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A review by kimberly68
The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
3.0
There is a saying about writers with a particularly "male" style. People will say of a Hemingway, for example, "He writes with his dick." Usually this means that there is a great focus on male beauty, male bravery, the gaining of a new female sex partner as a transformative act for the story line, indeed often the only thing the dear lady can do, other than serve as her man's mirror for preening, is open up those legs and introduce the only plot twist that counts. Women often write off books like this, in much the same way my husband brushes off "chick lit", not as he says all fiction by women, but those that rely over heavily on woman standing as sisters together to sob in each other's tea cupsm and defeat a cartoonishly evil male character. While such books can be formulaic, in the hands of a skilled writer new life is often breathed into the tired trope. Such is the case with this book, one of Carlos Fuentes early works.
Mr. Fuentes is certainly Hemingwayesque, but he has something more to say and some interesting twists. He starts with the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce into Mexico, and imagines it as Bierce using Mexico for a kind of Assisted Suicide. Bierce approaches a fictional general in Pancho Villa's army and says he has come to die with them or through. In a chapter they liberate the peons from the General's Childhood Home, meeting a beautiful American school teacher. She is clearly marked down as the "transformative screw" of the genre, interestingly though, she has her own story...and it is not one like the always suffering Maria in Hemingway. This lady has her own secrets including a not quite dead, dead father, a desire to be the one in charge and a frankly carnal appetite for conquest. Mr. Fuentes has also infused the book with ideas and plot elements that raise not only Spanish colonialism in Mexico, but America's Colonialism in Mexico and Cuba. The Civil War is referenced often, it haunts the "little war" here, that is only little from El Norte. I wish the themes weren't introduced so laboriously and lugubriously at times, but there is much good writing in the book as well. I like what he says about the US Mexico border..."It's not a border, it's a scar." At the end when the female character is coming back over the border to the US and is asked by Reporters about testifying to Congress so they can teach Mexico democracy and Justice, she is given the best and most succinct statement on the relationship between the two countries "I don't want us to teach Mexico anything, I want us to learn to live with Mexico." I understand Mr. Fuentes, who died in 2012, wrote a book about Vlad the Impaler not too long before he died. I am interested to see what he did with the character.
Mr. Fuentes is certainly Hemingwayesque, but he has something more to say and some interesting twists. He starts with the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce into Mexico, and imagines it as Bierce using Mexico for a kind of Assisted Suicide. Bierce approaches a fictional general in Pancho Villa's army and says he has come to die with them or through. In a chapter they liberate the peons from the General's Childhood Home, meeting a beautiful American school teacher. She is clearly marked down as the "transformative screw" of the genre, interestingly though, she has her own story...and it is not one like the always suffering Maria in Hemingway. This lady has her own secrets including a not quite dead, dead father, a desire to be the one in charge and a frankly carnal appetite for conquest. Mr. Fuentes has also infused the book with ideas and plot elements that raise not only Spanish colonialism in Mexico, but America's Colonialism in Mexico and Cuba. The Civil War is referenced often, it haunts the "little war" here, that is only little from El Norte. I wish the themes weren't introduced so laboriously and lugubriously at times, but there is much good writing in the book as well. I like what he says about the US Mexico border..."It's not a border, it's a scar." At the end when the female character is coming back over the border to the US and is asked by Reporters about testifying to Congress so they can teach Mexico democracy and Justice, she is given the best and most succinct statement on the relationship between the two countries "I don't want us to teach Mexico anything, I want us to learn to live with Mexico." I understand Mr. Fuentes, who died in 2012, wrote a book about Vlad the Impaler not too long before he died. I am interested to see what he did with the character.