The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes
Steve Tomasula

Carlos Fuentes. The Years with Laura Díaz. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 516 pp. $26.00.

Carlos Fuentes seldom sets out to create psychologically rounded characters in naturalistic scenes. Instead, his fiction is driven by the ideas his characters represent, especially in his interpretation of Mexican history. So it might seem natural for Fuentes to model his latest novel, The Years with Laura Díaz, as if it were one of those great Mexican murals, say the one by Diego Rivera that graces its jacket: a stylized panorama of factory workers and revolutionaries rendered with the boldness and flatness of a cartoon that is as crowded as the time line of the novel itself, and in which the title character makes a cameo appearance. Moving Laura Díaz from the periphery of Rivera’s mural to the center of his novel, Fuentes takes readers on a decade-by-decade tour as she bears witness to Mexico’s modern transformation, from her family’s prerevolutionary legends, through the stasis that marks Mexico by the end of the novel’s main action in 1972. An acknowledgment page details the numerous friends and relatives Fuentes drew on for the stories that make up his panorama. It doesn’t list the breadth of learning he also brought to the novel. Unfortunately, the fusion of the two in this stylized depiction often reads like a straight-forward family saga, peppered with talking-heads discoursing on politics. Its affinities with a TV miniseries format is surprising, coming as it does from an author known for narrative complexity. Indeed, richness, density, and line-by-line virtuosity arguably make his magnum opus, Terra Nostra, one of the most profound novels of the century, nostalgically recapitulated in Laura Díaz. If that earlier book was philosophy, a groundbreaking novel that, through its understanding of history, showed what a literature of the Americas might look like, then The Years with Laura Díaz is the sociology of the familiar, both in theme and aesthetics. [Steve Tomasula]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes Steve Tomasula Carlos Fuentes. The Years with Laura Díaz. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 516 pp. $26.00. Carlos Fuentes seldom sets out to create psychologically rounded characters in naturalistic scenes. Instead, his fiction is driven by the ideas his characters represent, especially in his interpretation of Mexican history. So it might seem natural for Fuentes to model his latest novel, The Years with Laura Díaz, as if it were one of those great Mexican murals, say the one by Diego Rivera that graces its jacket: a stylized panorama of factory workers and revolutionaries rendered with the boldness and flatness of a cartoon that is as crowded as the time line of the novel itself, and in which the title character makes a cameo appearance. Moving Laura Díaz from the periphery of Rivera’s mural to the center of his novel, Fuentes takes readers on a decade-by-decade tour as she bears witness to Mexico’s modern transformation, from her family’s prerevolutionary legends, through the stasis that marks Mexico by the end of the novel’s main action in 1972. An acknowledgment page details the numerous friends and relatives Fuentes drew on for the stories that make up his panorama. It doesn’t list the breadth of learning he also brought to the novel. Unfortunately, the fusion of the two in this stylized depiction often reads like a straight-forward family saga, peppered with talking-heads discoursing on politics. Its affinities with a TV miniseries format is surprising, coming as it does from an author known for narrative complexity. Indeed, richness, density, and line-by-line virtuosity arguably make his magnum opus, Terra Nostra, one of the most profound novels of the century, nostalgically recapitulated in Laura Díaz. If that earlier book was philosophy, a groundbreaking novel that, through its understanding of history, showed what a literature of the Americas might look like, then The Years with Laura Díaz is the sociology of the familiar, both in theme and aesthetics. [Steve Tomasula]

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