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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I loved this novel.,
This review is from: The Old Gringo: A Novel (Paperback)
I thoroughly enjoyed Fuentes' The Old Gringo. It constitutes everything a novel should be: love, death, war, sex, etc. It includes themes of brotherhood, colonialism, relations between the US and Mexico, freedom, love across national boundaries, and what it is to die. I found Fuentes' prose to be beautiful and diverse; an intersubjective consciousness flows through the characters, revealing as well that we are all only readers, and we will never know the real story. Beacuse of his style, Fuentes enriches the text, makes it stand out and vibrate with life. It's tactile. His characters are complex and story line great.For anyone interested in Latin-American works, I would highly recommend this one. It takes the revolution and gives it the colors we would never see as outsiders.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gringo Viejo- Carlos Fuentes,
This review is from: The Old Gringo: A Novel (Paperback)
An absolute gem of a book. Fuentes manages to transcribe the imagined fate of a renowned American writer in the vast and culturally distant Mexican desert into a tale of breathtaking astuteness and insight. By concentrating on the inner struggle faced by three characters all at vastly different stages of turmoil and decay in their respective soulful ventures. Fuentes manages to incorporate the wide ranging animosity and ignorance with which the Gringos and the Mexicans view each other. Acutely emotive without being overly indulgent he takes us to the dark recesses of the multi faceted characters dreams and memories. Far from being two dimensional pawns in his pocket as the unobservant Jim Carr believes, the three main characters inculcate and yet struggle to expand on the learned views they have been disposed to concerning at differing times their comrade, lover and enemy. There is no fanciful happy ending, nor is there unnecessary despondency. Instead Fuentes makes the reader question his or hers own view concerning death, travel and ones place in a world seemingly full of contradictions. An absolute must read for anyone striving to understand ones quest for glory and also what is is like to be bound by ones innate duty.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
diverting speculation,
By
This review is from: The Old Gringo: A Novel (Paperback)
Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia! -Ambrose Bierce in a letter to a friend In 1914, the great American journalist and short story writer Ambrose Bierce, age 71, traveled to a Mexico that was in the midst of Revolution and promptly disappeared. He thereby fulfilled the dark prediction above and provided one of the great literary mysteries of the 20th Century. In The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes offers his take on Bierce's fate. An "Old Gringo", carrying just a couple of his own books, a copy of Don Quixote, a clean shirt and a Colt .44, joins a group of Mexican rebels under General Tomas Arroyo. In turn, they meet up with a young American school teacher named Harriet Winslow, who was supposed to tutor the children of the wealthy landowner who illegally holds Arroyo's family property. The three become enmeshed in an unlikely romantic triangle, which necessarily ends in tragedy. Fuentes uses the story to explore a plethora of themes, some of which I followed and some of which I could not. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the degree to which it reflects Latin American obsession with the United States, an obsession which it must be admitted is met by only a fleeting interest on our part. Fuentes and the tragic chorus of Mexican characters elevate the tale of the Old Gringo to the status of myth; ironic, since Bierce is barely remembered here, but then one of his themes is that we are a people without memory, while the very soil of Mexico carries memories. It all adds up to a diverting speculation about an interesting historical puzzle, but I'm not sure that the story will bear all of the psychological and political weight that Fuentes loads upon it. GRADE: C+
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