[In The Death of Artemio Cruz] Fuentes's hero-villain, Artemio Cruz—Mexican industrialist, newspaper and land-owner, millionaire—lies on his death-bed while his devoted secretary, his despised and despising wife and daughter jostle around him…. And he lies there in a trance of disgust: disgust with those around him, with his past and, above all, with his own physical presence. Idealism, ambition, passion, and achievement all end in one corruption, the smell of which horrifies him. He reeks in his own nostrils.

Literally so, for by an odd trick of style all Fuentes's most vivid perceptions come in as scents on the air. He is a writer with a nose and no eye. Whenever he piles up visual details, listing the goodies in Cruz's mansions, his grandiose arrays of clothes and mistresses, the writing goes dead; he sounds less like an artist than a compiler of baroque inventories. Only smells seem really to get through to him imaginatively: the smell of his skin, his breath, his faeces, the smell of girls and food…. Like a hunting dog, he sees through his nose. And this has a curious effect: it makes the book, for all its scope, intensely private.

This claustrophobia of the self is emphasized by the form. Cruz's story is told in three persons. "I" is the old man dying on his bed; "you" is a slightly vatic, "experimental" projection of his potentialities into an unspecified future (you know it is experimental because the letters are in lower-case and the punctuation scanty); "he" is the real hero, the man whose history emerges bit by bit from incidents shuffled around from his seventy-one years….

Since Fuentes is a sophisticated writer—at times an over-sophisticated over-writer—the gradual hardening and corruption of his hero is done with a good deal of subtlety and intelligence. He is never allowed to become a monster since the process he represents, though monstrous enough, is also natural…. Fuentes, apparently, is a Marxist yet he is also literate and humane, unwilling to trust the bullies who take over revolutions; hence Cruz remains sympathetic and accepted, despite all his corruption. More important, Fuentes the Marxist is also deeply romantic. In fact, his romanticism is Marxist, and vice versa. For all his worldliness, he yearns for the pure revolution, the pure choice between right and wrong, justice and exploitation. The compromises of political reality seem insufferable. (p. 14)