A millennial novel with centennial breadth, The Years with Laura Díaz follows one woman through the 20th century in Mexico, witnessing its political upheavals, technological advances, and bitterly uneven social and artistic progress. Born on her grandfather Don Felipe's coffee plantation at Catemaco in 1898, Laura knows both the privilege of wealth and its limitations. Her parents, Leticia and Fernando, live apart, prudently waiting until Fernando can support his family in the larger town of Veracruz. While Don Felipe fights the laurel branches that continually weave their way through his delicate coffee plants, Laura watches as her gifted unmarried aunts are consumed by the forced idleness of their kind: Hilda, who plays Chopin to empty rooms, and Virginia, whose love poems never reach a suitor.

In Veracruz, Laura will find a focus for her own youthful longing, her half-brother Santiago, whose clandestine aid to the anarchist-syndicalists leads to his execution. After his death, she is expected to follow the girlish ambitions of her friends: taking dancing lessons and learning to listen to men. Yet in honor of her half-brother's memory, she embraces the revolution, and, hoping to avoid the fate of her virgin aunts, marries a solemn, dark-skinned, working-class hero. "The active life was preferable," Laura concludes at the ripe age of 22. For a woman, inevitably, this means "a life committed to another life."

A daughter, a wife, and then a mother, Laura is more or less dragged along by history. Eventually she must sacrifice not only Santiago but her own son and grandson to the violent game of musical chairs that is Mexican political life. Perhaps because of the almost laughable instability of power in Mexico, Fuentes is compelled to devote much of his narrative energy to explaining the rapid changes of guard--presidential assassinations succeeded by coups followed by questionable elections.

The poor and downtrodden, by contrast, are always there. Laura's husband takes her to the barrios of Mexico City to dissuade her from assuming anything but a housewife's role in political affairs. Later, a lover leads her through a nocturnal wasteland, a city of the poor, showing her deformed beggars, and stunted, starving children: Laura, did your husband show you this, or did he only show you the pretty side of poverty, the workers with their cheap shirts, the whores with their powder, the organ grinders and locksmiths, the tamale sellers and the saddlers? Is that his working class? Do you want to rebel against your husband? Hate him because he didn't give you a chance to do something for others, treated you with contempt? Laura decides that although she can't save everyone, she can save herself through work. And the first work she undertakes--wonderfully and bizarrely--is as a traveling companion to Frida Kahlo.

Given the time span and the gravity of occurrences this epic covers, it is no surprise that this character herself often seems to stand still while events and people move around her. Because of this, perhaps, The Years with Laura Díaz is not the clearest articulation of Fuentes's historical vision, nor his most moving work. Its emotional power is cumulative, however, and few readers will be able to put the novel down after the first hundred pages. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
In a masterwork imbued with historical anecdotes, mystical imagery and revelations about human existence, Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz) relates the story of 20th-century Mexico through the fictional biography of Laura D!az. Narrated by Laura's great-grandson, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, the central thread is straightforward: Laura grows from an unusually observant child into an attractive and passionate young woman, survives numerous revolutions and world wars, several lovers and one husband. The catalyst that keeps this chronicle engaging is Laura's desire to steer the course of her life above and beyond the political currents surging through Mexican society. Much of her life revolves around her rising and falling romances: with a Casanova who vanishes when Laura gets too close to him, a Communist whose search for his missing wife precludes their relationship and a screenwriter who is slowly dying of emphysema. She eventually marries Juan Francisco, an activist whose political passion initially attracts Laura, but ultimately disturbs and alienates her. The union produces two sons. In her later years, inspired by close acquaintances with the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Laura becomes a photographer (she photographs Kahlo's body while it is being cremated) and achieves renown almost instantly. While in other books Fuentes's characteristic riffs and dizzying, cascading sentences were intended as potential expansions of the novel, this time these gestures are used for the deepening development of the content of the book rather than of its form. Fuentes's emotional commitment to his subject shows in the lucidity of the book's underlying intellectual dialoguesDthe opposition of communism and fascism, the corrosion of individual identities by historical processesDwhich Fuentes is able to animate with a learned lyricism that should make this volume one of his most admired and memorable. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
"[Is it] possible to live the life of a dead woman exactly as she lived it, to discover the secret of her memory?" asks the narrator of The Years with Laura Diaz, Fuentes' new novel. In this case, the dead woman is Laura Diaz, Fuentes' version of a Mexican Every Woman, and her memory is none other than the turbulent history of twentieth-century Mexico. The novel begins in 1999 when photographer Santiago Lopez-Alfaro arrives in Detroit to film a documentary about the Mexican muralists in the U.S. There he comes across the image of an unnamed woman immortalized on the mural of the famous Diego Rivera. He soon realizes that "those almost golden eyes, mestizo, between European and Mexican" belonged to his great-grandmother, Laura Diaz. Thereafter, the novel recounts the life of Diaz, from the settlement of her German grandparents in Mexico in the late 1800s (based on the true story of the migration of Fuentes' European ancestors to Mexico) to her experience of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. In many ways, Laura Diaz is the female counterpart to Artemio Cruz, the hero of Fuentes' 1962 novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz. If Cruz, the former revolutionary turned capitalist, symbolized for Fuentes Mexico's quest for wealth at the expense of moral values, then Diaz, the politically committed artist, stands as the pillar of integrity and hope for twentieth-century Mexico. In Laura Diaz, Fuentes has created a remarkable heroine. Veronica Scrol
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

From one of Latin America's most gifted authors comes the dazzling, poetic novel The Years with Laura Díaz. Beginning his story in Detroit in 1999, Fuentes introduces his title character through her great-grandson nearly 30 years after her death. As the story unfolds, Laura D￯﾿ﾽaz emerges as a heroine of strength and allure, as a friend of the renowned Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and as a dedicated political activist in a country marked by corruption and violence. Through this extraordinary woman's life story, The Years with Laura Díaz offers an unblinking look at the tumultuous cultural and political scene in 20th-century Mexico.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A radiant family saga set in a century of Mexican history, by one of the world's greatest writers.

Carlos Fuentes's hope-filled new novel sees the twentieth century through the eyes of Laura D'az, a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Born in 1898, this extraordinary woman grows into a wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men, and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist. A complicated and alluring heroine, she lives a happy life despite the tragedies and losses she experiences, for she has borne witness to great changes in her country's life, and she has loved and understood with unflinching honesty.

In his most important novel in decades, Carlos Fuentes has created a world filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas. The result is a novel of subtle, penetrating insight and immense power.

FROM THE CRITICS

Denver Post

Reading this magnificent novel is like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel. . . . .

Publishers Weekly

In a masterwork imbued with historical anecdotes, mystical imagery and revelations about human existence, Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz) relates the story of 20th-century Mexico through the fictional biography of Laura D az. Narrated by Laura's great-grandson, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, the central thread is straightforward: Laura grows from an unusually observant child into an attractive and passionate young woman, survives numerous revolutions and world wars, several lovers and one husband. The catalyst that keeps this chronicle engaging is Laura's desire to steer the course of her life above and beyond the political currents surging through Mexican society. Much of her life revolves around her rising and falling romances: with a Casanova who vanishes when Laura gets too close to him, a Communist whose search for his missing wife precludes their relationship and a screenwriter who is slowly dying of emphysema. She eventually marries Juan Francisco, an activist whose political passion initially attracts Laura, but ultimately disturbs and alienates her. The union produces two sons. In her later years, inspired by close acquaintances with the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Laura becomes a photographer (she photographs Kahlo's body while it is being cremated) and achieves renown almost instantly. While in other books Fuentes's characteristic riffs and dizzying, cascading sentences were intended as potential expansions of the novel, this time these gestures are used for the deepening development of the content of the book rather than of its form. Fuentes's emotional commitment to his subject shows in the lucidity of the book's underlying intellectual dialogues--the opposition of communism and fascism, the corrosion of individual identities by historical processes--which Fuentes is able to animate with a learned lyricism that should make this volume one of his most admired and memorable. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1999, the narrator of this novel arrives in the urban decay of Detroit to make a television special about the work of Mexican muralists in the United States and instead launches into a saga of the generations that precede and follow his remarkable Mexican great-grandmother, Laura Diaz. Elaborating on many of the elements that appeared in Fuentes's earlier masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, this fictionalized memoir brilliantly recaptures the turbulent and exciting history of 20th-century Mexico. It all begins when Laura's German grandfather, Don Felipe, obtains a mail-order atheist bride from his homeland, who promptly announces that despite their Protestant heritage, they will be having a Catholic wedding. Laura herself is a friend of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and the lover of great men, but her brother, son, and grandson are all casualties of Mexico's tragically unsettled politics. In his epilog, where he recites the details of his own genealogy, Fuentes acknowledges his own real-life position within the clan of Laura Diaz. A mural-mosaic of recent Mexican history by an author who has witnessed, scrutinized, and interpreted that history like no other, this roman fleuve of a novel can hardly fail to entertain and enlighten. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00.]--Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A century's worth of Mexican culture and politics is observed through the prism of the life of the eponymous protagonist of this big novel, the most lucid and satisfying fiction of Fuentes's 40year career (The Crystal Frontier, 1997, etc.).