Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
Carlos Fuentes is perhaps Mexico's most celebrated writer and a voice of the people. From poetry to stories and essays, and a dozen novels, he writes of the passions and politics of a nation perpetually in turmoil. He even served as Ambassador to Paris, a time he eludes to fondly, before returning to Mexico City.His novel, "The Death of Artemio Cruz" [1962] is the best known of the translated fictions, and a powerful portrayal of a powerful, and largely corrupt, man on his deathbed as he imagines the past while railing against death. In this novel, Fuentes wrote the first of many graphic depictions of sex, including an odd characterization of Christ in sensualized circumstance, and in one of his later novels "Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone" [1995] he once again uses the bedroom as a place where personal and political clashes are won and lost.The plot line is skimpy, the novel largely philosophical rambling on political upheavals and cultural struggles, and these reflections are the best part of the book. As the sixties come to a close, a successful adulterous writer is drawn into an unusually intense affair with an American actress. As they come to each other and resist each other with equal force, he contemplates the pretense of Hollywood versus lost souls in his own country, including his own, and the inability of humans to connect in a meaningful way through time. Like the goddess Diana, the actress is equal parts pretense, desire and weakness."The young people of Paris, in May 1968, had rebelled against what they vaguely called the tyranny of consumption, a society that exchanged being for seeming and took acquisition as a proof of existence. A Mexican, no matter how much he travels the world, is always anchored in a society of need; we return to the need that surrounds us on all sides in Mexico, and if we have even the slightest spark of conscience, it's hard for us to imagine a world where you can get everything you might want immediately, even pink toothpaste. I've always told myself that the vigor of Latin American art derives from the enormous risk of throwing yourself into the abyss of need, hoping to land on your feet on the other side, the side of satisfaction. It's very hard for us - if not for us personally, then in the name of all those around us."Diana responds at another point that "There are forces that present themselves once and never again. Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities. Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They come by only once. It's useless to try to recover them. They're gone, mad at us because we paid them no mind. We didn't want passion. Then passion didn't want us either."Fuentes often seizes an opportunity to decry the "gringo" effect on his country and suggests that migration northward has been stimulated as much by the needs of the American people, even as they scorn immigrants, as a failure of his own government to improve quality of life in his homeland. I hung on every line and enjoyed playing voyeur as these two souls marched towards their own demise. Few surprises in this novel full of elegant thoughts. The book is hard to find, mostly used copies, and worth the search. Fuentes passed away in 2012 but his passions live on.I'll leave you with this great passage: "New Year's Eve. This passage from 1969 to 1970 was worthy of celebration because it marked the end of one decade and the beginning of a new one. But no one agrees about what that final zero means at the end of a year. Were the sixties coming to an end and the seventies beginning, or were the 1960's demanding one more year, a final agony of partying and crime, revolt and death, for that decade replete with major events, tangible and intangible, guts and dreams, cobblestones and memories, blood and desire: the decade of Vietnam and Martin Luther King, the Kennedy assassinations and May 1968 in Paris, the Democratic convention in Chicago and the massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza, the death of Marilyn? A decade that seemed to be programmed for television, to fill the sterile scheduling wastelands of blank screens but leave them breathless, making miracles banal, transforming the little electronic postage stamp into our daily bread, the expected into the unexpected, the facsimile of reality that culminated, even before the 1970's had begun, in mankind's first step on the moon. Our immediate suspicion: was the flight to the moon filmed in a TV studio? Our instantaneous disenchantment: can the moon go on being our romantic Diana after a gringo leaves his shit up there?"
It is true that you have to wade through an awful lot of philosophizing about love and death during the course of this novel, as the previous reviewer said. However, to judge it negatively for that is a subjective judgment (as is my judging it positively...). In general, not a lot happens during the course of this novel, and yet I personally found myself rather emotionally gripped. There is also a decent amount of "philosophizing" dedicated to race, class, and politics. In most instances, that combined with the whole love/death aspect would make for a rather dry book. In this instance, the lack of action combined with the fact that most of it is comprised of more cerebral philosophizing somehow, aside from making the book intellectually compelling, also made it emotionally compelling. I haven't read any of Fuentes' more standard fare, and I have a feeling that the extent to which this novel is autobiographical means that this is likely quite a bit different than his other works. However, the fact that he was able to compose something this good makes me feel that a fast paced run through his other works may be something that I am up for in the not too distant future.
What do You think about Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1996)?
Uno de los mayores problemas de este libro es que esta muy sobrado, vale, casi no tiene trama el muy mezquino. Muy buenas reflexiones filosóficas, existenciales, políticas y demás. Pero es en verdad algo que llega a ser característico de la prosa de Carlos Fuentes, hace alarde en todos sus libros de un estilo muy adornado, siempre dirigido no en específico a quien tiene un gusto por leer sino a quien aparte de ello tiene determinada formación cultural.Realmente a mi me parece un tanto chocante esta postura en que el autor salpica sus libros con algunas frases en inglés, francés y a veces hasta en alemán. Pero también es indudable que el tono reflexivo que adopta es interesante.No se puede dejar de reconocer de Fuentes en cada una de sus obras que es un gran autor, pero sencillamente su pedantería trasciende de las letras y a veces es demasiado notorio.
—Andrés Velázquez
By far my favorite Fuentes that I have either read or skimmed. Opens with a powerful, tortured treatise on the nature of God, with a capital G. Which leads to an equally well-rendered evocation of romance and literary showmanship with the titular Diana. Then slowly veers along in this same general direction of literary and filmic life and love for what may as well be the rest of the novel. Often it feels like the narrator circles around the issue, rather than properly elaborate on his and Diana's story -- and the problem with circular logic is the same with circular novels: it is hard to sustain interest even if the insights are rewarding once you choose to scour through them.Other problems: a consistent leitmotif of machismo, if not misogyny, insufficiently leavened with irony. An overall humorlessness, and a ponderousness which weighs the book down internally. Conclusions such as "No bondage is worse than the hope of happiness," the book's startling first, or is it at first, sentence, become weighty mealy stuff for the reader once they are bombarded with them. Whatever aphorisms are, swift moving reading they are not.This book in the end doesn't do much to change my opinion of Fuentes as an author characteristic of the Boom's bombast, even while the novel shows me he's got more tricks up his sleeves than I ever thought. It is books like these, and also most of Vargas Llosa's, that make me agree with the late Roberto Bolaño's assertion, always more veiled than apparently stated in his work, that The Boom was a collection of self-important, hyperpoliticized dinosaurs. Whatever you think of Bolaño's successes and many -- especially, understandably, in Chile -- dismiss them, it at least opened up other kinds of Latin American fiction for global dissemination and discussion. The model is more Borges now, less and less Garcia Marquez. Hopefully that means as well there will be more Juan Carlos Onetti read in the future than ever before.
—Kiof
I love Fuentes' writing. I felt he was jilted by Jean Seberg, and used this like a gossip. She didn't get a chance to write her story. I felt like I was visiting a couple in an ugly relationship, witnessing their worst, and taking off with the guy to tell me his part of the story. I felt uncomfortable.
—Joe
