remembrance, all too true, of one's first love, in his case, Regina, and those thoughts continued around the "smoke rings of his mind" even (and perhaps particularly) on his dead bed. Fuentes has included some fine erotica, particularly the scenes with Regina. Apparently the author did a lot of personal "research" for these scenes. Wikipedia somewhat surprisingly, for seeking a neutral style, states that Fuentes has been a "habitual philander."

And there is so much more. Fuentes was only in his early 30's when he wrote this, yet he seems to have an amazing understanding of the aging process, and an even more amazing appreciation of how some members of the medical establishment deal with the dying. Consider (and the ellipsis are the author's): "I open my eyes wide but I can't make them out, things, people...white luminous eggs that wheel before me...a wall of milk between me and the world..." There is the "survivor's guilt" of anyone who has ever been in battle, and has lost friends. The American reader is treated to another view of Santa Anna, other than solely wiping out the defenders at the Alamo. There are the Zouvres, whose children would never have French names. And there is even, for a leftist writer in Spanish, the "obligatory" scene from the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. There is the woman whose world permanently collapsed, and took to her room for the rest of her life, a la Ms. Rosa Coldfield, in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage Classics). There was a wonderful section in which Cruz reflects on the "what might have been's" in his life. And there is even a good understanding of cosmology, and the light coming from distant stars, and cicadas that trill.

Fuentes makes it all "work." It is simply excellent literature, and an impressive translation. The narrative construction which centers around selective dates is the technique that progressively reveals the story to the reader in a mounting crescendo of wonder, and even amazement. Fuentes uses "magically realism" in other novels, but not in this one. There are however numerous stream of consciousness passages. Speaking of magical realism, it should be noted that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a "cameo role" for "Artemio Cruz" in his One Hundred Years of Solitude

The first time around I was not certain, but on the re-read, there is no question that this novel merits 6-stars.