Fuentes's latest novel (after The Orange Tree), which seems to be semi-autobiographical, grapples with a double nostalgia?for a love affair and for the bygone era of the 1960s. On New Year's Eve 1970, the narrator, an acclaimed Mexican novelist recently turned 40 (like Fuentes at the time), meets American actress Diana Soren, a character who draws from two mythic archetypes. One is the muse-like moon goddess alternately known as Cybele, Astarte or Diana; the second is the late Jean Seberg, whose stand-in here comes complete with a small-town Iowa upbringing, a burst into fame after being discovered by a dictatorial director to play Joan of Arc and a hounding by the American media for her radical affiliations, which ends in her suicide. Despite his passion for Diana, the narrator learns that she is a "goddess who hunts alone," as their difficult affair undermines his confidence in his abilities as a Don Juan, his standing as a Mexican leftist and his prowess as an imaginative author. Real-life figures such as William Styron and Luis Bu?uel make memorable appearances, and the author's ironic, kindly take on his younger alter ego is affecting. Diana, however, lacks real mystique and individualism, and, ultimately, sparks fly not between the author's lovers but only between the lines of his glittery prose.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Fuentes's latest novel, a meditation on the question "Can we love on earth and someday deserve heaven?" doubles as a tell-all about a love affair with actress Jean Seberg. Notables such as Eduardo Terrazas and William Styron appear as characters under their own names. Seberg is disguised as Diana Soren, and her husband, French author Romain Gary, is Ivan Gravet. The story begins at a 1970 New Year's party, and much is made of the political turmoil of the moment, both in the United States and in Mexico. Carlos, a prominent Mexican novelist, meets Diana Soren, and they begin an affair that will take them to dusty Santiago, the location of Diana's latest film, and end as it began?with betrayal. The narrative is marked by digressions into Sixties revolutionary politics, the meaning of literary creation, and the Puritan origins of the United States. But these never distract from the central themes of the novel?the hunger with which Diana and Carlos consume each other, the tragic link between the eternity of desire and the finitude of love; the wish to create and the inexorable will to destroy. Seberg was scandalized when the FBI alleged in 1970 that she had been impregnated by a member of the Black Panther Party. She committed suicide in 1979; her husband in 1980. In an interesting revisionist turn, the novel claims (as far as Diana Soren is concerned) that the father was a Mexican dissident she met while in Santiago and, in its closing passage, cites an FBI statement admitting the slander. A strange blend of fact and fiction that puts Joe McGuiness to shame; highly recommended for collections of serious fiction.
-?Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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