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A review by shanviolinlove
The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
4.0
Now she sits alone and remembers.
This refrain throughout Fuentes' The Old Gringo softly reminds the reader again and again of the witness, Harriet Winslow, whom the community will always respect, because she will be the one to carry the memories of everything that occurred during the revolution. The old gringo, who came to Mexico to die; the young general, who himself saw life and death as the same entity and each necessary of the other. And Harriet, reconciling the two while navigating her Mexican life with her U.S. influence (literally hailing from D.C.) and ambitions of English lessons and democracy for a town that has no place for either. The theme of the novel is the new violence that must replace the old, and battles, accounts of rapes and murders, executions and coups de grace, flood the pages.
Taken literally, these three characters are hard to assess. Harriet Winslow is moved like a chess piece between the two men, sometimes literally positioned by one or the other. Her relationship with the old man is especially confounding, as he is constantly negotiating his feelings for her "as a wife or as a daughter," sometimes aroused by and sometimes protective of her. Same with Tomas Arroyo, with whom she shares mutual contempt and mutual lust. Taken allegorically, these three embody the ideologies that their background communities have created. The old man serves as a patriarchal figure who could potentially bridge the Mexicans oppressed by the hacienda owners with the white foreigners who will never truly belong otherwise to the community. Yet the theme persists: the new violence comes to replace the old. There is no removing it in its entirety, as the constant flashback narratives remind us--someone must be held accountable for the suffering, the oppression, the abuse. Indeed, the framework of the narration suggests this allegorical reading at times, as past and present tense shift, perspectives shift (dialogues from the past literally supersede the dialogues of the present), the quotation marks denoting character speeches are sometimes absent--suggesting an ideology rather than an actual spoken word. This is a novel of ideas and politics, both entrenched in history and focused on the future.
This refrain throughout Fuentes' The Old Gringo softly reminds the reader again and again of the witness, Harriet Winslow, whom the community will always respect, because she will be the one to carry the memories of everything that occurred during the revolution. The old gringo, who came to Mexico to die; the young general, who himself saw life and death as the same entity and each necessary of the other. And Harriet, reconciling the two while navigating her Mexican life with her U.S. influence (literally hailing from D.C.) and ambitions of English lessons and democracy for a town that has no place for either. The theme of the novel is the new violence that must replace the old, and battles, accounts of rapes and murders, executions and coups de grace, flood the pages.
Taken literally, these three characters are hard to assess. Harriet Winslow is moved like a chess piece between the two men, sometimes literally positioned by one or the other. Her relationship with the old man is especially confounding, as he is constantly negotiating his feelings for her "as a wife or as a daughter," sometimes aroused by and sometimes protective of her. Same with Tomas Arroyo, with whom she shares mutual contempt and mutual lust. Taken allegorically, these three embody the ideologies that their background communities have created. The old man serves as a patriarchal figure who could potentially bridge the Mexicans oppressed by the hacienda owners with the white foreigners who will never truly belong otherwise to the community. Yet the theme persists: the new violence comes to replace the old. There is no removing it in its entirety, as the constant flashback narratives remind us--someone must be held accountable for the suffering, the oppression, the abuse. Indeed, the framework of the narration suggests this allegorical reading at times, as past and present tense shift, perspectives shift (dialogues from the past literally supersede the dialogues of the present), the quotation marks denoting character speeches are sometimes absent--suggesting an ideology rather than an actual spoken word. This is a novel of ideas and politics, both entrenched in history and focused on the future.