published by Dalkey Archive (Lannan Selections)

In the first pages of Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes' first novel, overseer Ixca Cienfuegos invokes Mexico City's poetic sublime with its wreath of cactus, guitars on the streets, its rough face of strident music and brown mud. If you listen to Cienfuegos' preface closely, you will hear a voice, with echoes of Eliot, Borges and even Proust, the voice of a nation in search of defining itself on the world stage. He is a collector of crimes and sins, a purveyor of truths and illuminations, a narrator who is both protagonist and antagonist. Follow him into the lives of the bourgeoisie, the intelligencia, and the working class, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to the 1950s.

Written in the baroque style, Where the Air Is Clear is an ambitious undertaking with a complex--and sometimes vexing--structure that dispatches history in the attache case of high art. An impassioned revolutionary becomes a covetous and insatiable capitalist. With the help of his influential new friends, a failed writer becomes one of the nation's most successful screenwriters. A poor widowed mother confesses her struggle to raise her son, a boy whose haunting face becomes that of his unknown father's, a revolutionary who was shot in the back by a firing squad during the revolution. A woman of humble origins who, when challenged by her lover, abandons him in the name self-preservation, wealth and power.

Fuentes' scathing examination incites the poet, the artist, and the reader to find lucidity in the criminal atmosphere of Mexico City:

Snakes, those historic creatures, drowse in your urns... Don't break, my brother. Don't yield. Sharpen your knives, deny everything, feeling no pity, without parleying, without even looking. Let go your migrant nostalgia and all your loose ends and everyday begin again from birth. And at last recover the flame again in an imperceptible moment amid the sound of guitars on the street when it will seem that all your memories are clear and you are ablaze. Recover it alone, for none of your heroes will return to help you.

While it is unclear in certain passages who is speaking and to whom, it is well worth the effort to press on. The characters' confessions to Cienfuegos beckon the reader to continue through the chaos of political upheaval in order to discover a foreign history in the tragic arcs of lives shaped by the individual events of the past, lives conjured and traced by an exceptional pen.nth