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The Death of Artemio Cruz

A corrupt press baron lies dying in his Mexico City mansion, and his fevered memory ranges back across the making of modern Mexico: his birth on a Veracruz estate, the Revolution in which he fought and betrayed, the marriage into a Puebla landowning family that founded his fortune, and the empire of newspapers and deals he built in the capital. Fuentes maps a life onto a country, the deathbed in the city holding all the places that made Artemio Cruz.

Artemio Cruz

Artemio Cruz's mansion, Mexico City

The present

The whole novel is spoken from this bed, where the old man drifts in and out of consciousness while his wife and daughter wait for him to die and for the will to be read. From the mansion of a life's plunder, his memory reaches back for the moments that made and unmade him.

Framing narrative

inferred The dying Artemio lies in his grand house in Mexico City, placed among the wealthy western districts such as Las Lomas; the specific mansion is invented and sited in that part of the real city.

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