Mexico

by James A. Michener, Steve Berry (Introduction)

Overview

Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener, whose novels hurtle from the far reaches of history to the dark corners of the world, paints an intoxicating portrait of a land whose past and present are as turbulent, fascinating, and colorful as any other on Earth. When an American journalist travels to report on the upcoming duel between two great matadors, he is ultimately swept up in the dramatic story of his own Mexican ancestry—from the brilliance and brutality of the ancients, to the iron fist of the invading Spaniards, to modern Mexico, fighting through dust and bloodshed to build a nation upon the ashes of revolution. Architectural splendors, frenzied bullfights, horrific human sacrifice: Michener weaves them all into an epic human story that ranks with the best of his beloved bestselling novels.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii.
 
Praise for Mexico
 
“Michener the storyteller at his finest . . . There are splendid and authentic scenes in the plaza de toros that are as dramatic as any written by Ernest Hemingway or Barnaby Conrad.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Astounding . . . fast-moving, intriguing . . . Michener is back in huge, familiar form with Mexico.”—Los Angeles Daily News
 
“An enthralling story . . . Michener artfully combines the history of Mexico with the art of bullfighting, teaching the reader about both and telling a grand story at the same time.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A novel of epic proportions, abounding in visual and historical detail.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804151566
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/18/2014
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	656
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

James A. Michener was one of the world’s most popular writers, the author of more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the bestselling novels The Source, Hawaii, Alaska, Chesapeake, Centennial, Texas, Caribbean, and Caravans, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1907

Date of Death:

October 16, 1997

Place of Death:

Austin, Texas

Education:

B.A. in English and history (summa cum laude), Swarthmore College, 1929; A.M., University of Northern Colorado, 1937.

Read an Excerpt

I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind. And since it had not yet happened, I had been ordered to get photographs, too.
 
I was therefore burdened with unfamiliar gear—a large carrying case of Japanese cameras, some of which could photograph swift action occurring at a distance—and as my rickety bus trundled across central Mexico I wondered what I could do to protect these cameras if I followed my inclination to walk into the city from Kilometer 303.
 
I knew no one in the crowded bus and the cameras were far too valuable to entrust to strangers, so I resigned myself to staying on the bus and guarding them the seven remaining kilometers into the city. But as we approached Kilometer 303 the inchoate longing that had always possessed me at this curious spot in the highway surged over me with terrible force, and I was tempted to jump out and leave my cameras to chance.
 
Fighting back this childish impulse, I slumped in my seat and tried not to look at the road that had always haunted me, but I was powerless to keep my eyes away from it. Like many Mexican boys of good family, at thirteen I had been packed off to Lawrenceville School near Princeton, “to learn some English,” my father had grumbled, and sometimes on the green lawn of that excellent school I had stopped and gasped for breath, choked by nostalgia for the road I was now on. Later at Princeton, where there were also many young men from Mexico, I would sometimes seek out boys who had known this area and I would ask haltingly, “Have you ever seen anything lovelier than the view of Toledo from that gash in the hills where the road winds down from Kilometer 303?” And if my friends had ever seen this miraculous spot for themselves we would indulge our homesickness and think of our city of Toledo, the fairest in Mexico, as it displayed its golden iridescence in the late afternoon sun.
 
As a matter of fact, I think I became a writer because of this scintillating view. It had always been assumed by my parents that I would graduate from Princeton as my ancestors from Virginia had been doing since 1764, and that I would then take one year of graduate work in mining at Colorado and return to the silver mines of Toledo, which my family had been operating for many years. But all this changed in my junior year at college, when I wrote a prize-winning essay that occasioned much favorable comment among the English faculty. It described the view of Toledo from a point just beyond Kilometer 303 as it might have been seen in sequence by an Aztec district governor in 1500, by Cortés in 1524, by a Spanish priest in 1530, by a German traveler in 1660, by an American mining engineer in 1866—that would be my grandfather—and by General Gurza in the revolutionary battles of 1918.
 
Actually, it is not correct to say that I wrote this essay that was to have such influence in my life. I started it, and the visions came to me so vividly, so directly from the heart of Mexico and from my own memories, that I merely recorded them. In a sense, this prize was a damnable thing, for long after I had become a professional writer I remembered the ease with which I had composed the essay. And I was never again to experience that facility. But the visions I conjured up that day have lived with me forever.
 
Now they possessed me, and I surrendered myself to them, my glowing memories of Toledo, and I was reacting to them in my sentimental way when I saw through the window of the bus a sight that captured my imagination. Two young Indian women wearing leather sandals, rough-cloth skirts and bright shawls, and with their hair in swaying braids, were walking along the road toward Toledo. Obviously, they were heading for the Festival of Ixmiq, the site of my assignment, and the soft rhythm of their movement, from the undulating braids down to their slim ankles, reminded me of all the Indians I had ever seen walking home from my father’s mines, and I wanted to be with them as I had been forty years ago, and I found myself impulsively shouting in Spanish, “Halt the bus! Halt the bus! I’ll walk in from here.”
 
As the surprised driver ground down on his ancient brakes and as they squealed back in protest, I looked hurriedly about the bus in search of someone to whom I could entrust my bag of cameras, and it may seem curious to a typical American who might have a prejudiced view of Mexico, but I could hear my Mexican mother saying: “In other parts of Mexico evil men may steal now and then, but in Toledo we have only honest people.” Deciding to rely on her judgment, I quickly studied my fellow passengers to identify someone I could trust.
 
I saw in the rear an unusual-looking fellow who was watching me with aloof but sardonic amusement. He was about twenty-five years old, blond, quite handsome and dressed in what young people called a Pachuca sweater, that is, a huge, woolly, loose-woven affair that looked more like a shaggy tent than an article of clothing. It was much favored by Los Angeles beatniks who were infesting Mexico under one pretense or another and had come to serve as a badge of distinction. Even if the young man had not had his conspicuous blond hair the Pachuca sweater would have assured me that he was an American, for no self-respecting Mexican would have used this sweater for other than its original purpose: to keep sheepherders warm in the mountain pastures.
 
“You want somebody…” the young man asked, leaning slightly forward.
 
“I wanted to hike into town.” For some unaccountable reason I added, “The way I did when I was a boy.”
 
“Memories?” the young man asked with amusement. He reached out with an indolent gesture to indicate that he was willing to carry my case and assured me, “I’ll sort of…” His voice trailed off.
 
At this moment an older man seated behind me intercepted me as I started passing the cameras back to the American youth, and in excellent Spanish asked: “Aren’t you John Clay’s son?”
 
“I am,” I replied in Spanish.
 
“I thought I recognized your father’s bearing. You want me to look after the cameras?”
 
I considered the question only for a fleeting moment, during which I compared the undisciplined young American lounging in the back in his ridiculous Pachuca sweater with the Mexican businessman in his conventional dark suit. In Spanish I said, “I’d deem it an act of kindness if you took care of them for me.” Thus the motion of my arm, originally directed toward the young American in the backseat, was easily diverted in flight, as it were, to the Mexican closer at hand. To the American I apologized: “He’ll know where to deposit them.”
 
The young man laughed—insolently I thought. With three chopping movements of his palm as if delivering karate blows, he dismissed me.
 
“Where are you stopping?” the Mexican businessman asked.
 
“At the House of Tile,” I replied. “Please leave the cameras with Don Anselmo.”
 
“He’s dead,” the man said simply. “His widow runs the inn.”
 
“She knows me,” I replied, starting to dismount, but then I realized that I was about to hike into the city with no camera at all, and it occurred to me that if the event I was concerned about did take place, I might profit from having some good background shots of the festival to provide local color. So I begged the disgusted bus driver to wait for an additional moment while I retrieved one of my rapid-fire Japanese cameras, and with this slung around my neck I stepped down onto the highway at Kilometer 303. The bus accelerated swiftly, leaving a hazy trail of exhaust, and I was alone at four o’clock on an April afternoon at the spot where, above any other in the world, I wanted to be.”
 

Editorial Reviews

The publisher tells us that Michener, author of 35 big books, many graced by grand one word titles of places as storied as "Hawaii", "Poland", "Texas", "Alaska", and "Caribbean", began his epic novel of Mexico in 1961, but "put the manuscript aside 20. 20. 20. and then lost track of it." Somehow the project resurfaced and the king of epics completed it, turning out yet another ambitious and crowd-pleasing historical pageant. "Mexico" embraces and animates 1500 years of cultural conflict, romance, adventure, exploitation, and bloodshed. The narrator is Norman Clay, a successful journalist in his fifties, the product of "three radically different bloodlines": Mexican Indian, Spanish, and Virginian. Born and raised in a town in Central Mexico where his family ran a silver mine, Clay was educated in the States and hadn't been home in years. His return is precipitated by an assignment to cover the showdown between two ferociously competitive bullfighters, one of Spanish descent, the other an Indian. Michener employs this type of dichotomy throughout the book. The town itself is a symbol of dualism, sporting both a brooding prehistoric pyramid which became the site of gruesome human sacrifices and an elaborate Spanish Catholic cathedral. As the battle of the matadors proceeds suspensefully in the present, flashbacks highlighting the lives of Clay's ancestors trace the rise and fall of Mexico's great civilizations; Spain's obsession with gold, silver, and the conversion of the "pagans" to Catholicism; and the often strained relationship between Mexico and the U.S. Michener is a tireless source of homey AB>anecdotes and quick characterizations, loved by his readers for his mild teaching and absorbing entertainment.

Donna Seaman

The master of The Big National Treatment (Caribbean, Alaska, Poland, etc.) moves Mexico and Mexican history to the background of a novel about the passions, fine points, and meaning of bullfighting. Readers hoping to bone up on everything there is to know about America's new free-trading partner will find that Michener's Mexican history course ends during the Kennedy Administration when, according to Random House, the author set the uncompleted manuscript aside. Rather than drenching the book in post-Vietnam revisionism, Michener, in resuming the work, has left his story and his characters frozen in the sensibility of l961 when the peso was cheaper, there was no OPEC, no Canc£n, and, since there were no animal activists, metaphors such as bullfighting could still fly. His narrator is Norman Clay, a middle-aged magazine writer, the son of a Mexican mother and a Virginian father. After decades of absence, Clay returns to Toledo, the silver-mining city founded and reshaped by his Indian and Spanish ancestors respectively. He's there to reminisce (at length) and to write a story about an annual festival centered on three days of bullfighting. As a reporter and a relative of the town's leading family, the Palafoxes, breeders of Mexico's finest fighting bulls, Clay has an entr‚e to everything of interest going on in Toledo. Hooked up by his publisher with a party of oil-rich Oklahomans, Clay has scores of opportunities to use that entr‚e—and does, introducing the Yanquis to all the matadors, picadors, and the ghosts of the past. Anything Clay doesn't know about bulls, Leon Ledesma, the country's leading critic of the bullring and a charming, world-class cynic, does. TheOklahomans, staying up for those late Mexican suppers, learn plenty. The youngest of them, a pretty heiress just out of high school, learns just enough but not too much about Love and Nobility from the matadors. Genteel, free of epic overkill, safe for all ages, although kids may ask, "What's a bullfight?" (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for January)

Kirkus Reviews

Michener the storyteller at his finest . . . There are splendid and authentic scenes in the plaza de toros that are as dramatic as any written by Ernest Hemingway or Barnaby Conrad.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Astounding . . . fast-moving, intriguing . . . Michener is back in huge, familiar form with Mexico.”—Los Angeles Daily News
 
“An enthralling story . . . Michener artfully combines the history of Mexico with the art of bullfighting, teaching the reader about both and telling a grand story at the same time.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A novel of epic proportions, abounding in visual and historical detail.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

From the Publisher