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.

The Great Mexican Novel? The Great Novel of the Latin American "Boom" Generation? However you describe La muerte de Artemio Cruz's greatness, you'll need a capital G.

This book, which is widely regarded as Carlos Fuentes's finest work - I'll refrain from endorsing that claim for now, as I haven't read any of his other fictional pieces, but I recognize it would be extremely difficult to surpass - tells the dark and convoluted story of the failure of the Mexican Revolution through the equally dark and convoluted character of Artemio Cruz. A Mexican Charles Foster Kane, a real-life Ebenezer Scrooge - Artemio Cruz is definitely not a likable man. He betrays his lovers, comrades, and country for his own personal gain. He treats his family as mere financial dependents, incapable even of the hard work and disciplined thought he demands from his servants and business partners. He hosts New Year's Eve parties simply to invite less wealthy people into his home and be worshipped.

Fuentes arranges the book into sections that do not present the story chronologically but do repeat the same three-part structure: (1) An important moment in Cruz's life is narrated by an omniscient voice, with occasional interjections from other characters. (2) On his deathbed, and in the first person, Cruz reflects on the events in his life, justifies his treachery, and expresses his contempt for the "well-wishers" gathered at his bedside. And (3) the voice of Fuentes - or is it the voice of the Revolution? - directly addresses Cruz, drawing a connection between Cruz's abandonment of ideals and his country's overall corrupt state. Of course, this third section, written in the second person, reads like the author's direct reproach not only of Artemio Cruz but of us, the audience, as well.

Another reviewer has stated that Cruz may be the least likable character in Latin American literature. Yes, but is he truly that different from any of the rest of us? Fuentes, with reference to Baudelaire, says no. Selfish, scornful, and unworthy of any love and redemption - Artemio Cruz is our twin / our brother.

There are pros and cons to my annual self-imposed requirement of reading a book in Spanish.

On the one hand, there are several advantages. Firstly, I feel extremely cultured and smart when I engage in this activity. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and makes me feel more connected to different languages and cultures. Secondly, by the second half of the book, my Spanish is back to near-fluent levels. This continuous practice helps me maintain and improve my language skills.

On the other hand, there are also some drawbacks. For one thing, I basically have no idea what happened in the first half of the book. The unfamiliar language and complex content can make it difficult to understand the story initially. Additionally, it takes an incredibly long time to read a book in a foreign language. This can be quite time-consuming and may require a significant amount of patience and dedication.

Based on what I actually understood, this is a really good novel about Mexico and an old man named Artemio. However, the shifting perspectives, Mexican idioms, and extensive historical and political context might make this an overly ambitious choice for a non-native speaker like me.

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 Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) stands as an exquisitely intricate and baroque narrative.

The protagonist, Artemio Cruz, is a complex composite figure. He begins as a revolutionary fighter but gradually transforms into an opportunist and plutocrat. His type mirrors many real Mexican historical figures. Just like many revolutionary generals, he exploits his privileged position to build lavish mansions for himself, imitating the Porfirian aristocrats he overthrew and betraying the ideals of the Revolution.

The novel presents a significant challenge due to its multiple and constantly evolving points of view on the protagonist. Cruz's life is not presented in a chronological sequence from birth to death but as a series of fragmented moments that shift rapidly in time. Fuentes adopts a triadic perspective, using first, second, and third-person accounts of Cruz's life. The second-person account, which some reviewers found rather confusing, seems to be a self-evaluating and self-condemning voice of conscience. These three perspectives not only represent Cruz's multiplicity of selves but also his inability to reconcile his ruthless, self-serving ego with his self-negating conscience, his opportunism with his idealism.

La Muerte de Artemio Cruz is an incredibly expansive novel, a work of excess and supreme confidence that demands diligent effort from its readers. At the very least, one needs to have some knowledge of Mexican history. However, if you do your homework, it proves to be a highly rewarding read.

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.

I thought the premise of the story was truly fascinating. Artemio Cruz, who has no connection to that other fellow named Cruz, is a corrupt individual in every sense: a politician, a soldier, and a man. He is currently on his deathbed, and the story jumps around in time to narrate the tale of each significant event in his life, leading back to the "present" of his deathbed experience. The premise is excellent, and I really like the concept of the time-hopping and the storytelling aspect.

However, the story itself wasn't always straightforward to read. What I mean by this is that someone once told me they don't read and they consider James Patterson a "hard" author to read because he's "difficult." Well, Fuentes feels difficult to me as well. It might very well be because I'm not very knowledgeable about Mexican history. I have a feeling that if I understood more of the historical context, I would have had a much greater appreciation for the story than I did. This is entirely my own fault and not the author's.
The reality is that it did mean I didn't understand a large part of the story. I could grasp the corruption and much of the personality and relationships between the characters, but there was a certain distance that I felt towards the rest of the story. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I've been wondering if it's something that I'm not particularly able to identify when it comes to many of the Latin American Boom authors, such as some of Gabriel García Márquez's writing and what I've read by Jorge Luis Borges so far. Once again, I don't blame the authors or the culture. It's my own fault for not understanding the context in which they wrote. I suspect that a lot of the emotional distance I perceive in the reading is due to that context which is lost on me. Maybe I'll look into that and then re-read some of these books and authors who didn't have as much of an impact on me as I think they should have.

My Return to Magical Realism. Carlos Fuentes is an exceptional writer, with a varied, extensive, and baroque lexicon; without neglecting oral expressions, phonemes, and Mexican words. The story builds a puzzle with the life of Artemio Cruz while traversing fundamental chapters of the history of Mexico from the beginning of the 20th century: The Revolution. This context is extremely interesting and its reading aroused curiosity about this topic. I believe that a good book does not end with the last page, but rather begins. When you start to discover the social-historical-political context in which it develops, the literary and historical implications, what will enrich the next re-reading.

Therefore, as José Donoso stated in the prologue of the edition I own, the novel is a vision of Mexico, of Latin America, and of Man. The pendulum of the novel and of Artemio oscillates like the pendulum of all, between life and death. Love and hatred, passion and calm, generosity and greed, luck and misfortune. Highly recommended for reading, it is a great door to think about the history of the continent, about the revolution, about corruption, about the bitternesses of life, about deciding whether you want to fuck or be fucked.

I had the strangest reading experience when I delved into this book, which is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Mexican literature.

The protagonist is an old man on the verge of death, mostly confined to his bed. We catch glimpses of his life, perhaps memories that flit through his fading mind as he nears the end. At first, it's hard to like him. He seems to have been a soldier, a criminal, maybe a corrupt senator or even president, a lover and a womanizer.

It's difficult to precisely understand who he is or the people he's remembering. But as I prepared for the end-of-year holidays and dipped into the book and his recollections, I couldn't help but think about how my own life would play out in my dying moments. What would I recall? How would I interact with those trying to care for me?

Artemio's life is said to be a metaphor for Mexican history, but I can't comment on that. However, there are many sections where, even if I couldn't fully grasp the historical significance, I could sense the pathos and emotional depth of the scenes in his life and the experiences of those around him.

The disjointed nature of the scenes, sometimes without context for several pages, was occasionally a challenge to follow. But then, it truly works as part of the flow of memories, regrets, and the illustration of the man whose death we share. The last surgery and what the doctors discover might be a bit overdone as a metaphor for the corruption of the soul. Overall, though, the book, as a tapestry of a man's life and a nation's story, is quite moving.

The story of the last hours of the life of a rich and controversial landowner, his social ascent in parallel with the loss of moral values against the backdrop of events in Mexico from the time of the Revolution to the 1950s.

Overall, it is a simple plot for an original narration that instantly rejuvenates the Latin American novel by telling the story for the first time with new tools. Fuentes uses a plurality of viewpoints and temporal planes, but not as ends in themselves but rather making them functional to the description of an extremely complex personality like that of the protagonist, a character who changes over time and depending on the observer's point of view.

Everything is relative, the author seems to want to say, and even ideas and convictions change depending on the historical moment and the situation in which the character lives. And Artemio Cruz embodies this parabola of ideals perfectly with his life: from youthful ambitions to the cynicism of old age, passing through betrayals, corruption, and violence, a trajectory that seems traced not only on his figure but also on that of an entire nation.

Cruz has betrayed his dreams just as Mexico has betrayed the Revolution. The great values have been sacrificed on the altar of the god of money and the meanness of the human soul, and when the protagonist of the novel finds himself taking stock of his life, what he holds in his hand is a fistful of flies and the only thing he can hold on to are the memories, the true love he has had, given, and then lost.

Cruz is a lonely man who lies in bed remembering to delay death and who is about to leave behind only rubble:

"You will leave as an inheritance the useless dead, the dead names, the names of all those who fell dead so that your name might live; the names of men stripped of everything so that your name might be a symbol of possession; the names of forgotten men so that your name might never be forgotten: you will leave this country as an inheritance; you will leave your newspaper as an inheritance, the bribes and the flattery, the conscience numbed by the false speeches of mediocre men; you will leave the mortgages as an inheritance, you will leave a decadent class as an inheritance, a power without grandeur, a consecrated stupidity, a dwarfed ambition, a commitment like that of a clown, a stale rhetoric, an institutional cowardice, a vulgar egoism; you will leave their thieving leaders as an inheritance, the sold unions, the new latifundia, the American investments, the imprisoned workers, the hoarders and the big press, the day laborers, the municipal and secret police, the foreign capital, the slick speculators, the servile deputies, the sycophantic ministers, the elegant subdivisions, the commemorations and anniversaries, the fleas and the verminous tortillas, the illiterate Indians, the laid-off workers, the denuded mountains, the fat men armed with water skis and shares, the flabby and clawed men: let them keep their Mexico: let them keep your inheritance; you will leave the faces, sweet, strange, without a tomorrow because they do everything today, they define it as "today", they are the present and are in the present: they say "tomorrow" because tomorrow doesn't matter to them: you will be the future without being it, you will consume today thinking of tomorrow: they will be tomorrow because they live only today: your people your death: an animal that foresees its own death, sings it, calls it, dances it, paints it, remembers it before dying it, your death: your land."

Artemio Cruz is a man who has dedicated his life to giving the image of a whole person, dedicated solely to desire and possession, faithful to the law of all or nothing, and yet he is a man who only seemingly lends himself to a simplistic reading of the black or white type because he hides a contradictory personality.

His is a more complex, divided, and fragmented soul than it may seem on the surface, as a result of the thousand crossings he has had to make.

Cruz (also here) is the mirror of Mexico: a complex, divided, and fragmented nation as a result of the crossings it has had to make.

"You have looked northward, and ever since you have lived with the nostalgia of the geographical error that has not allowed you to be part of it entirely: you admire its efficiency, its comforts, its hygiene, its power, its will, and you look around and the incompetence, the poverty, the filth, the abulia, the nakedness of this poor country that has nothing seem intolerable to you; and it pains you even more to know that no matter how hard you try, you cannot be like them: you can only be a copy, something approximate, because after all, is your vision of things, in your worst or best moments, ever been as simplistic as theirs? Never. You have never been able to think in black or white, good or bad, God or the Devil: admit that always, even when it seemed otherwise, you have found in the black the germ, the reflection of its opposite: wasn't even your cruelty, when you were cruel, suffused with a certain tenderness? You know that every extreme contains its opposite: cruelty contains tenderness, cowardice contains courage, life contains death: in some way (almost unconsciously, because of who you are, where you are from, and what you have lived through) you know all this, so you will never be able to resemble them, who do not know it. Does it bother you? Yes, it is not comfortable, it is annoying, it is much more comfortable to say: here is the good and there is the evil. The evil. You will never be able to define it. Perhaps because we, more defenseless, do not want that intermediate, ambiguous zone between light and shadow to be lost: that zone where we can find forgiveness. Where you can find it. Who will not be able, in a single moment of his life (like you) to embody at the same time good and evil, to be guided at the same time by two mysterious threads, of different colors, that come from the same ball, so that then the white thread goes up and the black one descends and, nevertheless, both end up in your hands? You will not want to think about this. You will hate your self because it reminds you of this. You would like to be like them and now, as an old man, you almost succeed. Almost, however. Only almost. You yourself will avoid oblivion: your courage will be the twin brother of your cowardice, your hatred will be the son of your love, all your life will have contained and promised your death: you will have been neither good nor bad, neither generous nor selfish, neither faithful nor a traitor. You will let others reveal your qualities and your defects; but you too, how can you deny that each of your affirmations will deny itself, that each of your denials will affirm itself? No one will realize this, except perhaps you."