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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

The Underdog (1928)by Mariano Azuela



Book Review
The Underdogs (1928)
by Mariano Azuela

Replaces: The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Revere

  The Underdogs is Mexico's Soviet-style experiment in cultural promotion.  It was the Mexican Government that sponsored the English language translation, and its promotional efforts that helped to solidify The Underdogs as THE novel about the Mexican revolution.  The translation attempts to convey the class based speaking style of the Mexican peasants who are swept into the battles surrounding the revolution.  Scenes depicting the ransacking of the homes of the wealth are as explicit as anything you'd see this side of Russia or Chinese books celebrating the virtues of their revolutions.  Mariano Azuela, the author was:

A liberal by faith and a doctor by profession, he was, like his protagonist, from a small village, Lagos de Moreno, in the state of Jalisco. He moved to Guadalajara, an urban center, to study medicine, and supported Madero in his quest to unseat Díaz. Azuela’s Maderismo paid off when he was named director of education of his home state, but when the elected president was assassinated, thus igniting the chaos that came to be known as “la revolución mexicana,” Azuela, too, joined the Villistas, as a doctor. The commitment allowed him to see the tragedy from the trenches in a way that, to me, at least, recalls the itinerary of Isaac Babel’s in Red Cavalry. His first literary sketches, published in a newspaper of the country’s capital, and influenced by his experience as an internist, date back to 1896. His influences were Edmond de Goncourt, Abbé Prevost, and, in particular, Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias.

  And therefore not a member of the revolutionary class whose exploits he glorified.   That doesn't really count as a strike against him, and it's nice to have a book about revolutionary Mexico actually written by a Mexican national, and not an English expatriate, in the canon.


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