"Carlos Fuentes is like a walking mural: he has the universal dignity of Rivera's indigenous faces, the burning passion of Siqueiros, the universal vocation of Tamayo, the luminous torn images of Frida Kahlo, and the aching ardor of a poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
So too —like a great painting, a mural— is The Years with Laura Díaz. As we all knpow, murals are stories of stories, are the religious, civil, moral and personal memory of people. And in this novel Fuentes brings us voices from the past that conserve part of our history: the voices of our grandmothers and unmarried aunts, women from the provinces who speak of the times that shaped our lives today —from the Revolution of 1910 to the Cristera War of 1928, from the formation of PRI and its corruption to the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. This great panorama is filtered through the sensibility of mothers, daughters, lovers, and wives who represent different facets of Mexico during a hundred years of violent contrast.
I, as a Mexican woman, would like to celebrate Carlos Fuentes: it is worthy of applause that a man who has seen, observed, analyzed and criticized the great occurrences of this century now has a woman, Laura Díaz, speak for him".
—Laura Esquivel, Reforma
"[Fuentes] does not skimp on constructive, meaningful elements at every level: the protagonist and her family are presented and re-presented with a notable poetics of detail, the novelist assembling the defining circumstances of each situation: its smells, tastes, fruits and flowers, cuisines, wardrobes and objects... recalling the best of Balzac and Galdós... But the novel is not only about Mexico: it is also about civil-war Spain and its Republican culture, exiled in Mexico; the importance of McCarthyism also gains added meaning in its mosaic of references. Fuentes trascends the limits of Mexicanness and engages with the great ideological dilemmas of the century.
It is not too much to say that this is a decisive work in the literary life of its authot and of the late-twentieth-century novel".
"For many, many writers of my young generation Carlos Fuentes was a master. We studied, pored over, all but traced his novels. Now, thirty years on, he is still a master, undiminished. Laura Díaz is a subtle, comprehensive, witty and (as always with Fuentes) subversive in its views of the present as outcome from the past. This is Fuentes at the top.
"Carlos Fuentes is like a walking mural: he has the universal dignity of Rivera's indigenous faces, the burning passion of Siqueiros, the universal vocation of Tamayo, the luminous torn images of Frida Kahlo, and the aching ardor of a poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
—Laura Esquivel, Reforma
"Fuentes trascends the limits of Mexicanness and engages with the great ideological dilemmas of the century. It is not too much to say that this is a decisive work in the literary life of its authot and of the late-twentieth-century novel".
