Word: artemio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like the best of Fuentes' earlier books, Where the Air Is Clear (1960) and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1964), this one shows the influence of just about everyone the ambitious Mexican ever admired. There are echoes of Dos Passes, D. H. Lawrence, Faulkner, Mailer, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges. This time Fuentes also works in some sarcasm about the Mexican ethos, particularly his country's lively relationship with death and all its trappings. Mythology and symbolism are planted in conspicuous places for those readers who relish those forms of mental exercise, and there is enough...
...DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ by Carlos Fuentes. 306 pages. Farrar, Straus...
...white horse that tourists can see in Rivera's mural in the National Palace. A novelist has more trouble than the makers of film epics. In this case, Fuentes has had to package the whole corpus of Mexican history into the dying body of a septuagenarian symbol named Artemio Cruz...
Fuentes is at his least effective when the blunt weapons of Marxist homiletic fall heaviest. This occurs in impressionistic italic inserts in Artemio Cruz's dying reveries, and is a curious exercise in reportage in the manner of the early Dos Passes-a novelist still admired in Mexico, where the cult of proletarianism, dead elsewhere, lives...
...Insiders' work ranges from the violent canvases of Leonel Gongora, 30, to the near fantasies of Emilio Ortiz, 28, to the fleshy, bulbous creatures of Artemio Sepulveda, 27, to Francisco Corzas' fascination with hallucinations as "universal themes." Throughout the work, the palette is muted; Francisco Icaza, 32, argues that "reducing color makes form clearer." The results are uneven, occasionally repellent; but there is always a stark force about the Insiders that reaches out to the heart as well as the eye. Jose Mufioz, who at 34 is senior member of the group, explains his own anguished figures with...