Artemio Cruz is dying in bed: rich, powerful, corrupted, physically collapsing, and surrounded by the people who have learned to orbit him as money, threat, patriarch, relic. 

From that deathbed, the novel moves backward and sideways through his life: revolutionary fighter, lover, opportunist, land baron, newspaper magnate, political fixer, and finally one of those men who mistakes accumulation for survival until the body files its final paperwork. 

Fuentes uses Cruz’s memories to build a fractured history of modern Mexico after the Revolution. He tracks the idealism curdling into ownership, love becoming leverage, political struggle becoming property, and the self turning into a private archive of betrayals. It is a major Latin American modernist novel, structurally restless and morally nasty in the useful way — deathbed confession as national autopsy. The FSG Classics edition uses Alfred MacAdam’s translation and sits very nicely beside Borges, Asturias, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, etc., but with more old-man-empire rot. 

FSG Classics paperback, 2009 edition, translated by Alfred MacAdam. Good second-hand condition with light shelf wear and clean internal pages.