The insurgent Mexico of Arturo Pérez-Reverte

The creative stage that Arturo Pérez-Reverte is going through is amazing.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 October 2022 Saturday 09:42
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The insurgent Mexico of Arturo Pérez-Reverte

The creative stage that Arturo Pérez-Reverte is going through is amazing. The writer from Cartagena has been publishing one book a year, which usually appears at the beginning of autumn. Rugged novels, full of energy, that immediately become best sellers. Also essays on interpretation and historical dissemination.

The singular thing about the case is that at this moment in his career, when it would seem that he had his work done and the author, born in 1951, recognized and successful, could take life and literary creation more relaxed, in the midst of a wide production of verifiable quality has managed in a short time to deliver two major works. In 2020 it was Line of Fire, an in-depth vision of the Spanish civil war through the struggle in a small town on the Ebro Front, which was awarded by the Critics. And now comes Revolution.

The Mexican revolution of the second decade of the 20th century constitutes a myth in contemporary history and in the thinking of the international left. Also in the collective memory of the Spaniards, not a few of whom, like the one who signs these lines, had a relative who emigrated to Mexico had lived through those times and in their old age remembered them with retrospective emotion or fear.

It has inspired canonical works of journalism and narrative, from John Reed's insurgent Mexico to Carlos Fuentes' crepuscular Gringo Viejo. Among these inescapable references will now be the father of Captain Alatriste.

Pérez-Reverte's novel follows the hectic and extremely violent period that goes from the end of the presidency of Porfirio Díaz to the taking of power by Carranza through the adventures of a young protagonist, Martín Garret Ortiz, a Spanish mining engineer who casually is involved in a shootout in a Mexican city. Spotted by the revolutionaries, he is compelled to assist them in blowing up a bank safe. From then on, his destiny will be linked to the movement -always with the doubt of whether "he will be able" to do what they ask him-, and especially to Pancho Villa, with one of whose lieutenants, Genovevo Garza, he establishes a friendly relationship between and pseudo-affiliate.

Why does a brilliant Spanish professional, associated with conservative circles, get into a mess that, as he will soon see, is inseparable from shocking violence, with the background roar of gunfights, the incessant retaliation and control shootings, and with the bodies of hanged men dancing in the air?

Between fascinated and horrified, Martín is moved by the curiosity of someone who is starting out in life and bumps into characters and situations that are more intense than he could have imagined. But he too has an instinctive sympathy for “those from below” – as the Mexican novelist Mariano Azuela dubbed them – due to his own family background and a lax but persistent sense of justice.

And on the human level, he sympathizes with those generous, ferocious and disheveled characters who have taken up arms against an oppressive situation, and who, the usual dilemma of revolutions, by assuming even a small parcel of power, reveal themselves as brutal or more brutal. than the former masters, and with all their leaders at war with each other.

The warlike setting and the reflection on what war implies is a characteristic in the work of Pérez-Reverte, who not in vain reported on the subject for twenty years from different international scenarios. In Revolution there are abundant battle scenes, with gunpowder, dust, noise and blood, sometimes deliberately confusing, because as the author recalls and as Fabrizio del Dongo of Stendhal knew, from within a combat it is almost impossible to have a general vision of what what is happening.

But the adventures of the young Martín are not limited to the insurgent side: due to his profession and contacts he also has access to the world of the privileged, where families like the Laredos enjoy dream villas in a modernizing metropolis whose center remains beautiful and neat, especially for the enjoyment of the upper classes. In those environments where Martín is claimed by his personal attractiveness and his contacts with rising power, he will meet other characters, such as the young Yunuen or the soldier Córdova, who will be decisive in his itinerary.

And it will go through episodes such as the presidency of Madero –assassinated along with his brother–, the triumphant entry of Villa's troops into the capital or the counterattack that gives power to Carranza, with the consequent elaboration of the Mexican Constitution and a very relative pacification from the country.

There are several common threads in this party for readers. This is a very vigorous, panoramic and informative historical novel, with elements of intrigue – the missing treasure of the bank robbery. But he especially offers a learning story, a coming of age about what moves a young man to enter danger zones, and how he gets to know himself in them: "I'm in Mexico because things are learned," he confesses. the protagonist at a certain point. “Mexico is not a game, Martín. Here you die”, the American journalist Diana Palmer will observe.

The most characteristic Revertian hero –from Alatriste to Falcó- is usually a tough and skeptical veteran but still capable of embracing a just cause. In Revolution, on the other hand, we find a twentysomething who asks himself questions about existence until, like Dumas's D'Artagnan or Stevenson's Jim Hawkins, surprising figures involved in life or death battles cross his path. And as in the oldest stories of human history, the adventure begins.

The best novel by Pérez-Reverte? At least and without a doubt, one of the best.

Arturo Perez-Reverte

Revolution

ALFAGUARA

464 PAGES. 22.90 EUROS. ON SALE OCTOBER 4