Diana, o, La cazadora solitaria.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

In this tedious, rambling novel Carlos Fuentes tells the story of a successful Mexican writer, suspiciously like himself, who falls for a second-rate movie star named Diana Soren. Middle-aged and married, the narrator periodically heaves Luisa Guzman, his beautiful Mexican wife, to carry on affairs, but this time, he won't go back home. Diana's grip on him is too tight. While meditating on Latin America's "change of skin" (Fuentes' Cambio de piel was published in 1967), he follows her everywhere, finally winding up in Santiago, a frontier town where she is filming another B-movie.

More than a novel, this book is a long, self-righteous meditation on the Western world in general, and Hollywood in particular. The narrator laments the tendency of the West to find "revolutionary paradises" in the Third World and Hollywood's tendency to take on liberal causes in order to disguise its own hypocrisy and avarice. He deplores American racism, exploitation, and cultural imperialism and disdains Americans' lack of a "serious sense of death." He repeats age-old cliches about cruel, sanctimonious Puritans and brave, noble Spanish conquistadores without examining the cultural and historical ambiguities of the colonization process. Although there is certainly much truth in some of his observations, his generalizations are simplistic: "every gringo," he asserts, is a racist; every single American is guilt ridden. Equally offensive are his remarks about Mexican women, whom he characterizes as empty-headed, spoiled brats.

In spite of his constant gringo-bashing, Fuentes's protagonist seems only too intent on dropping the names of influential American intellectuals and kowtowing to the Americans on the movie set. When a youth leader in Santiago asks him to become involved in the students' struggle against PRI domination, he declines, afraid that he might upset his American friends, to whom he seems positively diffident. Stranger still is his obsession with Diana, the blond, middle-class Midwesterner for whom he forsakes his dazzling, politically committed Mexican wife.

After a while he becomes aware that Diana has a secret life. In the middle of the night she engages in strange, mysterious telephone conversations. Eavesdropping as best he can, he surmises that Diana has another lover, this one, a Black Panther. Eventually, she leaves him and has a baby -...