The Old Gringo
Fuentes, Carlos
and Uganda, the results were surrealistically lethal. In a few cases the economic forces of the old inertial system provided a temporary period of prosperity, which faded as the distance from the...
...Ungar is fond of a vague reference), quoting their claim that "whatever temporary harm blacks may suffer, it is worth the ultimate rewards of freedom...
...In any case, it seems odd that Fuentes should have been attracted to write about Bierce at all, considering their dissimilarities as writers, apart from a common interest in the super-natural and macabre...
...It used to be possible for a first-rate book reviewer to read a new novel every day without going crazy in the process...
...If a despot was benevolent it made no difference to this tendency...
...A great deal of space in Africa is given to describing the rewards in question: economic disaster, corrupt elites, intertribal slaughter, utter dependence on outside aid which is skimmed by the elites, a worsening of internal oppression, and starvation, all for the locals...
...r tlll lit.teardo tl a-in,tx std...
...The problem is that Frank Mac-Shane is either unable or unwilling to make this kind of distinction in his critical discussions of Jones's work...
...when his relatives demanded the body, Villa had the corpse dug up and shot to disguise the fact that Benton had been clubbed to death...
...Topics And Guest Speakers Panelists will discuss a variety of important First Amendment issues including: pornography and freedom of speech...
...when Hunting-ton attempted to bribe him—on the steps of the Capitol in Washington!—Bierce replied that his price was $75 million, to be paid over to the treasurer of the United States...
...To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia...
...T XIC TERROR how wit iy^ \Uh\l.1\ I . .At !G Siin rniIi+ \^^hlItact'I'rirr SPECIAL OFFER FOR SPECTATOR SUBSCRIBERS TOXIC TERROR is regularly $16.95, but American Spectator subscribers may order this startling new book for only $12.95 plus postage...
...writing is the quarry scene in From Here to Eternity—the scene in which one of the prisoners takes his crowbar and, on request, breaks the arm or leg of a fellow prisoner...
...In fact, Marcus Aurelius Bierce was an impoverished Ohio farmer struggling to support thirteen children (of which Ambrose was the tenth) and never set foot in Mexico...
...sl.mA 1.1>~.c.rti...
...lil ,i...
...Bierce was a classicist who eschewed experimentation in literature, distrusting any style that called attention to itself...
...In the meantime Harriet and Arroyo have had a brief affair, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 49 EN MI= ^ ^=11•11OIll ASXTTXI "IS IT ANY WONDER QUACKS TRIUMPH...
...7rn wtcdc c.l lnao.Etuu.73 qua...
...With Harriet the old man is courtly, treating her with the affection he denies his own living daughter, and with something of a lover's tenderness as well...
...IrasF'~R.G.~ IaLjn6.dae leDunZ 1,l '7danl...
...But Frank MacShane can almost always be relied on to get the facts straight, and he has done so once again with this book...
...The Society is represented at more than 65 law schools...
...Deadline March 30, 1986 JAMESON BOOKS, 722 Columbus Street, Ottawa, IL 61350—(815) 434-7905 Please send me copies of TOXIC TERROR by Dr...
...The following year, with seeming deliberateness, he took leave of his earlier life, touring the battle sites where he had fought in the Civil War and paying farewell visits to friends and relations...
...Nor is Mr...
...in both cases, their father's writings are somehow implicated...
...This would be the inevitable result of a black takeover, and to put it bluntly, our anti-Boer crowd would love to see those Afrikanerbigots get it in the neck...
...ultimately it is about the intertwined fates of America and Mexico in a time of historical crisis...
...residents, add sales tax...
...Her final verdict on Marquand, for example, is as dispassionate a statement of the case for popular fiction as can be found: Without transcending the high-grade commodity level, he has done a great deal to raise our standards of what a literary commodity can be...
...He sees them as not only proving his claim to the Miranda estate but also giving the Mexican peasantry title to the land they had worked for centuries...
...If this pressure builds and succeeds in cutting us off from Pretoria, and destroys the government there, then our vicarious revolutionaries may indeed get what they lust for...
...Veteran craftsmen like John P. Marquand were writing novels that could be taken more or less seriously by the intelligent reader...
...Amount enclosed: $ or charge my C] MASTERCARD Cl VISA Number Exp...
...L.A'inr.vl.l rl<m4 Oruuat3~a.bn%7u3 g~tl:o ur...
...We are made to understand that Fuentes's representative Americans are both driven to Mexico by their private demons, and that their "crossing the border" has psychological and even metaphysical dimensions...
...Trilling certainly didn't, not even after reading several tons of junk...
...Like Mr...
...telecommunications and broadcast deregulation...
...Compared to the reeking garbage in which our great publishing houses currently Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...914 34 Engelhard Ave., Avenel, N.J...
...Permanent Representative to the U.N...
...Towards Arroyo, Bierce is as much the rival as the father-figure, vying with him for Harriet's affections and challenging his authority in front of his troops: When Arroyo demands that he shoot a captured enemy officer in the back, he contemptuously refuses...
...Court of Appeals Judges Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork...
...That is the moment for which the great muck heap of that book exists...
...stranded in rural Chihuahua when she 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 during which she discovers her long-suppressed sensuality and the impossibility of any lasting union between them...
...Thirty-one-yearAnita Susan Grossman is a writer /iv- old Harriet Winslow finds herself ing in Berkeley, California...
...This beautiful reworking of the original book is graced with hundreds of photographs, maps, and drawings (most of them in color) as well as new essays...
...In the words of the Old Gringo, "I think my sons killed themselves so I wouldn't ridicule them in the newspapers of my boss William Randolph Hearst...
...Travel scholarships will be available to defray student expenses...
...He is currently at Harvard, and has had a string of American university posts since 1977...
...Moreover, the Bierce Fuentes portrays in The Old Gringo is an exile from America, just as Fuentes himself is something of an exile from Mexico, having lived most of his life abroad, chiefly in France and the United States...
...Witness Frank MacShane, a professor at Columbia University whose previous books include uncritically admiring biographies of John O'Hara and Raymond Chandler and whose new book, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer, opens with the profoundly wrong-headed pronouncement that James Jones "deserves to stand in the first rank of American writers in the second half of the twentieth century...
...Enclosed is $12.95 per book ordered plus $1.75 per order for postage and handling...
...the wonder is rather that it took so long to inspire a work of serious fiction...
...That's pretty strong stuff, especially when applied to the man whom Wilfrid Sheed once described as "the king of the good-bad writers" and whose eleven books are studded with hideous examples of paralyzing syntax...
...mer...
...specialize, those old war horses look better and better with each passing bestseller list...
...Remember A Rage to Live...
...Date i CITY STATE ZIP Books will be shipped by UPS...
...There will be approximately twenty speakers, including prominent judges and academicians...
...07001 Please send me THE DOMESDAY BOOK...
...Elizabeth Whelan, a Harvard-educated scientist and director of the American Council on Science and Health...
...and N.J...
...Their pleasure at contemplating this result obscures any incidental consequences...
...Playing on the theme of conflict between parents and children—a metaphor for the entire Mexican revolution—Fuentes hints at gloomy mysteries surrounding Bierce's relationship with his own three children...
...in Fuentes's version, the emphasis is on the father's—that is to say, Bierce'squest for death: having failed to find death in battle, the Old Gringo finally goads Arroyo into killing him by burning some old papers which the unlettered general has endowed with mystical significance...
...Significantly, Fuentes has moved forward the date of the action several months to April 1914, the time of the so-called "Veracruz massacre," when American marines invaded the city and inflicted heavy losses on its defenders...
...The reader is never told exactly what this means, any more than the author explains his contention that Soviet goals and Cuban goals in black Africa are "not always congruent...
...commercial speech...
...Even more strongly, he resembles one of his own characters...
...By 1912 he had seen his twelve-volume Collected Works into print and ended his long association with the Hearst press, for which he had been a columnist and crusading reporter...
...Equally confusing are the many references to her father's Negro mistress, who may have known Harriet in Washington, or may be merely a product of the latter's imagination...
...Ungar will have none of that...
...Professors Paul Bator, Richard Epstein, and Lino Graglia...
...In a few cases the economic forces of the old inertial system provided a temporary period of prosperity, which faded as the distance from the old days lengthened...
...even the steamy blockbuster novel could be counted on more often than not for a good read...
...Now Fuentes has turned his attention to geographically closer, if spiritually more distant, neighbors during this turbulent revolutionary period...
...Ironically, Bierce became better known for the mystery surrounding his death than for any of his published writings—an irony he himself would have been quick to appreciate...
...Fills an important gap between the scientific consensus and the `media consensus.' "—Rae...
...Diana Trilling used to keep that kind of schedule forty years ago when she wrote her "Fiction in Review" column for the Nation, and it doesn't seem to have done her any lasting harm...
...It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar steps...
...The details of his life—a rough childhood, a miserable stretch in the Army, a tempestuous but happy marriage, a disastrous second novel, a tour of duty as Parisian expatriate, an early death brought on by the excessive consumption of alcohol—have the vaguely familiar ring of a dozen other literary lives...
...Even from this rather bald plot summary, one can see that The Old Gringo is an enormously ambitious novel which attempts to invest its characters and actions with mythic dimensions...
...CUBAN AMERICAN NATIONAL FOUNDATION 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, N.W., Suite 601 Washington, D.C...
...Information For information about the society or registration for the symposium, call or write: Mr...
...As for his P ai.ut.4g...
...tI--- I Its-- MN II sr.1f11.1f1)• Name Address City State_Zip_ N.Y...
...Delegations of law students are especially welcome...
...earl...
...10-day money-back guarantee...
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...From Here to Eternity is essentially a moral book...
...the younger son, a newspaperman like his father, died of pneumonia at twenty-seven...
...Tomas Arroyo, a self-proclaimed "general" in Villa's army, likewise has a personal interest in lingering around the Miranda estate since he is the late owner's bastard son, and wants to revenge himself on a family that never acknowledged its kinship but let him grow up as an illiterate servant...
...3.00...
...One day he read Look Homeward, Angel and concluded, like so many other sensitive young men before him, that "I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written...
...It's not just that we're going through what Joseph Epstein likes to call "a bad patch" in our serious fiction...
...a. & earpo ralaas'14;0...
...ten on December 26, 1913 in Chihuahua (then occupied by pro Villa forces), he announced that he was going to Ojinaga the next day...
...u 115 ttttusti...
...1ia 'bf• oluq.'Irifoc o ctt.t et46 Vet M. m 11.14...
...Favoring brevity, he naturally gravitated to the epigram and the short story form...
...Ungar, they include a real danger to our oil-shipping life-line around the cape...
...This ill-assorted pair turns out to have more in common than one would first suppose, for Harriet too has been abandoned by her father, an army colonel who disappeared in the Spanish-American War years before...
...sttur;i4c...
...In fact, like Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, they rather like the idea of sudden change which would involve a bit of bloodshed...
...MacShane at a loss for superlatives in subsequent pages: He had appeared like a comet from the heart of America, and he wrote with a directness and truthfulness that recalled such distinctly American writers as Walt Whitman and Mark Wain...
...For us, pace Mr...
...Our righteous pro-testers do not like to think much about the implications of this...
...His reading nurtured his philosophical nature, and without cant or illusion he confronted the nature of love, sex, and mortality...
...Bierce's single greatest triumph as a journalist was his battle with the corrupt railroad magnates who dominated not only California but national politics—figures such as Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford (whom Bierce variously called Stealand Landford and Leland Stanford...
...20007 INTO ETERNITY: THE LIFE OF JAMES JONES, AMERICAN WRITER Frank MacShane/Houghton Mifflin/$18.95 Terry Teachout THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 51...
...In addition to a semi-formal banquet Saturday evening, there will be opportunities for outdoor recreation in sunny northern California...
...life imitates art as the parricide de-scribed in Bierce's famous tale, "The Horseman in the Sky," is re-enacted with Bierce playing the Confederate officer shot down from a high promontory by his own son, a Union scout...
...Jean Isaac, The American Spectator...
...In fact, the lives of Bierce's children were tragic enough, but not in the way that Fuentes has portrayed them...
...This is the first time that Fuentes has portrayed Americans as protagonists in his fiction, and he finds Bierce, the "Devil's Lexicographer," a sympathetic figure...
...Since Fuentes is not writing a biography but fiction, one can argue that his departures from historical truth aren't terribly serious, particularly since Fuentes is not even a conventionally "realistic" novelist, but instead employs history as the raw material of a myth or fable which calls attention to its own artifice: evidently we are meant to recognize the allusions to Bierce's "Horseman in the Sky" in the portrait of Bierce's father, and the real-life episode behind the exhumation of the Old Gringo's corpse...
...larger-than-life proportions who seems to personify Mexico's tormented history...
...in fact, Harriet secretly knows that he abandoned his family for a Negro mistress in Cuba...
...Moreover, just as the novel mingles fact and fiction, it occasionally jumps abruptly into fantasy, with the literal This is a lousy time to be a compulsive reader...
...Early commitments to speak have been received from U.S...
...At one and the same time he convinces us of the non-referential nature of his fiction and the dead-serious historical import of what he has to say...
...Can he have it both ways...
...eeudo'S6 py.E...
...14 'senate fub t.E...
...At the same time, one should note that Fuentes has deliberately fictionalized several aspects of Bierce's life—that is, apart from having him alive and kicking during the first four months of 1914...
...Perhaps, then, it is Bierce the bitter moralist who appeals to Fuentes, since the Mexican novelist often attacks the vices and corruptions of his native land, and may share with Bierce a certain pessimism about the human condition...
...As elsewhere in the book, the reader is left with nothing but bum-rumble to in-form his judgment...
...In the novel one son is said to have been a hopeless alcoholic who committed suicide (perhaps in order not to be a burden on his family), while the other son seems also to have willed his own death, albeit more passively...
...He never admits that any such goals exist in South Africa...
...He prefers his economics to have a moral flavor, and claims that the South African statistics are "skewed byinternal disparities...
...the daughter, Helen, remained on good terms with him despite the many vicissitudes of her life, and Bierce visited her shortly before his trip to Mexico...
...For most readers, the very thought of ranking From Here to Eternity anywhere near a masterpiece like Guard of Honor will be jolting...
...ratiy7 j IA...
...Eugene Meyer Executive Director The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies 1625 Eye Street, NW Washington, D.C...
...Mexico was in the throes of its own civil war, and Bierce intended to act as an "observer" of Pancho Villa's rebel army...
...One of the great books In world history, the Domesday Book was written in 1086 by command of William the Conqueror to record every tangible (and taxable) element of his kingdom...
...uncertainty of access to mineral supplies in southern Africa, and the necessity of expending In a letter to his nephew's wife shortly before he disappeared into Mexico in 1913, Ambrose Bierce wrote prophetically, "Good-bye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life...
...Although dedicated to William Styron, the novel seems closer in style to William Faulkner, with language so densely metaphoric that vehicle frequently merges with tenor...
...111eb ~eaa...
...Bierce was seventy-one, suffering from asthma and perhaps loneliness as well, since his long-estranged wife had died in 1905, and his two sons had also died young...
...If Bierce's literary career had not been entirely disappointing, he had clearly reached some kind of turning point in his life...
...loommolmommminN...
...Where possible, visiting students will be housed in Stan-ford students' apartments...
...tyW,t•DCY, v UBh Rt...
...If this trade rests now upon the success of a system we dislike, we can note that the system is changing in response to that dislike, if not as quickly as the protesters wish...
...Which begs the question: why would anyone want to read a threehundred-page biography of James Jones in the first place...
...we will all have the harsh experience of watching one more bloody and tragic chapter unfold in the contemporary annals of smug, pious, well-meaning stupidity...
...Officially he is assumed to have died in battle...
...Mystifyingly, Fuentes has Bierce making his reply to Leland Stanford in his office, rather than to Huntington—which makes no sense, since Stanford had died in 1893...
...From Here to Eternity is a textbook example of the very best sort of popular novel, the kind that went out with Brylcreem and the nuclear family...
...reality of narrative assertions left up in the air: Arroyo speaks nonchalantly of having "willed" his father's legal wife to barrenness, and we are told that Harriet has had her mother buried in Arlington National Cemetery...
...Frequently, too, the plots in Fuentes's novels multiply and split with dizzying speed, as in his aptly-named novel The Hydra Head (1978...
...The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies presents A Symposium on the First Amendment MARCH 7-9, 1986 Stanford Law School Public Participation All persons interested in philosophy and policy applications of the First Amendment are invited to attend...
...But then, in a sense she was doing him a kindness: he did not want to die an old man, like the Gringo...
...The much-loved and respected Julius Nyerere managed to destroy the economy of Tanzania with his "socialist" policies...
...Hearteningly ambitious in its scope, From Here to Eternity is warmed by a dignity so transparently authentic that Whittaker Chambers was moved to comment: To my grotesque way of thinking, one of the great moral moments in current U.S...
...Unlike most of those other young men, though, he promptly sat down and started to act on this wildly optimistic conclusion...
...furthermore, a great part of the profit we take elsewhere in the world comes from equally bad or rather worse systems, none of which are decried by liberals in the emotive terms applied to our relations with South Africa...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 merely that Harriet Winslow, as she gives up her somewhat tarnished virginity, explores a realm of experience which she has hitherto avoided, but that her encounter with Arroyo represents the irreconcilable otherness of the two nations: Discovering the reality of Mexico, Harriet encounters sex and violence, often together...
...Both Harriet and Arroyo, in different ways, find a second father in the Old Gringo, who is never called by name except at the very end of the book...
...Fuentes fictionalizes to less purpose in his treatment of the writer's professional life...
...diitesdau Book England's Heritage, Then and Now Edited by THOMAS HINDE Size 9'/2"x 12" $17.95...
...The Old Gringo is an intriguing performance...
...Fuentes here is rather portraying the father in "The Horseman in the Sky," placing Ambrose this time in the son's role...
...the freedom of association...
...Brian J. Brille Symposium Director Stanford Federalist Society Or Stanford Law School Stanford, CA 94305 (415) 497-1551 1 MADISON The Federalist Society is a nationwide organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and law students dedicated to the principles of limited government and a limited judiciary...
...I enclose my check or money-order for $17.95 plus $2.15 postage and handling charge...
...It isn't surprising that Jones, a devotee of the hardboiled detective story, actually broke down and wrote one when he needed extra money to keep his Paris residence afloat...
...and John Hart Ely, Dean of Stanford Law School...
...It t f 7 fibs SubrGi Pc fat 7 , Aim '1.S...
...Our popular fiction has also become horribly debased...
...a. L c. . fr la" au'2 ~"btrw.iu~,fiauadi a.1'5jutta3~ leaf lI' -i titi;m ifnw...
...With the possible exception of Kenya, in no case has the condition of a neo-colonialized people improved over the long term...
...ea* t11 %'w.e t .u.eaTil1t tj„t Ya...
...Jones's gauche prose style is enough to prevent all but the most committed Dreiserites Former U.S...
...the religion clauses and government neutrality...
...by changing the name to "Miranda," Fuentes may be playing with the Spanish word meaning "to gaze upon," since the glittering mirror-filled ballroom of the ruined hacienda plays a major role in the story...
...The exorcist approach to purging our land of industrial chemicals is one of the most serious issues facing America today," says Dr...
...c.feG.mese v1.1tI...
...His treatment of From Here to Eternity is all too typical: he ranks it above Guard of Honor and The Naked and the Dead as the "most successful" American novel to come out of World War II...
...In particular, this latest novel can be seen as a kind of companion piece to its immediate predecessor, Distant Relations (1982), which concerns the links between the Hispanic New World and France...
...The area will thus pass violently out of the Western orbit...
...a5 Ten:,, $c rile .E.1' reatf,rVu1.ott:nvk,a4luv CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc., Dept...
...in a majority of cases it has worsened, often catastrophically...
...The shady dealings of Harriet's father and her beau, Delaney, have obvious symbolic implications, as does Harriet's own affair with Arroyo, a figure of discovers that the promised employers she has come to meet at their hacienda have already fled the Revolution...
...Whatever Fuentes's personal affinities with Bierce, The Old Gringo ultimately demonstrates his abiding preoccupation with Mexican history, a topic he has long explored in his fiction...
...Illinois residents please add 6% sales tax...
...The really remarkable thing about Jones, one feels after reading Into Eternity, was the distance he was able to travel on sheer nerve alone...
...20006 (202) 822-8138 THE OLD GRINGO Carlos Fuentes/Farrar Straus Giroux/$14.95 Anita Susan Grossman It should not be surprising that Mexico's leading novelist, Carlos Fuentes, has taken Bierce's strange disappearance as the subject of his latest book...
...1. Y...
...The economic difference between this state and the rest of Africa is huge, but Mr...
...For that matter, the en-tire story is more or less the imaginative re-creation of Harriet and others who recall the Old Gringo, so that its veracity is called into question within the frame of the novel itself...
...Jeane J. Kirkpatrick analyzes the "Kennedy-Khrushchev Pact", the 1962 agreement that guaranteed the security of Fidel Castro's regime, and asks what the implications of a similar accord between Washington and Managua would be for the Western hemisphere...
...As an example of the critical biography as high art, Into Eternity is nothing special...
...In Fuentes's recounting of the story, Bierce's journey into Mexico is the occasion for a larger meditation on U.S.-Mexican history, as reflected in the shifting relationship between the "Old Gringo" and two fictional characters, an American schoolteacher and a Mexican peasant-soldier...
...now at your bookstore, or use coupon to order...
...One might question, how-ever, whether it all adds up to a coherent work of art, or whether Fuentes, in his improvisation of a historical theme, has merely performed a clever conjuring trick...
...The single African exception to this dismal continental condition has been South Africa...
...At any rate, no one—Mexican or American—has ever claimed to have seen him after that date, although his disappearance caused a sensation and prompted numerous investigations...
...Here as elsewhere, dependence on extra-African help has not diminished but increased...
...Elizabeth Whelan...
...It is not s a4kLa Min 1. ti8.Arar6o 2A (e fmaur•-fire t.ea~~ } col .Halm' lit1G m4o/uAE• ~ -t'I,c R wgtilo: err T tn...
...industries accomplishes nothing in terms of public health, she maintains, asserting that the American people are being deprived of some of the most useful, safe and cost-effective drugs and chemicals—many lifesaving—by the radical environmental extremists exposed in this controversial book...
...The absence of this sane and judicious perspective is all too typical of a distressing new phenomenon on the American literary scene: the current group of academic biographers who cull the checklists of our second-string novelists with unseemly enthusiasm...
...utfi7u.boy' d .tt.ca'?t ,/.c ~ltt~.sto/m.'reed...
...The huge estate of the Miranda family likewise recalls the enormous holdings of the Terrazas clan in pre-revolutionary Chihuahua...
...Given the Soviet backing for Oliver Tambo and the African National Congress, it seems obvious that one Soviet goal will be served by the destruction of the present Pretoria government...
...In the short story, the son has no choice but to kill the enemy soldier, whose identity he knows all too well...
...Ungar, they are pleased to demand disinvestment and allude to "a number of South African black leaders" (as I say, Mr...
...But as it turns out, Bierce's corpse has a larger part to play in the story, being dug up, shot by Signature Villa's firing squad—this time from the front, not in the back—and finally in ADDRESS terred in the empty grave reserved for Captain Winslow in Arlington National Cemetery...
...A bungled at-tempt by Woodrow Wilson to hasten the downfall of General Victoriano Huerta, the attack only managed to rally the citizenry behind him...
...Then, too, the adventures of Bierce's corpse echo an episode in Mex-ican history: In early 1914 an Englishman, William Benton, was murdered by one of Pancho Villa's officers, provoking an international scan-dal...
...In his last letter, writ-our own resources in danegeld (i.e., "aid") payments to hostile regimes in an area where we once traded profit-ably...
...cum cr-4' If you love the English landscape, you'll love the 900th Anniversary Edition of the Domesday Book...
...In another apparent gaffe, Fuentes has Bierce recalling old times in the San Francisco Chronicle editorial office, whereas Bierce actually wrote for its arch-rival, the Examiner, and attacked the editor of the Chronicle every chance he had...
...For example, Bierce's father is recalled as a stern officer in the Mexican War, with his son Ambrose repeating the father's experience in crossing the border...
...Most likely he got there, to be killed in a battle which took place on January 11, and was buried in an unmarked grave...
...all} tl fias Cut...
...But to say all this is to make the novel appear more discursive and analytic than it really is, since Fuentes narrates principally through a succession of juxtaposed images, and his characters converse through inter-changed soliloquies rather than naturalistic speech...
...f01, .E • rai,tglusa'nerd u 0 C, Discover England the way William the Conquerer saw it...
...Lots of bad novels got written and published, of course, but quality control in the popular fiction business was still significantly tighter...
...Whelan sets the record straight on issues exploited by environmental and Naderite public interest movements of the last two decades...
...xtu+aa{R.E,~ I,Linl,dn4 usAire5c.I !nao.eusu.73 trot...
...Or From Herr to Eternity...
...His whole life was an education in books, and in the work of such writers as Teilhard de Char-din, Stendhal, Conrad, and Yeats he searched for an understanding of life...
...In 1896 Huntington, the last survivor of the California "Big Four," lobbied for a bill that would have allowed his Southern Pacific Railroad to write off an enormous debt to the federal government, at a cost to the taxpayers of some $130 million...
...The unspeakable loneliness of self-pity that is blind and tongueless rose up hot in her, trying to bring tears...
...The plot is solid, the detail convincing, the macho romanticism smoky and fragrant...
...as a secondary source of factual information about the author of From Herr to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, it is a solid, eminently reliable performance...
...In all these things he differs from Fuentes the novelist, whose mannered prose is full of self-conscious rhetorical flourishes, and whose subordinate clauses frequently run away with the sentences, as antecedents recede into misty vagueness...
...In English and Spanish...
...Bierce, through his writings for the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal, helped defeat the bill...
...The result was a long, clumsy, enthralling novel about the peacetime Army that is still in print after thirty-five years, one surprisingly good Holly-wood adaptation, and God only knows how many copies sold...
...Bierce's elder son, Day, far from being a washed-out alcoholic, was a mere youth of sixteen when he shot himself after killing a rival in a gunfight over a girl...
...Please give street addresses for UPS...
...fede.t rlecegl daughter, she has sworn never to see Bierce again for having indirectly caused the deaths of her brothers...
...i 3gawtld-cehe R.ar6om i.e b%tv...
...The subsequent crippling of various U.S...
...Still, readers familiar with Bierce may be disturbed by some of the liberties Fuentes has taken because they seem so pointless, suggesting a negligent indifference to historical fact—the kind of thing which Latin Americans find so unforgivable when exhibited by Yankees concerning matters south of the border...
...Y'a 1<» -C a.wt...
...The trick, of course, is not to go too far with this line of reasoning...
...Without urging us to regard his novels as "important," he has done more than any writer of our time to close the dangerous gap between important and popular fiction...
...It is for revealing these things to her, as much as for killing Bierce, that Arroyo provokes Harriet into setting in motion a train of events which leads to his death...
...on the other hand, the America that she and the Old Gringo are fleeing from seems a land of flabby vices—of prudery, venality, and most of all, hypocrisy...
...A man rigidly faithful to his own code of honor, the Old Gringo carries around a copy of Don Quixote as his traveling companion and bears a certain resemblance to the Knight of La Mancha...
...r?.]m Slbdvl ~ilG.tx...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
