The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics)
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes's masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.
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Community Reviews
hallucinations from a tormented and ailing artemio cruz on his deathbed epitomize the culmination, or transition, of a life - “so high.. you’ve never been so high.. you’ve never seen treetops from this angle.. and you will not feel small as you contemplate.. in the serene idleness of uncertainty..”
carlos fuentes’ vehicle of time (artemio) pivots, often unpredictably, across a fragmented timeline while describing ‘mexico’s drama’. above all, artemio's trajectory is the embodiment of a mexico in constant flux. as the country braces for a change to her pyramid, an ever-impeding question resurfaces - has the revolution fulfilled its promise? carlos fuentes’ novel provides timely insight.
like his contemporaries, carlos fuentes’ revolution consists of “fighting for a long time, ever since [taking-up] arms against don porfirio”. and now? with resignation, he concludes - “we’ve let ourselves be divided and directed by the lustful, the ambitious, the mediocre.. we are living among criminals..”
indeed, mexico’s historical record lays bare years of state-sponsored violence and crime against the most marginalized. since the bloody and factional revolution of 1910-1920 and the death of a fictitious yet real artemio cruz in 1961, military suppression against civil unrest (tlateloco 1968), displacement of indigenous communities and land via transnational trade and globalism (nafta), decades of femicide, disappearances in the hundreds of thousands (ayotzinapa’s 43) reveal a demoralizing and helpless succession of events.
such is the fatalism of ‘mexico’s drama’. whether the historical appointment of the first female president (claudia sheinbaum) proves a revolutionary step forward or displays, yet again, “a sinister game of musical chairs”, mexico’s imminent future will carry tremendous implications for the ‘promise of the revolution’ and the country’s troubled past and present.
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