by Carlos Fuentes
Ambrose Bierce was a newspaperman at the turn of the century who made a reputation by writing for Hearst's most sensational papers. He disappeared into Mexico, and no one knows what happened to him. This book, a sort of extrapolation from Bierce's life, is a haunting meditation on a 71-year-old American who rides horseback into Mexico and joins a group of revolutionaries in Chihuahua, the scorched desert land. The fighters have taken over a grand hacienda. Its owners have fled, and the woman teacher they hired for their children arrives to find the house—all but a mirrored ballroom—burned to the ground by Pancho Villa's men. The teacher, from Washington, D.C., adopts the old man as her surrogate father as she sets to work with the peasant children. Because he has come to Mexico seeking death, the old gringo is fearless in battle. After the men are awed by his bravery, he muses, "Was he here to die or to write a novel about a Mexican general and an old gringo and a Washington schoolteacher lost in the deserts of northern Mexico?" This novel's major theme is the fascination North Americans have with Mexico, which often appears to be a land of violence and death. Fuentes, the author of Terra Nostra and eight other books, is Mexico's best-known novelist. The Old Gringo is full of fine descriptive passages, but the melodramatic plot and the strange, repetitive dialogue are curiously distancing. The novel is like a long, careful poem—written in prose. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $ 14.95)
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