Revolution Is Hell

THE UNDERDOGS (149 pp.)--Mariano Azuela--Signet (60-c-).

Mexico's bestselling novel of all time is, ironically, a bitter attack on the most sacred event in Mexican history: the 1910 Revolution. It takes an exceptional writer to go against his native grain and still be popular. But Mariano Azuela wrote The Underdogs with such unsparing honesty that he was forgiven his iconoclasm. Few novels have so fiercely proclaimed that war, revolution included, is hell.

Reissued now in paperback, in a new English translation, The Underdogs is less a narrative than a series of sharply etched, compactly written vignettes of peasant life during the Revolution. A band of illiterate Indians gathers to fight the government, but it hardly knows why. As the Revolution progresses, the peasants become only more bewildered; the Revolution seems an outrageous force beyond their control. Their idealism gives way to cynicism, their heroism to savagery. "The Revolution is like a hurricane," says one character. "If you're in it, you're not a man . . . You're a leaf, a dead leaf blown by the wind."

Killing for Enchiladas. The characters who claim to have noble motives for rebelling are shot down with literary marksmanship by Azuela. An intellectual journalist "from the city" joins the peasants and awes them with his ideology: "We are the tools Destiny makes use of to reclaim the sacred rights of the people." But the intellectual soon sells out the "people" for power. He starts pimping for his rebel boss, even sacrificing the girl who loves him. Another character supplies a typical romantic reaction to revolution.

"I love the Revolution like a volcano in eruption," he exults. "I love the volcano, because it's a volcano, the Revolution because it's the Revolution! What do I care about the stones left above or below after the cataclysm?" But he fails to translate this poetry into practice. At the first sign of shooting, he flees.

The basic motives for revolution boil down to one: love of killing. At first the rebels are content to kill only their oppressors, who by and large deserve it. But before long, they are making no distinctions, shooting down and stringing up innocent and guilty alike. They even compete at cruel deeds. Boasts one: "When I was up at Torreon, I killed an old lady who refused to sell me some enchiladas. I got no enchiladas but I felt satisfied anyhow!" Another tops that: "I killed a man because I always saw him sitting at the table whenever I went to eat. I hated the looks of him so I just killed him. What the hell could I do!"

Mellowing Peace. Azuela wrote The Underdogs in 1915 after serving in the Revolution as a doctor. Unlike another chronicler of Revolution, Andre Malraux (Man's Hope, Man's Fate) who found that revolution brought out the best in some men, Azuela felt that it brought out the worst in most. He made the Revolution so remarkably vivid that he encouraged a host of imitators and set a literary style for realism in Mexico. But no writer ever quite recaptured the freshness and power of The Underdogs, not even Azuela himself in the eleven other novels he wrote before his death in 1952. Living into an era of peace in Mexico, Azuela mellowed with the times. In one of his last novels, a character reflects: "The green grass will grow over the mistakes we have made."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.