THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ – Romance by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes was born in a November day, in 1928. Mexican novelist (short-story writer, playwright, critic, and diplomat), he traveled with his family in North and South America and in Europe. As a young man, he studied law at the University of Mexico in Mexico City and later attended the Institute of Advanced International Studies in Geneva. Rebelling against his family’s middle-class values early in the 1950s, Fuentes became a communist, but he left the party in 1962 on intellectual grounds while remaining an avowed Marxist. Fuentes spent most of his time writing but continued to travel widely as he had in his youth. His novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, presents the agony of the last hours of a wealthy survivor of the Mexican Revolution, was translated into several languages and established Fuentes as a major international novelist.

Artemio Cruz a wealthy and successful business man who falls ill and is dying. Catalina Cruz doesn’t love her husband and really has no reason to since he betrayed her brother, allowing him to be shot by a firing squad. Gonzalo Bernal it is the heroic, idealistic older brother who is shot by a firing squad. But there are also Lunero (the mulatto” who is Cruz’s uncle) and Lorenzo Cruz (Cruz’s only son), Regina (Artemio Cruz’s first love, who loved him when he had no money) and Teresa (Catalina and Artemio Cruz’s only daughter and only surviving child), Padilla and Gloria, Don Bernal and Gerardo. In this novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the main protagonist uses his memory to fight against death; Fuentes uses his novel to fight for the memory of the original ideals of the Mexican Revolution, subsequently forgotten and betrayed.

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artemio-Cruz-Novel-Classics/dp/0374531803

https://www.amazon.com/muerte-Artemio-Cruz-Spanish/dp/9708120472