("The Death of Artemio Cruz")

[fiefoe]

Carlos Fuentes gave lucid interviews, so finding this book such tough going was a bit of a surprise. All those jumbled lists and rapid changes  of point of view make it hard to get through more than ten pages at one go, even though the story and the characters are pretty much what you'd expect from a book about a dying tycoon.

• You will think that you have done so mnay cowardly things that it's easy for you to be brave.
• ... the substance of your spirit absorbed by matter: .. the ambition of growing fingernails, the tedium of progressive baldness.., the old age of an abandoned beach.
• Never have you been able to think in black and white, good guys versus bad guys:.. admit that always, even when it seemed just the opposite, you've found the germ, the reflection of the white in the black.
• Perhaps because we are more forsaken, we do not want to lose that intermediate, ambiguous zone between light and shadow, that zone where we can find forgiveness.
• Eyes, lips, hard, smooth breasts alternated between helplessness and rage.
• Awareness weakens us, turns us into victims when we realize that the powers will not consult us, will not take us into account.
• She was ashamed of having done it, even once, of having thought that her love could come to an end or be measured by the time used to measure other things.
• ... that seren body.. wrapped up in itself with the smoothness of a moon in mourning.
• (On eyes:) their depths like sand mixed in time, dark cherries from the tree of flesh and hot entrails.