The Death of Artemio Cruz

(Written by Carlos Fuentes, 1962)

Check out the newest addition to Write Brain TV’s ever-expanding radical library! Mexican author Carlos Fuentes’s landmark 1962 novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz) has remained one of the most enduring and influential works of literature from the so-called Latin American Boom, an era in the 60s and 70s when European publishers were finally paying attention to writers from Central and South America. Fuentes’s utilizes his signature flashback and narration changes throughout the novel to tell the story of the wealthy, aging industrialist Artemio Cruz, a man who years before fought in the Mexican Revolution, only to have become a corrupt newspaper magnate with myriad dirty political connections, and even more secrets. Lying on his deathbed, Cruz recollects both monumental and mundane moments of his life as his family pries for their inheritances and a priest furiously attempts to extract a final rite of confession. With swirling, revelatory prose and a cinematic scope, Fuentes outlines the moral pitfalls of the former revolutionary’s ascension to national prominence, along the way critiquing the class exploitation and extensive blackmail/bribery rackets required to make one wealthy/ Fuentes’s jumpy style and keen sense of detail magnifies the extent of the corrupting influences so familiar to the spheres of politics and power. Write Brain TV is proud to present this cautionary tale from Mexico’s most celebrated novelist.