What do You think about The Old Gringo (2007)?
A little too pretentious in style. Too often, a crucial background story was alluded to before it was actually introduced, making the narrative hard to follow even as late as halfway through the novel. The stream of consciousness attempts ended up building on the obscurity rather elucidating character. There were occasional sparks reminiscent of the mythical characters and moods from "One Hundred Years of Solitude". In general however, more could have been achieved by dissecting Bierce's philosophy and irony; instead, this turned out to be more a book about Mexico than the Gringo.
—Cezar Petriuc
Highly oneiric. Revolutionary Mexico. Swift jumps from conciousness to conciousness, yet with the purpose of generating a coherent narrative. The language is spritely, sullen, erotic by turns. The old gringo, American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce, is a bitter man come to Mexico seeking death at the hands of the revolution. He meets the younger rebel General Tomas Arroyo whose innate machismo turns his relationship with the old gringo into a Game of Manhood. A game only the general seems to be playing. The old gringo fearlessly marches straight into the most dangerous faceoffs with the Federales. He seems invulnerable, god-like. The bullets don't so much as graze him. Arroyo's rebels marvel at him. Arroyo resents him for how can he shine by comparison? In a comandeered train the general, his army, and the gringo cross the desert for a day and a night to the famous Miranda Hacienda. It was here that Arroyo was fathered by Señor Miranda. It was here Arroyo grew up and came to know intimately his nation's "aristocracy." It is in the destruction of the hacienda that the general seeks to make a grand statement. On arrival he and the old gringo find the white woman -- the "gringa" -- arrived only hours earlier from the U.S. to teach English to the Miranda children, long since flown the coop. Her name is Harriet Winslow. She becomes Arroyo's lover. One feels she could use the workout. She positively screams uptight white anglo-saxon protestant, and the destruction of personal property is incomprehensible to her. She discounts the long history of oppression in a trice. Somehow she feels -- laughably -- even in the absence of the departed Mirandas, that she is responsible not only for stopping the destruction of the hacienda, but also for seeing to its restoration. (She sets the peons to ridiculously whitewashing the place.) Yet like certain characters in Anita Brookner's oeuvre, she knows she's missed much of life in her 31 years. The old gringo sees her submission to Arroyo only in terms of the general's machismo. He does not for a minute imagine the attraction this man of action might hold for Harriet. The sex is electric. As I've said elsewhere, I am no fan of sex in literature. It's almost always badly done -- but not here. Here the sex is integral, it works to push the story forward; whereas, usually, all the action of the fiction must stop for nookie time. It's almost too long, the sex. Fuentes pushes it about ten pages too far. But one can see why. It's working so well. The novel's onieric bent seamlessly blends backstory, dialogue both thought and spoken, hopes and dreams, you name it. The prose is consistently dazzling. You must read it.
—William1
An occasionally entertaining blend of poetically charged "dream-biography", and incoherent babbling. I would recommend not reading The Old Gringo if you want to know something about Ambrose Bierce; though in all fairness, you should probably never read a novel to teach yourself history. Anyway, it was not Fuentes' intention to be historically specific. The life and disappearance of his subject is a very difficult obstacle for any novelist, and instead of focusing our attention on the broad range of history, Fuentes plants his readers on a 500 square feet region of land in Mexico and talks about mirrors (now she remembers) for just under one hundred and ninety-nine pages.It is the story of Ambrose Bierce ( a man you should know), Harriet Winslow, an American woman in Mexico to teach the children of a wealthy family, and Tomas Arroyo, a self-appointed general of the Revolution. Bierce is the "old gringo" of the title, though he is not mentioned by name until the very end, and he has come to Mexico to die honorably; Winslow is a sort of half-breed between a self-righteous Henry James heroine and something left in the minds of Mexicans about how Americans are supposed to think and act when out of their country. Arroyo is fairly tragic, and always maintains at least half of an erection, Ms. Winslow lets us know.It's a book that's desperate to have you love it.At its best and worst, The Old Gringo, is reminiscent of some of Leonard Cohen's best and worst songs: disturbing, unsubtly libidinous, and chock full of quiet, lonely explosions. I think much of Cohen is awful, and most of The Old Gringo. Its particulars are much more important than its scope.When Fuentes allows his story to be understood it is quite well-written; for the other hundred pages or so, though, it is worse than a stilted romanticism. Certain phrases grab you with their marginally thought out direction; others just wither in their own incomprehensibility. I like to believe that it's the translator's fault, but I don't really think that's true. Plus, Fuentes helped on this translation, so the best that can be said about him is that he wrote a bad book, and tried to cover it up by assisting in a bad translation.
—Michael
