In The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes imagines the final disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer and Civil War veteran who vanished in Mexico in 1913 after crossing the border during the Mexican Revolution.

Fuentes turns that historical uncertainty into a feverish, symbolic novel about age, violence, national myth, desire and the strange vanity of men who go looking for death and call it destiny. The “old gringo” arrives in revolutionary Mexico already half in love with his own ending. Around him move General Arroyo, a revolutionary leader carrying both pride and grievance, and Harriet Winslow, an American woman whose own inherited ideas about civilisation, duty and control begin to come apart in the heat. 

Fuentes writes with a grand, almost operatic intensity, but the book is sharpest when it turns its attention to performance: who gets to be heroic, who gets remembered, who gets sacrificed, and who mistakes violence for meaning. A good one for readers of political fiction, Latin American literature, borderland histories, and novels where everyone is speaking partly to each other and partly to the monument they hope will be built over them.

First UK hardback edition, published by André Deutsch in 1986. Originally published in Spanish as El Gringo Viejo in 1985; English translation copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. Very good condition overall, with light shelf wear and handling to jacket/boards; clean internal pages and firm binding.