The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magon

Serving time in a U.S. penitentiary, Ricardo Flores Magon recounts his involvement with Emiliano Zapata and discusses American interference in Mexican politics, internal rivalries, and the disbanding of Mexican leaders

Day ( Journey of the Wolf ) has discovered a fascinating protagonist for this novel of ideas--the eponymous Flores Magon, the anarchist journalist and failed lawyer (1873-1922) who became the voice and the conscience of the 1914 Mexican Revolution. Part biography and part polemic directed against the failed opportunities of the Revolution, the book takes the form of notebooks scribbled by Flores Magon in the Leavenworth (Kans.) penitentiary where he is imprisoned for having violated United States neutrality laws. Flashbacks cover Flores Magon's life from his birth in Oaxaca through the last days before his mysterious death in his cell. Through its pages pass the arrogant Pancho Villa, the reluctant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and the string of Mexican dictators against whom they fought. Joe Hill and Emma Goldman, who becomes Flores Magon's lover, also make brief appearances. Day adopts a lean, muscular style, but it takes a special writer to make this masculine prose work, and Day is neither a Malraux nor a Montherlant; ultimately, the hero's voice is not strong enough to propel the novel. The one altogether fictional character, the sultry lover of both Zapata and his brother, is treated rather badly, and an unpleasant strain of sexism runs through the work. The rich historical material here, however, exerts a pull on the reader's imagination.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fictional notebooks in which a historically real Mexican anarchist intellectual describes his country's revolution of 1914, his experiences with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and his thoughts about the cause to which he has given his life. Day (Journey of Wolf, 1977) based the notebooks, which he portrays as written in Leavenworth prison in 1922, largely on Flores Magnon's letters, many written to an admirer who called herself Ellen White. And obviously the author has done his homework, as the book meticulously details much of the ebb and flow of the extraordinarily complicated struggle to overthrow Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915) and his successors, not neglecting its color and passion. But Day doesn't tell it chronologically, which may confuse readers seeking to grasp the essentials of the revolution through a fictionalized account. In an introduction, however, he makes it clear that the book is chiefly about its narrator and not about the events of history, although all the characters (except for an invented revolutionary woman whom Flores Magon loves) were actual people. The narrator, on which the book stands or falls, is an ironist who has seen too many hopes abandoned or betrayed, and as he writes, he distances himself somewhat from his earlier, enthusiastic self. Somehow, though, he doesn't ring true. A gringo intellectual is sensed behind this too self-conscious Mexican. Even the outsized figures of Villa and the Zapata brothers are diminished by being filtered through the consciousness of a man who seems to have settled for being ineffectual. What does come through unreduced is the sorry role the US played in this popular revolt, brutally fought by both sides. A vivid chapter in Mexican history but told by a less-than- vivid narrator. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Flores Magon (1873--1922) was a Mexican journalist and anarchist theoretician whose calls for radical revolution inspired opponents of the regimes of Porfirio Diaz, Francis Madero, and Venustiano Carranza. As a result, Flores Magon spent much time in prison both in Mexico and in the United States, where he fled. Alas, there was no escape for someone with such radical beliefs, and he ended up in Leavenworth Penitentiary, where he died in 1922 under mysterious circumstances. Day has created a fictional autobiography that accurately projects the chaos that was Mexican politics at the turn of the century and includes such colorful characters as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. He portrays Flores Magon as a sympathetic figure who comes to understand that there is often a great gulf between theory and reality but who remains defiant to the end. While interesting and well wrought, this is unfortunately not the sort of work likely to generate great demand. Primarily for larger public and academic libraries and those serving a Hispanic clientele.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.