The Years with Laura Diaz.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

The Years with Laura Diaz, by Carlos Fuentes. Trans., Alfred Mac Adam. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

In 1999 a Chicano photographer named Santiago Lopez-Alfaro finds himself standing in front of a mural by Diego Rivera in Detroit. His intention is to photograph the decaying city as an "epitaph for our terrible twentieth century." As he scans Rivera's depiction of faceless workers, his eye is drawn to two feminine figures with distinct features. One is Rivera's wife, Frida. The other is a beautiful, enigmatic individual who elicits in Santiago a strange sense of familiarity. She is Laura Diaz, his great-grandmother.

Like Rivera, Fuentes paints murals of vast sweep. Laura Diaz's life spanned the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, a period of tumultuous change and enormous growth. Born in 1898, she witnessed the last years of the Porfiriato, the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero Rebellion in the late 1920s, the triumph of the PRI, and the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred four years before her death in 1972. Through Santiago's search for his extraordinary ancestor, Fuentes offers a splendid panorama of modern Mexican history, in all its brilliance and brutality.

The story begins with a tellingly vicious incident. In the late 1860s Cosima Kelsen, Laura's German-born grandmother, is held up by a bunch of bandits, whose leader demands her rings. In an act of defiance, Cosima retorts that first he'll have to cut off her fingers. In a heartbeat, the robber raises his machete and chops off four of Cosima's fingers. The sadistic mutilation of this beautiful young woman in her twenties is a prelude to the epic that follows, in which Fuentes weaves together intense drama and delicate lyricism. Throughout the book calamity follows joy. Laura experiences tragedy from an early age, losing first a brother to the Revolution, then a son to illness. Years later, she loses her grandson at Tlatelolco. In the interim, she witnesses class straggles, political clashes, and labor violence, as ambition and corruption unleash the darkest forces of the human soul.

Like Mexico itself, Laura combines the European and the indigenous. Through her, Fuentes expresses the cultural ambivalence that has characterized Mexico from the beginning of its history. The question of cultural...