SOURCE: "In Realms of Gold," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4758, June 10, 1994, p. 23.

In the following review, Kerrigan offers a favorable assessment of The Orange Tree.

Carlos Fuentes established his international reputation over three decades ago, with The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). That novel goes in search of the identity of a protagonist who is modern down to his Volvo, and Mexican down to the parasites in his gut, but the quest ends up taking in a past of conquest and revolution, and looks far beyond Cruz's native Veracruz to the shores of the Mediterranean. Like the stars Cruz sees overhead—"only the ghost of the light that began its journey countless years ago, countless centuries"—the past informs the present. Its churches the reconsecrated shrines of Indian deities and its public buildings based on Spanish models, modern-day Mexico is unthinkable without this past.

Not that history is necessarily...