Carlos Fuentes's Mexican Novels Reading Order

Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962) is the central novel of the Mexican literary boom — a dying press magnate recalls his life through three alternating narrative voices (I, you, he), moving between the final hours of his death in 1959 and the key moments of his life spanning the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War, and the decades of PRI rule afterward. Fuentes, a diplomat's son who grew up between Mexico City and Washington, wrote the novel partly in Havana in the months of his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, and it is marked by the urgency of someone taking stock of revolution's betrayals. The novel is formally experimental — the three-voice structure borrowed from Faulkner and Dos Passos — and politically engaged in a way that makes it essential to understanding twentieth-century Mexican culture. The Death of Artemio Cruz stands alone; Fuentes's other major novels — Where the Air Is Clear (1958), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) — are independent works rather than continuations.