I Finished The Death of Artemio Cruz!

 I just mentioned in another post that the new place without a television may give me more time to read. I cannot believe it took me so long to read Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz.

The novel is a few years younger than myself; the translation is a little more than half my lifetime ago. It is brilliant. It is fresh to this old man. I read Fuentes' The Old Gringo while in prison. That is more a novella, a slighter form, but Artemio Cruz is not a long novel for all it packs into its pages. Start with Artemio Cruz.

Citizen Kane came to mind while I was reading. Only here the one recollecting the title character's life is Artemio Cruz. I have only the slightest acquaintance with Mexican history in the Twentieth Century, but it seems to me Cruz is using Cruz's life to map out that history. The only time Fuentes strays from Mexico is a foray into the Spanish Civil War.

I wanted to include a sample of Fuetnest's prose. What follows was chosen quickly, randomly, since I had run out of time with the book. I thought it captured some of the rhythm and some of the themes. What I did not realize until later was how it foreshadowed the plot, too.

Only then did he remember that he'd always looked ahead, beginning with the night he'd crossed the mountain and escaped from the old ruined house in Veracruz. From that day on, he'd never looked back. From that day on, he'd willed to know he was alone, with no other strength than his own... And now... He couldn't resist asking that question - what it's like, what can you see from there - which perhaps was his way of disguising the anxiety of memory, the slopes toward an image of leafy ferns and slow rivers, tubular flowers over a shack, a starched shirt and soft hair that smelled of quince...

The Death of Artemio Cruz (translated by Alfred Mac Adam; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 1991), p. 180

 Go ahead and read the novel. You may surprise yourself by liking it.

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