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Article: Refried Beans.(Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- February 19, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Years with Laura Diaz, by Carlos Fuentes (Farrar, Straus, 516 pp., $26)
Carlos Fuentes has benefited from a kind of literary affirmative action: He is Mexico's best-known novelist and therefore considered its most talented and accomplished, with an oeuvre that is important because it is . . . important. However, any talent he previously showed has slipped badly, and he is now in decline.
In The Years with Laura Diaz, Fuentes has produced a politically correct female equivalent to his most famous work, The Death of Artemio Cruz, published in the U.S. in 1964. Artemio Cruz was a brilliantly nuanced chronicle of modern Mexico through the life of a ...