The Old Gringo: A Novel Summary and Reviews

The Old Gringo: A Novel
by Carlos Fuentes

The Old Gringo: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Carlos Fuentes
Translator: Margaret Sayers Peden
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-20
ISBN: 0374530521
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of The Old Gringo: A Novel

Book Review: There had to be a new violence to end the old one
Summary: 3 Stars

Carlos Fuentes's book is an ambitious project: the disappearance of the great American writer Ambrose Bierce and his fictional confrontation with Pancho Villa and his army in Mexico.

Both face defeat.
Ambrose Bierce `believed he could shape the destinies of others through a journalism of accusation and satire', `while my lord and master of the press cannibalized my anger for the greater glory of his political interests and his massive circulation and his massive bank accounts.'
Mexico and its people `conquered by a destiny of defeat: slaves and rustlers, never free men, except by being rebels.' Why this rebellion? `Because we are tired of a world ruled by the caciques, the Church, and the strutting aristocrats.'

Carlos Fuentes is a brilliant writer: `The mountains rose like worn, dark-skinned fists and the old man imagined the body of Mexico as a gigantic corpse with bones of silver, eyes of gold, flesh of stone and balls hard as copper.'
But, another author, J. M. Coetzee, tackled the same theme in his book `The Master of Petersburg', where another famous author F.M. Dostoyevsky is confronted with Russian anti-tsarist terrorism. While J. M. Coetzee wrestles with the problem of political violence head-on, Carlos Fuentes slides into another `Cambio de Piel" and explicit sex.

A big opportunity missed.

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