Rating: 
Summary: Mexican Bigshot's Life Reflects Times
Review: The violent society of Mexico in the 19th century produced a bloody revolution that laid the foundations for a new Mexico after 1920. The revolution devoured its dreamers and hopers, as revolutions tend to do, so that it was co-opted by the most violent, least idealistic types, who arranged Mexican society to their benefit, even if the common man ultimately did derive some advantages too. For the winners, especially as the century wore on, it seemed as if goose neck stuffed with pork-liver paté, or perhaps the damask armchairs by a fireplace in the huge living room loomed far larger than social justice. For them, the ruthless grab for power turned out to be a successful gambit. Artemio Cruz is such a successful individual, determined to let nothing stop his rise to the top, taking advantage of every chance brought to him by the tides of war and political intrigue.The backward-forward nature of the narrative, the wordy lyricism interspersed with terse action sequences, and the dwelling upon illness, decay, and death locate this novel on the absolute opposite end of the literary continuum from say, the quiet, spare prose of Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari. This is a novel of bright colors, of deep, intense feelings, a novel in which the author thrives on vocabulary and the effect of the words themselves, a novel of ultimately surprising revelations that do not stop until the very last pages. Artemio Cruz desires power for its own sake, he will stoop to any deed to acquire it. Fuentes scrapes back layer upon layer of the character, digging deep into his psyche to tell why. THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ is a highly intellectual, cleverly-constructed novel that is not easy to read. It encapsulates a most turbulent 70 years of Mexican history, from 1889 to 1959, and at the same time, is a poetical, psychological study of an individual that can have few peers in the realm of modern literature. Fuentes opens everything subtly, gradually. You meet a dying man on his last day and through flashbacks come to understand who he is---cruel, cynical, lucky, devastated---and how he destroyed everyone around him, yet kept them loyal through money and power. If basically an unattractive personality, Artemio Cruz is not a monster; he bears considerable similarity to people you know, maybe to yourself, but the times made him what he was. Fuentes has written a masterpiece: one of the great novels of the 20th century, certainly. If what I have written intrigues you, be sure to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Grief for youth by Ivonne Saed
Review: They say The death of Artemio Cruz is the last novel about the Mexican revolution. For me this novel uses the anecdote of the revolution as a pretext to make a vast reflexion about old age, disease, love, freedom and our uncontrollable passage through the world as human beings; it's a grief for youth. The revolution becomes an instrument to set up the doubt about how much History is our history and how our life is determined depending on the position from which we are able to play. In The death of Artemio Cruz Carlos Fuentes portrays his character from three angles that refer both to space and time. In this geometry resides the esencial conflict of being: the relations me-myself, me-the others and me-my past. By the first person narrative in present tense we find the most terrible reality: the need to face death and putrefaction of one's own body from where the soul can't get away; the inevitably slow road that lets the ego take complete conscience of its decay and its imminent end. It's a slow road and, at the same time, it's a lone instant related in detail through thousands of words. It's the instant of death that can only be one, but at the same time, is eternal in the delirium. By speaking to himself as you, the character is getting a call of his conscience; he speaks to himself in future tense so to make clear the road he travelled all his life to get to be what he's now was and is an unavoidable fate; the cycle would be identical, no matter how many times it repeats. The second person in future tense is a reconciliation with himself, it's the way of adjudging the drive of destiny as his own-"God... He... I carried him inside me and he's going to die with me." The third person is the one that completes the story, the one that presents the facts to fill the holes and justify the existance; he's the seemingly alien and impersonal narrator telling a story. Here there's no reflexion; there is a simple relation of facts; there's no questioning, but just events describing the tangible contents of the triangle that is the person of Artemio Cruz. The death of Artemio Cruz is, first of all, a universal and existencial novel of this century. Artemio Cruz could perfectly be inserted in one of the world wars without being much different of what he is. The mark he leaves on us as readers touches much deeper our existencial threads than the national ones.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work!
Review: This book is brilliantly conceived and executed. Fuentes does a great job of portraying a man on his death-bed, a man with much to look back on and to regret. I can't imagine anyone who enjoys literature at all not liking this book.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work!
Review: This book is brilliantly conceived and executed. Fuentes does a great job of portraying a man on his death-bed, a man with much to look back on and to regret. I can't imagine anyone who enjoys literature at all not liking this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Headed for oblivion
Review: When a writer starts a story in the first person, switches to the second person and finally to the third person, I usually get annoyed and stop reading. But when it's on a list of books you have to read and are going to be tested on, you keep going, more and more convinced of the stupidity of those professors in Spanish departments all over the USA who keep it on their reading lists and thus save it from the oblivion it so richly deserves and will soon attain. I give "Artemio Cruz" two stars only because reading it proved to me that my taste is better than that of my professors. And for those who think that the fault may lie in the translation, I can assure you that the original is just as bad, if not worse.
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