Customer Reviews

The Years with Laura Diaz

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In 1999, he came to Detroit to begin filming a TV special on the famous twentieth century Mexican muralists. However, looking at one of the works, he finds himself captivated by a woman in one of the murals who seems eerily familiar before he realizes that she is his famous great grandmother, Laura Diaz.

He begins to think about the life and loves of Laura. Born in 1898, her lovers include Communists and other activists before she marries and has children. She watches as male members of her extended family die during the constant years of turbulence shaking her country. She becomes friends with some of the artistic elite and ultimately becomes one of them as a renowned photographer. As Mexico lives and dies with each new tremor, so has Laura Diaz.

Renowned author Carlos Fuentes has written his best work to date with the incredible THE YEARS WITH LAURA DIAZ. The story line centers on the life of the title character, but actually serves as a backdrop to the bigger mural of twentieth century Mexico. This entertaining, dark, but powerful novel provides an enlightening look at the nation and its people rarely seen in a novel. Senior Fuentes deserves awards for this classic biographical historical fiction.

Harriet Klausner

Carlos Fuentes' most accessible novel in many years uses one woman's life to encompass a massive chunk of 20th century Mexican history. Fuentes manages to place Laura Diaz at almost every important cultural and political event between 1905 and the 1970's-from pre-revolutionary hacienda life, through the building of Mexico's union movement, to the Spanish Civil War, and the massacre of students at Tlatelolco on the eve of the 1968 Olympics. This might seem like a stretch. Come on, how likely is it that any one person would manage to fit all that in as well as love affairs, a teeming family, and a friendship with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera?

Not likely at all, but Fuentes' has created a rich and readable novel, filled with many characters who exist mainly to express a political point of view but who are complex and interesting people nonetheless. The first part of "The Years with Laura Diaz" works especially well, recording Laura's early years as the granddaughter of German immigrants living in the coastal state of Veracruz and the kind of life enjoyed by the families of landowners. Her marriage to a union organizer who takes her to post-revolutionary Mexico City puts her in the heart of a society recreating itself. No one writes about the Mexican capital like Carlos Fuentes, and Mexico City in the 1920's through the 70's springs to life in all its glories and maddening confusions.

There is a lot of politics, which unfortunately causes "Laura Diaz" to bog down as her cipher of a husband stirs an alphabet soup of labor unions and political parties. It's interesting if you know Mexican history, but I can imagine it's pretty incomprehensible if you don't. (The fascinating thing is that during this period following the Mexican Revolution, labor was delivered to a political party and not the communists, thus putting an end to the possibility of government/labor conflict for once and for all, or at least until that party was voted out of office seventy years after it was first voted in.) But once you get past that, you'll be glad you stayed with the novel to its mysterious and elegant end.

This is a novel of great depth, written by a man who has lived his life observing, thinking, asking questions, considering and writing. His great talent lies in speaking for many: for fathers, mothers, sons, lovers, passionate revolutionaries and for each of us.

The Years With Laura Diaz, is as great a mural and testament, and as real and colorful as the Diego Rivera mural that graces its cover. Just as the great mural tells the history and stories of a people, so this magnificently written work shows us the colors and contrasts that richly color our world. Do check out our Guest Reviewer Deborah D/M's full review.

Like Carlos Fuentes' masterpiece, "The Death of Artemio Cruz," "The Years With Laura Diaz" traces a migration from the state of Vera Cruz to Mexico City, during and after the Mexican Revolution. Here, however, the protagonist is not at all similar to the jaded revolutionary, Artemio Cruz, (who makes a cameo appearance in the novel). She is Laura Cruz, an artist and photographer, a woman of integrity, as well as a wife, mother and lover. Strong and vibrant, she manages to circumvent the Latin machismo which surrounds her and become a person in her own right, able to produce her own creative work, and to love with great abandon. In this sweeping historical saga, which spans a one hundred year period, Laura Cruz meets and mingles with all sorts of 20th century luminaries, like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, along with numerous political figures. Logically, history is portrayed through the eyes, experiences and ideology of Carlos Fuentes. He incorporates his views on the Mexican Revolution, socialism, Mexico's various workers' and labor movements, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism and other important events which took place during the last century.

Santiago Lopez-Alfaro, a young Mexican filmmaker, is in Detroit to make a documentary about Mexican muralists and their work in the US. He also wants to capture the decay of a great city, "the first capital of the automobile, no less, the place where Henry Ford inaugurated mass production of the machine that governs our lives more than any government." He goes on to narrate, "I wanted to photograph the ruin of a great industrial center as a worthy epitaph for our terrible twentieth century." While Santiago is absorbed, studying the Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he recognizes a familiar face - that of his own, spirited great great-grandmother, Laura Diaz. He proceeds to investigate, chronicle and relive her story, through various personal tragedies, her development into a great artist, and several marriages and love affairs. Against this fictional backdrop, Fuentes juxtaposes important historical events. And Laura Diaz seems to always be at the center of everything. She's everywhere - a veritable witness to history, reminiscent of Woody Allen's Zelig. And 'History' is as much a protagonist in this novel as Sra. Diaz. Fuentes' narrative, as usual, is driven by the ideas his characters represent. He sacrifices their natural development, frequently, to make his political and historical points. Indeed, the documentation of political upheavals, the rise and fall of various Mexican governments, and the lack of social and economic reforms are a constant here. The focus on the political and philosophical interests of the characters, with long sections of debate, makes for some dry reading at times, and certainly hampers the narrative's flow.

Laura Diaz was born in 1898 and comes of age during her country's revolution, in which her beloved brother, Santiago, was killed. She marries a prominent union leader, but when she becomes restless after nine years and two sons, her husband advises her to focus on the home and children, rather than help him with the Worker's movement. She finds temporary solace in an affair, becomes part of a bohemian circle and, after a year, finds an interesting job with Diego Rivera, an acquaintance. She decides the only way to save herself from the passive, boring life of forced idleness is through work. Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Laura travel to Detroit, where the great master is to create a mural. The continuing epic of Laura's life, loves, adventures is fascinating. There are colorful stories within stories, but Laura is essentially pulled along by the force of history.

I was disappiointed with "The Years With Laura Diaz." Carlos Fuentes is a favorite author, and I have read his work in Spanish. I was expecting another masterpiece and this does not measure up to his usual standard. It is not an easy book to read. The information included is interesting, but there's an overabundance of it, to the detriment of the characters' development. Our heroine, appears to be little more than an observer, a front for Fuente's portrait of a century. The book is also very long. Although I usually enjoy long novels, especially when the prose flows, I felt like I was actually on a century-long journey myself, and couldn't wait for the conclusion - always a bad sign. For all it's epic quality,"The Years With Laura Diaz" left me with an empty feeling. Something crucial was missing. Perhaps I missed relating to three-dimensional characters.

Carlos Fuentes, probably Mexico's greatest living writer, is the author of more than twenty books and has received many awards for his accomplishments as a novelist, essayist, and commentator, among them the Cervantes Prize in 1987.

JANA

Carlos Fuentes true epic surrendered me to tears...Laura Diaz whether a fictional character of Frida Kahlo's assistant, brought me an Argentine born individual to great emotional depts...It is a lyrical novel, which tells truths beyond truths...Carlos Fuentes writes and depicts all of his characters with great intellect, knowledge of the times, and incredible perspective...Was totally aghast at the comment by one of our reviewers that stated that this book was not historically correct and that Carlos Fuentes is a shameful communist...Au contraire, readers, Carlos Fuentes is a poet and a latin, and therefore tells the truths about our countries and the US with a very objective eye...Since the Where the Air is Clear by him as well, no other book has touched my inner being and left me completely breathless...It is a book that is both timeless and reflective, emotional and philosophical...and most of all one of the most satisfying performances by Carlos Fuentes...Viva Carlos Fuentes, un autor con tanta sabiduria!!!

I would suggest that readers re-read his beautiful prose more than once and refer to this book throughout their lifetime, it is filled with the passion, pulse of individuals who are citizens of the world...

Thank you, thank you...Carlos, for a great magnificent book...

Carlos Fuentes is an amazing writer. He writes in a beautiful, poetic style. As a narrator, he notices even the minute details and brings them to life with his writing. The problem for me is that with all this attention to detail and poetry, the story seems to get lost. I would have liked the plot to move more quickly. Mr. Fuentes does not seem to be in any hurry to tell the story or stay on track with the plot. A scene my divert into a long, lovely description of nothing much, and the reader and characters are left waiting for Mr. Fuentes to return to the narration of the plot. It is, as I stated, beautifully written, it is just not a style for which I care.

Carlos Fuentes takes us on a sweeping journey of the 20th century as he reveals the history, culture, and political life of Mexico and the world. Fuentes draws on his own family history to weave a tale of love and tragedy and of extraordinary people whose lives and work influenced their times. Laura Diaz, the heroine both normal and unusual in her roles as wife and mother--lover and artist, waltzes through the years with grace and vitality. Her honesty and common sense approach to life make her an example for the many lives that she touches. She married a dashing young man in the labor movement andwas thrown into the political mainstream that coursed through Mexico City in the early part of the century. She also was the lover of more than one dashing and famous man as she joined the high life of Spanish-European society that existed in Mexico City. Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo became friends of hers, and she traveled with them to the United States as Diego painted his famous--and infamous--series of murals celebrating the workers. As a friend of Frieda's, Laura was able to tell the tragic story of the famous painter and her struggle with health and tragedy. The figure of Santiago, first the murdered brother of Laura and later her son and grandson, symbolizes the heroic persona who fights for what is right only to be cut down before his prime. Laura holds her love of these three in her heart, and eventually it sustains her through her life and into her new career. That in later life she became a famous photographer of the poor and downtrodden is indicative of the love she has for the three Santiagos, and for her husband and lovers, all of whom where involved in the people's movement. This novel encompasses all that is important in life, and it celebrates the courage and vitality of those who are willing to spend their lives for other's causes. The tracing of Mexico's history from revolution, corrupt politics and visionary idealism, interwoven with Laura's life, is fascinating, and leaves the reader with a better understanding not only of Mexico bul also of the human spirit.

This is a book I wish I had written; it is of a life, I feel I have lived. Senor Fuentes brilliantly composes a story that encompasses all that is grand and horrific about the evolution of a country, of a people, and of one life that reflected the emergence of the Mexico we know today. If you know anything about Mexico in all its riches and contrasting hues, this book confirms why we love it so. If you know nothing about Mexico, read it for the sheer poetry of one woman's life. Bravo Carlos! I can't wait to read whatever books you have written that I haven't read yet!!!

the key moment in the Fall of Communism came when Soviet dissident intellectuals took advantage of Perestroika to demonstrate that Lenin was a totalitarian butcher. The sustaining myth of the Soviet Union and fellow travelers in the West had been that Stalin took a noble and righteous revolution and perverted it to his own ends, that Marxism would have worked, but for this artificial intervention by one monstrous man. The truth was quite different, that the Revolution was corrupt from it's inception, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks stole the Revolution from more popular and democratic Left parties, and that Lenin and the Soviets ruled through terror from the start. Once this final prop was kicked out from under the Soviet Union, it quickly collapsed.

Comes now Carlos Fuentes, the Marxist novelist of Mexico, to argue that the Mexican Revolution was likewise pristine and honorable until it was corrupted by faithless leaders and corrupt one-party rule. In fact, this long (excruciatingly so) epic novel seeks to go back and revisit many such arguments from the 20th Century. It is quite audacious--he is after all trying to say, at the end of a Century that was decisively won by the forces of liberal democratic capitalism,, that the Socialist/Marxist Left was generally right about most issues--but it is neither convincing as history nor compelling reading.

The story is ostensibly about the life of a famous photographer, Laura Diaz, as retold by her grandson who, at the start of the novel, recognizes her as one of the figures in a Diego Rivera mural. Fuentes charts her life through several marriages, numerous love affairs, various personal tragedies, and her late development into a respected artist. But all of this is juxtaposed against the events of the Century. In what quickly becomes a noticeable annoying contrivance, the main events of her life just happen to occur at the precise moments in history which the author wishes to comment upon--her life is really secondary to the march of world events. The problem with this is that, since the author obviously is less interested in her than in what's going on around her, it is hard for him to get us to care about her. Why should we care more than he does ?

If you'll indulge me for a moment, I think I've discerned a pivotal structural flaw in the novel, though I admit I've not thought it out fully. It seems to me that most multi-generational historical epics like this don't merely pin themselves to one character and a batch of events, instead they are generally driven by a discrete set of events with a known conclusion (Winds of War comes to mind) or the central character/characters are trying to build or defend some family enterprise (Scarlett O'Hara had Tara, and in Tai-Pan, Dirk Struan had the Noble House). In the absence of such coherence imposing structures, the main character has to be incredibly interesting in order to keep our attention for hundreds and hundreds of pages and nearly a hundred years. Laura Diaz is simply not such a character.

Now that is a significant weakness, but it's not fatal. Other authors have written great epic novels without one overwhelmingly interesting character : consider War and Peace. But if you don't have such a character for us to identify with and root for (or against), you had better have a sure hand on the tiller of events. It's here that Fuentes fails miserably. To take just one example, a major portion of the story features the community of Hollywood refuges from McCarthyism living in Mexico in the 1950's. Fuentes argues correctly that McCarthy was a demagogue run amok, smearing people for his own political reasons, rather than on the basis of evidence or out of any moral sense of right and wrong. But he then proceeds to excuse American Communists and to himself smear anti-Communism generally.

At various points--in complete opposition to conclusive evidence that has come to light since the end of the Cold War--he maintains that the Rosenbergs were innocent, that Communist writers, directors and actors were not following orders from the central Party, that there was no basis for the anti-Communist movement, etc. At one point he says that :

The day will come when all the accused will be rehabilitated and celebrated as cultural heroes, and the accusers will be the accused and degraded just as they deserve.

In fact, at the end of the Cold War, who are the honored heroes ? Elia Kazan received a special Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Whittaker Chambers received a posthumous Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan and was the subject of a major reassessment by Sam Tannenhaus. Even his journalism and reputation as a writer has been revived and rehabilitated; by any measure, his memoir, Witness, must be considered one of the major texts of the century.

And what of the unrepentant Party members who refused to testify ? Alger Hiss, like the Rosenbergs, lies, unmourned, in a traitor's grave. Despite the continuing bouquets from the modern Left, the once towering reputations of Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman are in tatters. The repellent pair having been exposed as doctrinaire Stalinsts, unswayed even by genocide. Take a look at books like Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (1998)(Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley), Not Without Honor : The History of American Anticommunism by Richard Gid Powers, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein, The Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America- -The Stalin Era by Allen Weinstein, The Soviet World of American Communism (Annals of Communism) by John Haynes , Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes, and try to make an honest argument that the victims of McCarthyism were innocents. No, the tragedy of Joe McCarthy is not that the witch hunt was unwarranted, but that he was too irresponsible to lead it--not that lives were ruined, but that some of the wrong lives may have been ruined. There was in fact a Communist conspiracy to subvert American democracy; it was financed and directed from Moscow; and those who refused to testify before Congressional committees were aiding and abetting a foreign power.

Perhaps more disturbing, and indicative of how oblivious Mr. Fuentes is to the true historical record is the absurd distinction that he repeatedly makes between Hitler and Stalin. He continues to maintain what one would have hoped would by now be an indefensible canard, that though both used evil means, Stalin at least had good intentions because communism was intended to help the workers, but that Hitler represented genuine evil because his ends were evil.

Nazis and Communists are not the same thing. The difference is that Hitler believes in evil, evil is his gospel--conquest, genocide, racism. But Stalin must say he believes in the good, in the freedom of labor, in the disappearance of the state, and in giving to each according to his needs. He recites the gospel of the civil good.

First of all, this ignores the inconvenient fact that Hitler was just as serious about Socialism as he was about racism. Second, it ignores the by now nearly incontrovertible argument that mass movements like Nazism and Communism have far more in common than they do that divides them. The work of authors like Eric Hoffer, F. A. Hayek, Paul Johnson, Allan Bullock, Robert Conquest, and a host of others should really have settled this issue. These movements are, by and large, driven by intellectuals who think that they know better than the masses how to run a country, adopt a nearly religious belief structure to justify their actions, and then unleash the destructive forces of followers who don't particularly care what the new system may bring, but know that they are losers in the current system. It is inevitable that such revolutions end in violence and repression, as every single one we've ever witnessed has in fact done. Finally, it assumes that ideal Communism is necessarily a good. The idea that a system based on oppressing one man to benefit another is de facto a good thing, is hardly a given, and, I would argue, is actually evil itself (see Orrin's review of The Communist Manifesto.)

Which brings us to the Mexican Revolution, whose initial urges Fuentes works so hard to vindicate. In particular, he seems awestruck by the emphasis on worker rights, the six day work week, and the eight hour work day. I don't know enough about Mexican history to know whether this was truly the great focus of the Revolution (Fuentes tends to make the unfortunate assumption that we are as obsessed with Mexico and conversant with it's history as he is with us and ours), but let's accept Fuentes's insistence that this is what made it worthwhile. Elevation of these basic tenets to nearly sacred status requires one of two things : either they must be invested with some kind of absolute semi-talismanic level, must take on the quality of nearly religious commandments; or they are subject to being trumped repeatedly. If the six day