The Old Gringo

"A challenging meditation on politics, love and the burden of history itself . . . What lingers most in this profound work are the images that convey the wonderous grandeur of a society in transformation. The Old Gringo is a brilliant fiction, a luminous and compelling chronicle."—Henry Mayer, San Francisco Chronicle

"Sensual and mind-pleasing . . . The Old Gringo [is] the work of an integrated personality, the artist who contains and illuminates all the layers of all times and cultures of a nation."—Earl Shorris, The New York Times Book Review

"A tribute to the economical power of his art. It radiates authenticity. Fuentes understands the Mexican Revolution as only a visionary can."—Dennis Drabelle, USA Today


"Clues scattered through this brief but intense novel gradually reveal the identity of the title character, an aging American writer who disappeared in revolutionary Mexico in 1913. Fuentes has made clever fictional use of an actual literary mystery, but his more remarkable achievement here is the portrait of the writer as a father figure to an American governess and to a general in Pancho Villa's army, each of whom has been betrayed by a real father. The tempestuous intimacy between governess and general and the complex relationship each has with the old gringo reflect the links and contradictions between Mexican and American cultures. This is a novel to be savored; it deserves more than a single reading."—L.M. Lewis, Social Science Department, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Library Journal

"Fuentes, Mexico's leading novelist, invents here a lyrical and philosophical tale about the times of Pancho Villa and the Revolution in Mexico. The old gringo of the title is Ambrose Bierce, the Ameican journalist and writer who disappeared in the Mexican dust. Bierce went to Mexico to die, Fuentes speculates, because he could not bear to reflect on the pain and sacrifices his sanctimonious moral rectitude had caused his family. He joins the troops of the young revolutionary Tomas Arroyo, one of Villa's generals, who, as a 'child of misfortune' ('bastard' in the servant quarters) was trapped in the hacienda and is now trapped by the revolution. Both the old gringo and the young revolutionary fall in love with Harriet Winslow, an American who had come to Mexico as teacher for the children on a hacienda which no longer exists, having been burned by the revolutionaries. Fuentes examines the borders between men and women, dreams and reality, Mexico and the U.S. ('a scar' rather than a border). Doomed never to understand each other, the two men inevitably die as they cross the frontier of their differences: the old gringo killed by Arroyo (whom he provoked by burning the papers of the history of Mexico) and Arroyo, in his turn, shot by Villa for overstepping his boundaries of power. In this fine short novel, Fuentes remains, as usual, wisely suspicious of both American politics and those of the Revolution."—Publishers Weekly