Pérez-Reverte's Mexican 'Revolution': good bill, little grounds

The subtitle reads “a novel”, but what Pérez Reverte has written in

is an adventure film set in revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1914, with its waste of gunpowder, bullets, harshness, and violent characters.

The narrative syntax is that of a script, with temporary hiatus between scenes that combine interiors and exteriors in which the adventures of the hero are mixed with the evolution of the popular rebellion.

War as background and habitat, friendship and love, loyalty and betrayal, righteousness and duplicity, courage and insidiousness feed the well-oiled machine of the plot: all the pieces fit together and acquire their function in the precise moment.

Even the anticipatory beginning seems to be told by a voice-over ("This is the story of a man, a revolution and a treasure") that invites you to sit back and attend to the flow of a story whose characters act in a linear fashion,

with the fixity or rigidity of stereotypes.

The reader them

how they speak and behave, but he is not invited into their mental mechanism, into their resolute or hesitant, clear or darkened consciousness.

Thus, it is natural —perhaps in self-irony on the part of the author— that the protagonist, the Spanish mining engineer Martín Garret, tells Pancho Villa that “he would be surprised by how little there is in those insides”, his, because he is only “ a man who looks”.

The reader sees how the protagonists speak and behave, but is not invited to enter their mental mechanism, their consciousness.

And what he looks at and the reader sees is his accidental immersion in the Villista troops through the fictitious Major Genovevo Garza, the taking of Ciudad Juárez and the disappearance of the loot obtained from a bank robbery in Chihuahua.

The young Garret, employed in the Northern Mining, becomes a dynamite, gains the trust of Garza and Villa, arouses the dislike of the grim Sarmiento, crosses paths with a gringo mercenary and a reporter struggling to get out of trouble (Diana Palmer) , falls in love with the beauty of the inconvenient Yunuen, faces a duel (watch out for Captain Córdova) for that impeded love and, finally, becomes for a year and a half one of the men who fights in the North under the command of Pancho Villa.

The fast-paced action, the fragility of individual destiny in a turbulent historical situation like revolutionary Mexico,

and the great adventure novel (Conrad of course, from whom he takes the exergue that opens the novel), but also, without a doubt, from the author's own experience as a war reporter.

In fact, it is not unreasonable to suppose that in the maturation of the very young Garret (his adventure extends between his 24 and 26 years) Reverte has lodged a good dose of his own learning of the human condition in extreme situations, when the moral character is revealed of human beings.

The fast-paced action, the fragility of individual destiny in a turbulent historical situation like revolutionary Mexico, come from the

from the great adventure novel and from the author's own experience as a war reporter

The educated Garret is subjected to a second education, that of the world of violence and the primary values ​​that seek to legitimize it.

His learning in the rudeness and inclemency among Villistas who speak a laborious Mexican is parallel to that of loyalty and blind dedication to a cause, at the root of which seems to be the search for adventure for its own sake but also the need to provide a superior sense of his own life.

In this sense, the crossing of the Rio Bravo to join Pancho Villa's general staff functions as a symbolic border from an epic that refers to John Ford's cinema, a ritual context in which Garrett's education as a laconic, seasoned man must be placed. cool and dangerous.

novel

, entertaining and well made that leaves little residue and to which it is not necessary to demand greater importance.

look for it in your bookstore

You can follow BABELIA on

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber