"Your own cruelty, when you've been cruel, hasn't it always been tinged with a certain tenderness? You know that all extremes contain their opposites: cruelty and tenderness, cowardice and bravery; life, death."
"When both of you realize one single world would be enough and yet you keep silent, who will live in that silence?"
"Your heart will still beat in an accelerated rhythm, because you are conscious that after today the unknown adventure begins, the world is opening, offering you its time... You exist.. You are standing on the mountain... You answer Lunero with a whistle... You are going to live... You are going to be the meeting point, the universal order's reason for being... Your body has a reason for being... Your life has a reason for being.. You are, you will be, you were, the universe incarnate... For you, the galaxies will light up and the sun will burn... All so that you can love and live and be... So that you will find the secret and die without being part of it, because you will possess it only when your eyes close forever... You, standing there, Cruz, thirteen years old, at the edge of life..."
This is a book mostly composed of Artemio Cruz's last grip on life and jumps around in time showing the essence of his life. He was a calculated and almost cold person in his life, and yet the book ends with such feeling when he was a boy and his life just began. The story is sporadic and hard to follow at times since he's hallucinating and jumping from one time period to another but in the end boils down to cheating death and lost love. It is very sensitive even though the Artemio is a mafia-type of guy. I enjoyed the stream of consciousness of a dying man who had so much to say as he was leaving the world.
Pub info:
Fuentes, C., & J, A. (2009). The death of Artemio Cruz. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux.
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