Fascinating history made boring
I’m what you might call a Mexicophile. I’ve traveled extensively throughout the country, and I read a lot of books about Mexican history and art. So it was with great enthusiasm that I commenced the reading of Carlos Fuentes’s 1999 novel The Years with Laura Díaz. I’m very interested in the Mexican mural movement, and Diego Rivera and his murals play an important part in this story. I have also been to many of the locations in this novel, such as Veracruz, Xalapa, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and the Rivera murals in Detroit. While in the process of reading this book, I happened to spend a week in Mexico City walking many of the same streets and seeing many of the same sites mentioned in the book. So if anyone should be predisposed towards liking this novel, it should be me. Why then, did I find the reading of it to be such a terribly boring ordeal?
It seems the one aspect of Mexican culture that I am unable to appreciate is Carlos Fuentes. He has been widely hailed as the greatest Mexican novelist since Juan Rulfo and might have won a Nobel Prize if his countryman Octavio Paz hadn’t beaten him to it. Nevertheless, I’ve always found it difficult to get into his books. The Death of Artemio Cruz is the one work of his that I remember fondly, but I recall The Old Gringo being annoyingly tedious. The problem is that Fuentes tries really hard to be William Faulkner, and not in a good way. He writes in a style that emphasizes verbal creativity at the expense of storytelling. Every scene and emotion must be approached from an oblique angle; every sentiment expressed in sentences of intricate syntax. Rather than augmenting the emotional power of the story being told, all this verbal gymnastics tends to obfuscate the plot and dull any identification with the characters.
The Years with Laura Díaz is a historical novel chronicling the life and loves of a Mexican woman who lived from 1898 to 1972. As such, it contains a lot of Mexican history, but it’s very much in the background. The coming and going of presidential administrations are mentioned. Many historical figures make cameo appearances, but the reader doesn’t learn much about them beyond the dropping of their names. For a while, Laura Díaz works as a personal assistant to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but they never really register as actual human beings. Rather, they speak only in bon mots and metaphor, serving as mouthpieces for the author’s cleverness. The narrative makes meandering side trips into the Spanish Civil War and McCarthyism in Hollywood. For a historical novel, the history here feels very tangential, hidden behind a veil of gratuitous verbiage. When all is said and done, The Years with Laura Díaz is really just the story of one woman’s love life, and not a very interesting one at that. What really becomes tedious is the way Fuentes feels the need to constantly recap her entire genealogy and history of lovers on almost every page of the book.
Oddly enough, the most satisfying portion of the novel may be the two pages of Acknowledgments at the end of the book, in which the reader finds out that all of the characters are based on members of Fuentes’s family. This could have been a much better book if he had written it as nonfiction, which might have reined in some of the Faulknerian excesses. Fuentes is a very intelligent and talented writer whose personal stylistic choices just really rub this reader the wrong way. I haven’t read enough of his books to gauge whether he deserved a Nobel or not, but I do know that a Mexicophile like me should have enjoyed The Years with Laura Díaz a lot more than I did.
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A master of words AND pictures
Mexican writer Juan Rulfo was the author of Pedro Páramo--a book that many consider to be the best Latin American novel ever written--and The Burning Plain, an excellent collection of short stories. In addition to being a Nobel-caliber novelist, Rulfo was a world-class photographer. His pictures expertly capture the landscape, architecture, and indigenous culture of Mexico. Juan Rulfo’s Mexico was published in 2002 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. It is a translation of a Spanish-language edition published the same year by Lunwerg Editores in Barcelona. This 11.5 x 11.5" coffee table book contains 175 exceptional photographs by Rulfo, all of which are beautifully reproduced. I didn’t care much for the accompanying essays, however, which are heavy on the type of psychobabble and postmodern philosophy only an art historian could love.
Rulfo was not just a writer who happened to take a few pictures in his spare time. He may be one of the best photographers in the history of Mexico. His pictures bear some stylistic similarity to those of his country’s most renowned photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and may remind American audiences of the work of Edward Weston. These photographs, taken from about 1945 to 1955, capture rural Mexico at a turning point. Rulfo depicts indigenous cultures engaged in traditions, customs, and lifestyles that have been in existence for centuries, yet are gradually disappearing with the encroachment of modernity. His photographs are not merely sociological studies, however, but artistic portraits imbued with visual poetry and quiet dignity. His images straddle the line between romance and realism, on the one hand evoking the timeless mystery and myth of Mexico, while on the other hand documenting the gritty reality of rural Mexican life. Architecture, a particular fascination of Rulfo’s, is represented by pre-Columbian temples, Spanish colonial churches, the dwellings of Indian villagers, and the skyscrapers of Mexico City. His stunning landscapes of rugged mountains, barren deserts, cascading waterfalls, fertile farmlands, and lush forests call to mind the rich, silvery tonal values of Ansel Adams. There are also a number of photos taken during the production of a film called La Escondida, which appears to be a story of the Revolution, but about which the text offers no information.
The book contains six brief essays by six different authors, the only really recognizable name among them being the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. In an essay by Jorge Alberto Lozoya, the author states, “In an age that confuses chatter with the deeper meaning of existence, Rulfo’s work is resplendent, presaging the dawn of a new era.” Though he may be right about Rulfo, these six essays unfortunately fall into the chatter category. Mostly the authors offer their lofty opinions of Pedro Páramo, expressed in the obscure jargon of art theory, while failing to address the photography altogether. Only the last two essays, by Victor Jiménez and Erika Billeter, offer some useful biographical information on Rulfo and his photographic art, hidden amid the references to Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
Juan Rulfo’s Mexico provides a beautiful collection of Rulfo’s photographic work in a well-designed package. Fans of Rulfo’s writings will be fascinated by the correspondence between his photographic imagery and the verbal imagery in his stories. Any enthusiast of Mexican culture, history, and art should not be without it. If the writing were worthy of the master himself, this would be a five-star book.
Juan Rulfo, Acceso a un atrio
Juan Rulfo, Indígena de Ayutla, Mixes, Oaxaca
Juan Rulfo, Actor de La Escondida entre magueyes
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