Carlos Fuentes has been intrigued for forty years by stories of the celebrated American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce and his mysterious disappearance in Mexico during the civil war there. In The Old Gringo, fuentes imagines the fate of Bierce among Pancho Villa`s troops and portrays the encounter of two cultures, the American and the Mexican, through the passionate triangular relationship of Bierce, a younger American woman named Harriet Winslow como to Mexico to teach the children of a wealthy Mexican landowner, and Tomas Arroyo, a Mexican general under Villa. This is a haunting and eloquent book in which politics and history are inextricably woven into one of the most unusual romantic stories of our time.
“A dazzling novel that possesses the weight and resonance of myth [and] the fierce magic of a remembered dream.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“
A perfect little gemstone, faceted by a master craftsman.” —Charles Larsen, Chicago Tribune Book World
“The fate of Bierce has intrigued Americans since 1914, when he vanished . . . Fuentes has spun an opalescent around the mystery.” —Evan S. Connell, Los Angeles Times
Carlos Fuentes is Mexico`s most distinguished novelist and one of the leading analyists of contemporary Latin American politics. He received Mexico`s highest literary award, the National Prize in Literature, in 1984.
"Was he here to die or to write a novel about Mexican general and an old gringo and a Washington schoolteacher lost in the deserts of northern Mexico?" The man asking this question is the gringo himself: an embittered American journalist who has made an abrupt break with his past and is riding into Mexico to join Pancho Villa's revolutionary army. There are clues suggesting that if this man were ever named he would prove to be Ambrose Bierce, who vanished from the United States into Mexico during 1913. Many subjects eddy through the story: the conflict between instinct and reason; the historical relationship between the United States and Mexico; the nature of revolution; the beauty of courage, and its absurdity; the different ways in which two men need one woman and the rivalry that results; the drive to find one`s true self, and the impossibility of holding onto what is found... And all these themes are contained within a novel which has a single presence so bold and seductive that it makes most other contemporary fiction look pale.
One of Carlos Fuentes`s greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story os Ambrose Bierce, the American author, soldier, and journalist, and his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa's soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.
