The Death of Artemio Cruz
SynopsisPlot
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate, and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death.
Story
About this book
The Death of Artemio Cruz opens with its central character lying on his deathbed. Artemio Cruz is a newspaper owner and landowner whose power stretches across modern Mexico. As his body fails, his mind drifts through fragments of his past, assembling and reassembling the events that shaped him. Carlos Fuentes structures the novel around these shifting recollections, moving between different periods of Cruz's life without following a single chronological line.
Cruz's memories reach back to the Mexican Revolution, where he fought as a young man, and trace his eventual rise from poverty into wealth and influence. The novel examines how revolutionary ideals can erode over time, replaced by personal ambition and corruption. Fuentes tells this story using three distinct narrative voices, each tied to a different pronoun and tense: first person in the present, second person in the future, and third person in the past. This technique fractures Cruz's identity across time, letting different versions of himself comment on or contradict one another.
The book is set against decades of Mexican political and social change, from the armed conflicts of the 1910s through the mid-twentieth century. Fuentes uses Cruz's individual story to explore how power concentrates and what it costs.
