The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962)

Typical words people would use: difficult, pretentious, complicated. I prefer "over my head". Artemio Cruz is a rich old man lying on his deathbed, and the book is a mish-mash of his dreams and memories of his life told in various styles, narrated from different points of view. It definitely had its moments: I was gripped by the climax of his activities during the civil war. I also found the style easy-going and evocative on occasion, as in the part with a weekend prostitute. But most of it was a strange style made up of feverish imaginings and stream-of-consciousness writing, and I really struggled to understand what he was talking about half the time. I often couldn't figure out which character was responsible for quoted speech, and Fuentes certainly commits that annoying crime of having several pages of dialogue, back-and-forth, single line of quoted speech after line after line, with no narrative interjections or asymmetry to indicate which character each half belongs to. When I was younger I would count it out but now I honestly can't be bothered; reading is meant to be fun and interesting, not laborious. Even when the words and grammar made sense, the meanings were usually hard to "get": after half a book of tension I discovered what the horse-crossing-the-river phrase was referring to, only to be left wondering, without resolve, what it meant.

All that aside, it's not worthless. Even the grammatically confused stream-of-consciousness passages, annoying and opaque as they were, at least conveyed a strong impression of what it might be like to die slowly of illness.

Oh, one last problem: I don't need my characters to be heroes, but Artemio Cruz is, without giving too much away in the form of spoilers, a completely pathetic wanker for whom I have very little sympathy. And I'm not talking about misdemeanors, but crimes which today would land you in prison for life.

Tour de Force allegory that explores the complexities of Mexican national identity. The complicated narrative (divided into a third person omniscient that retells the key moments in AC's life; the 1st person stream-of-conscious rants of the bed-ridden and dying AC; and the 2nd person self-recriminations of AC's conscience) invites comparisons to W. E. B. DuBois's notion of double-consciousness. This is a difficult book, but an important book. Nonetheless, beyond the technical dexterity of Fuentes style, the tales, particularly the 3rd person stories that make of the bulk of the novel, are quite compelling in their own right: battles in Spain and Mexico, intrigues with American business, not to mention the clumsy love affairs AC continually finds himself in all make for compulsive reading. That Fuentes overlays Cruz's biography on top of the key moments of Mexican history generates even more interest. A truly amazing book. ( )

This is my second venture into Fuentes, the first being "The Crystal Frontier." While "Crystal" was seemingly a bunch of short stories and "Artemio" is written as diary entries, I thought there was a definite connection in their forms. In "Crystal" the short stories often feature a lot of the same characters and all work together to paint a picture of existence on the literal and figurative "border." "Artemio" sometimes feels like disjointed anecdotes since the diary entries are not chronological and Artemio seems to be the only character that appears in each section although his personality is different depending on what aged Artemio is featured. We get Artemio as a child, the soldier, the lover, the wealthy landowner, newspaper owner, etc. He also has many different ladies in his life corresponding to each of his developments.

I also couldn't help but think of Beckett's "Malone Dies" while reading this. Both stories are told as a man is on his deathbed recounting memories and dreams from his life. I think "Artemio" is a bit more straightforward, but also serves another purpose as to create a version of Mexico's history between 1900 and 1960. ( )

4011. The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes (read 17 Apr 2005) I recently was supplied with a list called "the 100 Greatest Novels of All time" which ranks novels. I like to see how many of the 100 I have read in such lists, and I found I had read 85 of the 100. No. 72 was this book. Since I greatly disliked what I have read by people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, I did not expect to like this book. However I found the book not as boring as those authors' 100 Years of Solitude and The House of Spirits. The central character is on his death bed and in flashbacks his life is told--but not in chronological order (that would make the story too easy to follow, of course). Some episodes have a certain power, but there is also a lot of pretentious stream of consciousness mingled in the story. Cruz is, of course, immoral sexually with a host of women--though his wife was at his deathbed. This was not, usually, enjoyable reading. ( )