La muerte de Artemio Cruz

An opening scene that blows your mind: the impressions of the old Mexican tycoon Artemio Cruz, on his deathbed. What follows are a dozen cycles of texts, presented in three different perspectives. In the 1st person, we hear the raving Artemio on his deathbed, sharing his disjointed thoughts and memories. In the 2nd person, there is a kind of living conscience that confronts Artemio with his faults and mistakes, making him face the consequences of his actions. And in the 3rd person, there are flashbacks on crucial episodes from his life, painting a vivid picture of his rise to power.

The construction of the story initially is intriguing, as it keeps the reader guessing and wondering what will happen next. However, soon it gets boring, as the same patterns and perspectives are repeated over and over again. The information that is presented gives you very gradually a picture of a reckless man who, through cunning, blackmail and manipulation, has built up an empire against the background of the turbulent Mexican history in the first half of the twentieth century.

Regularly there are beautiful passages, especially the stories in the 3rd person, which are rich in detail and atmosphere. You also get a somewhat disconcerting picture of a big man with his doubts and bumbling, which makes him more human and relatable. But there are too many dark, confused fragments to speak of an enjoyable reading. It's a pity that the author didn't manage to bring all these elements together in a more cohesive and engaging way.

I had to read a book for my high school World Literature class. I specifically chose this one as it appeared interesting. Little did I know what to anticipate from it as it truly caught me off guard.

The book commences with a surprise due to its explicitness. The author, Carlos Fuentes, employs rich imagery and other techniques to captivate the reader and maintain their focus, making them eager to read on. Although the novel isn't straightforward, it helps expand your imagination and makes you think about what's happening.

Set during the Mexican revolution, the main character witnesses the rise of modern Mexico and is a part of it all. The novel is about a wealthy high-class man, Artemio Cruz, who is on his deathbed. At his last moment, there is a crowd around him, many of whom, as he sees it, never loved him but only his wealth. He orders his only loyal friend, Padilla, to bring a recorder to capture his final spoken words.

Then, we learn about his life through his memories of climbing from poverty to wealth, which involve corruption, guilt, disloyalty, and affairs. He speaks of his experiences in a crucial and disturbing war, where all emotions seem to be erased from existence. There, he meets the woman he loved and desired to spend the rest of his life with, but is devastated to find her dead. Through memories, he slips in and out of dreaming and reliving, back to the reality of his deathbed.

The book seems to follow a sequence of events, starting from his recent memory and going back to his first memory, all the way to his birth, where the novel concludes.

Fuentes masterfully sums up the complex Mexican reality within the monumental "Chingar" Chapter. It is truly a remarkable piece of work. If you have the ability to read in Spanish, it is highly recommended that you read this book in its original language. This is because when you read about certain words like "F*#K" for a dozen pages or so in translation, something significant is lost. The original language likely conveys a more profound and nuanced meaning. This thought-provoking book should not be overlooked. It should be studied in conjunction with the Mexican Revolution and Post-Revolutionary Mexico to gain an adequate historical context. By doing so, one can better understand the true essence and significance of the events and ideas presented in the book.

A serving of Citizen Kane is taken. It is then stirred well with the Latin American literary boom, Mexican politics, and the Mexican Revolution. James Joyce is added as a seasoning along with a dash of the post Han Dynasty Three Kingdoms epic. The outcome is The Death of Artemio Cruz.

This is not a book that can be casually perused while lounging on a chaise by the pool. However, for those who are willing to engage deeply with literature, it offers a remarkable experience. The protagonist, Cruz, is on his deathbed. The novel alternates between flashbacks that reveal snippets of his life and his deathbed perceptions of himself and those around him, presented in a more or less stream of consciousness style.

In the hands of a less skilled author, this approach might have resulted in a jumbled mess. But Fuentes is a master. He presents us not with a linear story but a character portrait. We gradually move from a vague understanding (in a sense, we have a rough sketch of the whole person early on) to a more focused one (as our initial impressions of Cruz are continuously developed, refined, and challenged). In a nutshell, Cruz is a revolutionary fighter who survives and achieves great success afterward, but often acts in morally ambiguous ways. However, this brief summary fails to convey the full experience that the reader has as Cruz takes shape in the novel.

The first time I attempted to read this novel at the age of 18 or 19, I abandoned it. In my thirties, I managed to finish it. It seemed fascinating to me to observe how it weaves the fictional life of a successful and corrupt entrepreneur who emerged from the ranks of the soldiery and rose to become an official of the Mexican Revolution with contemporary Mexican history. However, I also thought it was long, its language was overly ornate and its form was rather contrived.

It would take about thirty years and a new reading of the novel to raise it from three to five stars and understand that this novel, first published in 1962 and part of the dazzling boom of the Latin American novel in the sixties, is a classic that improves with age and rereadings.

The frame narrative is the protracted death of the septuagenarian protagonist, oscillating between his memories and the crudeness of his agony, the awareness of his vile, aging and rotten body, and the almost cheerful carelessness and energetic and vital egoism with which he embraces his growing moral rottenness resulting from excessive, comfortable and increasingly cynical enrichment, in a journey that goes from love to lovelessness and contempt.

The frame narrative recalls and at the same time deeply contrasts with those of La muerte de Ivan Ilich (1886) by Leo Tolstoy, As I lay dying (Mientras agonizo, 1930) by William Faulkner and El rumor de la montaña (1954) by Yasunari Kawabata, all of which, like Fuentes, work in a highly personal and original way on the relationship between aging, memory, history, morality, conscience and the confrontation with one's own death.

I still haven't found it easy to start reading Fuentes' novel. The shocking and uncompromising crudeness of Artemio Cruz's agony from the first paragraph of the novel, the overwhelming preciosism, more churrigueresque than baroque, of the language and narrative inventiveness, perhaps only comparable to the sonorous ocean of Alejo Carpentier with whom he also shares the sense of the marvellous real where the sea smells of guava and melons, make the initial slope of the novel steep. It is true that one gets tired of so much sordid piling up of descriptions of decomposing entrails, but it is no less true that the life narrative gains speed, complexity, energy and contextual richness and ends up becoming an irresistible and implacable wave that bursts and unfolds in a splendid confusion of birth and death, of the protagonist and of the Mexican Revolution.