Book Review & Analysis: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

      We commemorate death and dying. But death is not what matters. What does matter is the life we live from birth until our exit from the world. Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz is all about the life of a Mexican business man, revolutionary soldier, and failed lover.

This story begins with Artemio Cruz lying on his death bed, surrounded by doctors, a priest, a business partner, and his family, all of which have some degree of respect for him, but no particular feelings of love. Through flashbacks, memories, reminiscences, and recorded conversations being played back on tape, the story of Mexico’s most powerful businessman is told. If it sounds a lot like Citizen Kane, that’s because the film by Orson Welles was a huge inspiration on Fuentes in his writing of this story. This isn’t just a retelling of that classic film as it goes off into so many different directions, some of which are more personal. One difference is that an early passage in the book goes into extensive detail about Cruz’s body, described both internally and externally along with all the physical pains and discomforts he suffers as he dies. At first you may wonder why Fuentes went through the trouble of describing a body in all its details, especially when physiology is such common knowledge. But the body is the center of everybody’s life; without it we wouldn’t exist so it serves as a starting point for the biography. One thing we gather is that Artemio Cruz has the same body that most people have. He doesn’t start out in life being any different from most other people in that way. At the base of this extraordinarily powerful man is an ordinary body. Fuentes starts playing on our sympathies from the start. Add to this the physical suffering of Cruz and we are forced to see his humanity before any other details are added.

The details that get added are not always favorable to Cruz. As the narrative alters between past and present, we understand how terrible he could be as a businessman. We get taken back to the end of the Mexican Revolution when Cruz marries Catalina in order to inherit her father’s estate, an hacienda and a treasure trove of material wealth. Due to the laws of primogeniture, the estate should rightfully have gone to Catalina’s brother who died in the Revolution. She blames Artemio Cruz for his death, but marries him anyways. Cruz had originally joined the Revolution because of the promised agrarian reform, but in the end he uses that reform to acquire wealth and property, betraying the ideals and the other soldiers who fought by his side. As a shrewd and ruthless businessman, his empire grows The more successful he grows, the more callous he becomes until he is unable to have feelings for anybody, possibly not even for himself.

Artemio Cruz’s thick skin serves him well as he fights in the Revolution. Several flashbacks from his deathbed tell the stories of gunfights, battlefields, imprisonment, and how he connived his way out of getting shot in a duel. His actions could almost be seen as heroic even though he leaves one soldier to die when he could have saved his life. That incident is the big turning point in his biography. He abandons that wounded soldier to return to a village he had spent the night in before. He had fallen in love with a young lady named Regina and spent the night with her. Upon his return he finds that she has been hung from a tree, along with other villagers, by troops of Federales. Distraught by her murder, Cruz carries memories of her throughout the rest of his life.

If there is anything we can have sympathy for in Artemio Cruz, it is his inability to fulfill his desire for love. His wife Catalina does’nt love him and only stays in the marriage to hold on to her wealth which she I inherited through him. His daughter does not love him either and her sole concern is inheriting his money when he dies. One humorous scene has Cruz sick in his bed. His wife and daughter ask him where he keeps his will and he amuses himself at their expense by lying about where it is kept while watching them frantically dig through his possessions in search of it and then crying when they can’t find it. Catalina isn’t without love though since she does love her daughter and she loved her son whose death she blames on Artemio Cruz. Otherwise, Cruz spends his life pursuing misstresses who don’t reciprocate his love or who hold on to him for a short time because they want his money. He was luckless with love and this failure casts a melancholy tone over the whole story.

This all comes back to Regina. Cruz revisits her name throughout his life story in the way the word “rosebud” keeps reappearing in Citizen Kane. For him , she is the only woman who ever said she loved him like she meant it. She died the day after they met. After all his romantic failures, he ends his life with nothing more than a memory of one night. It is hard to tell if Regina even loved him. His memory could be inaccurate or he could be deceiving himself. She could have just been a prostitute that he hired for one night. We can never be sure how she truly felt. But he clings on to the memory of his love as if that one victory were the only one that ever mattered in his life, a memory that would crush him if he ceased believing in it.

The only other source of love in Cruz’s life is his son Lorenzo. When they travel together back to the derelict hacienda on the beach in Veracruz where Artemio Cruz grew up, they bond as father and son. And yet, the young Lorenzo tells his father that he has chosen to go abroad to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. (This might be a nod in the direction of Hemingway) It is there where Lorenzo dies. Catalina blames Cruz for the tragedy, but through a clever narrative device, we have to infer why from a later passage in the story.

At a ball thrown by Artemio Cruz for the upper classes where he lives, we learn how he has no friends. The attendees are nothing but entertainment for him. They are puppets and he pulls their strings. That is all he wants from other people. He wants to make them dance since his sole amusement in life is control over others. A young man approaches him and asks for a loan to start a business. Cruz lectures him on his philosophy of life. Power is the result of rebellion. Power has to be earned. During this explication, there are flashbacks to Cruz and Lorenzo riding horses in the jungle of Veracruz. If you put this conversation together with the cause of Lorenzo’s demise, you can deduce why Catalina blames her husband for their son’s death. The same narrative device is used to narrate the death of Regina. Cruz returns to the village and learns about the hanging of the villagers. He sees a body hung from a tree. One of them has the feet of Regina and he sees the hem of her dress. It is never explicitly stated that she died, but your mind is directed to a blank space in the narrative that is inevitably filled in. It is all the more horrifying because the brutality is shown indirectly, leaving your mind to see it subjectively. This technique is used in film. Notice that in the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you never actually see the knife stabbing into the woman.

The closer we get to Artemio Cruz’s death, the farther back in time the flashbacks go. The story of his childhood is the last thing we learn about him before his demise. Although surrounded by the lush jungles of Veracruz and the paradise of the nearby beach, it is a childhood of poverty where he was raised by a mulatto on an hacienda that was burned down during an uprising. His unenviable childhood at the bottom of society comes full circle as Artemio Cruz dies as one of the richest and most powerful men in Mexico. As the birth and death of this man are tied together at the end of the narrative, Carlos Fuentes writes some lyrical passages portraying all the natural landscapes and the varieties of people inhabiting the land of Mexico. He thereby makes Artemio Cruz a cipher for the nation of Mexico and its entire history up to the modern era.

It is impossible to talk about this novel without mentioning its literary technique. Such a technique can be said to be nothing short of cinematic. In fact a lot of film techniques are used in the narrative construction. A craeful analysis reveals not only the use of flashbacks for narrative layering, but also camera techniques like overlays, close ups, panning, montage, and rapid cuts. The action sequences have the visual impact of western movies too. This is not accidental as Fuentes consciously used film techniques to write. It isn’t just visually cinematic though. Fuentes adds in the subjective dimensions of literature that are inaccessible through the medium of film. The sensation of feeling internal physical pain or the sadness one feels when haunted by the memories of failed love affairs can only be delivered through dialogue in cinema, but literature as a subjective form can use language to deliver these sensations in a direct way that other mediums can not. This is done successfully in this novel.

But as entrancing as this whole book may be, it does have its flaws. In a postmodern sense, the narrative has the feel of a collage incorporating different author’s styles in different passages. While Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway were previously mentioned, there are other passages that mimic the styles of Faulkner, Joyce, Sartre, Neruda, and others. At times this mimicry feels too obvious and derivative. Another flaw is that in the attempt to make Cruz an all-encompassing symbol of Mexico in the same way that James Joyce made Leopold Bloom a symbol of Ireland, doesn’t quite work. Although Cruz experiences Mexico at all the levels of its social strata and embodies the contradiction at the heart of the Mexican Revolution in the way he betrays its ideals, he isn’t quite big enough as a symbol to contain all that Mexico has to offer. The pre- and post-Conquest eras of Mexico up to the Revolution barely figure into his story, for example, and it’s not convincing to say that Mexico is as unlovable as a country as Cruz is as a person. Mexico really is a country that has a lot to love in its culture, its history, its geography, and its everyday people. Despite these flaws, this is still an amazing novel and one of those books that you really must read before you die.

The Death of Artemio Cruz is a landmark, a turning point, and a cornerstone in the development of Latin American fiction. The writing style is tricky and off-putting at first, but the effort to understand it is worthwhile. Against your better judgments, you may find yourself sympathizing in part with Artemio Cruz as he suffers while dying. Just give in to those feelings, but don’t forget the terrible things he does as well. That’s what literature is for. The world is a messy and confusing place and experiencing that through the written word can only enhance our understanding of it if we take the time to think.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Attachments by Judith Rossner

Attachments

by Judith Rossner

      What kind of a woman would marry a conjoined twin? Nadine, the main character of Judith Rossner’s Attachments would and she’ll one up your expectations too by convincing her best friend Dianne to marry the other conjoined twin. The refrain of “it’s complicated” when asked about a person’s love life is taken to a whole other level here. The author’s intentions are complicated too, so much so that it is not entirely clear what she strives to accomplish in writing this story.

Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.

When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.

By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.

Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.

The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.

One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.

Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.

Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.

Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.

Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.

Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.