Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes, Alfred J. Mac Adam ISBN: 0-15-600620-0 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: A Fragile Crystal
Comment: Carlos Fuentes is a major author in Mexican literature, with notable successes in history and fiction. In this book of 266 pages, he introduces us to the lives of a spectrum of persons living on both sides of the Mexican Border, particularly with Texas. He speaks with authority about the historical injustices involved in the American conquest of Texas, the War on Mexico, and our continuing hostile dependency on each other. The Americans need cheap labor and the Mexicans need jobs. In nine vignettes (chapters), he gives us a glimpse into the lives of various persons on both sides of the border. The Mexicans come North to go to school legally or to do menial work illegally or legally. The message in this book is quite clear. We want the Mexicans when we need them to do tasks cheaply that our own labor force will not do. We do not want the Mexicans when they become dependent on us and stress our social system for such things as health care or education. Carlos Fuentes points to the type of economic slavery that this creates, not much better than the era of slavery which Abraham Lincoln fought against. Fuentes achieves some balance in showing also the internal corruption of Mexico, and the many ways that they miss opportunities to improve themselves. The vignettes are funny, sad, passionate, and sometimes lacking in clear focus. Some characters fade into and out of various chapters creating a fabric of impressions about the life on the border. The reader has to relax and let the images flow past, with the poetic inserts by Fuentes about the various conflicts. This is clearly not his best book but in some ways it perhaps reveals more of his own most heartfelt conflicts which accumulated while he spent many years as a child and young adult in the USA. It is a particularly good book to read while you are traveling near the Mexican border and can get your own impressions of this SCENE.
Rating: 1
Summary: A ROLL OF THE EYES
Comment: Anytime you write a bunch of short stories and try to thread them together with a cameo of characters from previous stories you're going to get into trouble. Because that's what it ends up being. A bunch of short stories that is said to comprise a "novel". It's hard to remember who's who from one story to the next because you've only been exposed to the characters for a short glimpse.
"The Crystal Frontier" is an unimaginative attempt at metaphor concocted by Fuentes to symbolize the frontier between Mexico and the United States. That boundary is not only the physical presence of the Rio Grande River but also of the differences between cultures.
The character that threads the stories together is a powerful Mexican businessman named Leonardo Barroso whose main export to America is cheap labor. He is introduced in the first story, called "A Capital Girl" in which he sets up his bookish son to be married to a beautiful girl. He also sets her up to be his mistress. Like a demented Amelie, Leonardo has a direct or indirect impact on all the short stories that follow. I guess it has something in common with chaos theory, but instead of a butterfly causing a hurricane, here we have a money grubbing exploitive Enron type affecting lives that he knows nothing about.
A few of the earlier stories are interesting and good. "Pain" is about a doomed love affair between two medical students, one of which got a scholarship from Leonardo. "Spoils" was a great story about a famous food critic and chef who offers his philsophy of why America is obese. It is also in that story that the book starts to destroy itself for me. Fuentes starts coming in through his characters about how America stole half of Mexico and about how we are inferior to the europeans in culture. It is in this story that Americans begin to be stereotyped as ruthless buzzards that are eating off the flesh of Mexico. I won't get into a rant just yet.
The rest of the stories in the "novel" run the gamut from average to poor and some are just downright an affront to the intellegence of a brain dead squirrel and are unreadable. Two of the most awful are the short story the book was named for, "The Crystal Frontier" and the last story in here, called "Rio Grande, Rio Bravo". "Frontier" is about a Mexican who is a complete failure in his hometown who is contracted to work in New York. His work is to clean the windows of an immense glass skycraper. While he is cleaning he notices a woman working, not knowing that she's there on a Saturday to get away from her domestic problems. There's this whole big moment where they basically fall in love just looking at each other straight out of a harlequin novel. It was just so cliched and awful.
For sheer Ed Wood sorriness "Rio Grande" takes the cake. All the characters in the earlier stories are brought together in an episode centering on an illegal crossing of Mexicans into Texas. Here we have the cliched white border guard who never goes out in the sun because he's afraid of tanning and showing the darkness inherit in his genes and who is sort of a closet Adolph Hitler. We have his subordinate, an American of Mexican descent, who is in a cliched scene where he confronts an illegal alien and is engrossed in a loving hug with him. Let's not forget the arrival of a Nazi skinhead motorcycle gang who proceed to slaughter the Mexicans right on cue. Oh boy. The horror. The horror. This book is so ludicrous it makes me sick. Oh, it is also interspersed with a Neruda-wannabe poem recounting Mexico's history.
I will soon be donating this book to my local library. Fuentes' prose is overblown and pompous. He tries so hard to be a poet but it can never be. It says on the back of the jacket that he is Mexico's greatest novelist. I weep for Mexico. I agree that America takes advantage of Mexico but Mexico also takes advantage of us. It's a cycle that has benefits and drawbacks but I think both countries ignore the problems. Sometimes I don't understand why Mexico has never been able to get its act together and why there even has to be the problems we have. Fuentes seems to place most if not all the responsibility on the US. He does place some blame on Mexico itself when he states that "whoever said Mexicans have the right to be well-governed?"
Obviously he likes the politics in his country enough to be an ambassador to France for it. And I have a lot of suspicion for a man who "champions the poor" when he divides his time between Mexico City and London. It must be rough trying to get by on the little amount of money he makes.
Rating: 5
Summary: Insights from the Outsider
Comment: Fuentes does not bridge the gap between two colossal cultures, he defines that gap. As a gringo in his own country Mexico, and a foreigner in the US, he is qualified and capable to draw a honest and sensitive picture of these two countries and its characters. He uses the physical divide to draw a picture of what really matters to him - the poverty and impasse existence of myriads of people in Mexico. Luckily, there is only a hint of his (far leftist) politics, and we are allowed to enjoy his cultural insight, deep understanding of characters, compassion for suffering, and sense of humor. A powerful author, but short of the genius of friend and peer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
 |
Title: LA Frontera De Cristal: Una Novela En Nueve Cuentos by Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes ISBN: 9681902688 Publisher: Ediciones Alfaguara, S.A. Pub. Date: 31 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
 |
Title: The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre by Octavio Paz, Lysander Kemp ISBN: 080215042X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: June, 1985 List Price(USD): $14.50 |
 |
Title: Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto ISBN: 0671532766 Publisher: Washington Square Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
 |
Title: Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots, & Graffiti from the US/Mexico Border by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, John William Byrd, Bobby Byrd ISBN: 0938317598 Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: The Old Gringo : A Novel by Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Sayers Peden ISBN: 0374525226 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 31 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
