The Years with Laura Diaz
Carlos Fuentes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p><b>A radiant and epic new novel that is among the finest achievements of Mexico's greatest man of letters.</b></p><p><b>The Years With Laura Diaz</b> is <b><i>Carlos Fuentes</i></b>' most important novel in several decades. Like his masterpiece <b>The Death of Artemio Cruz</b>, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and moves to Mexico City - tracing a migration during the Revolution and its aftermath that was a feature of Mexico's demographic history and that is a significant element in Fuentes's fictional world.<br></p><p>Now the principal figure is not <b>Artemio Cruz</b> (who, however, makes a brief appearance) but Fuentes's first major female protagonist, the extraordinary Laura Diaz. Carlos Fuentes's richly woven narrative tapestry - filled with a multitude of dramatic scenes both witty, amusing, and heartbreaking - shows us this wonderful creature as she grows into a politically committed artist who is also a wife and mother, a lover of great men, a complicated and alluring heroine whose brave honesty prevails despite her losing a son and grandson to the darkest forces of Mexico's repressive, corrupt regimes. In the end, Laura Diaz herself dies, after a life filled with tragedy and loss, but she is a happy woman, for she has borne witness to, and helped to affect, the course of history and has vindicated the aims and intentions of the highest art.<br></p>