Cartucho

One of the great war novels of all time—in a brilliant new translation by Heather Cleary—Cartucho is no less relevant in our unsettled century

“I needed death and blood, they nourished me; my little girl’s spirit expanded and my eyes went impossibly wide. I didn’t want to miss a single detail.” 

On November 20th, 1910, the nation of Mexico exploded into revolt. The armed conflict that followed ended the thirty-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, but the generals and rebels who brought down Diaz soon fell into infighting, resulting in a decade of brutal civil war.

Cartucho—subtitled “Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico—is the story of this conflict, told through the eyes of a child. On the streets of Parral, Chihuahua, young Nellie bears witness to the horrors of war: battles raging from house to house as occupiers take the town, dig in, are routed, and take the town again. And every time, the same scene: traitors are rounded up and shot. Nellie Campobello’s masterwork, written in short vignettes and in strikingly simple, clear-eyed prose, chronicles the generals and bandits that crossed the threshold of her mother’s home, some to pillage, some to pay tribute to an old friend of Pancho Villa, and some to simply catch up on gossip.  The story of a bloody conflict unfolds in starkly human terms, and its child’s-eye view is perhaps unique among the literature of war: Nellie grows up in a world where a summary execution two houses down is as natural as going to church on Sunday. In lyrical, deadpan prose that blends the author’s childhood memories with folk history and legend, Campobello’s gripping novel boils the grand themes of a nation’s history into luminous, disturbing images of what remains in the wake of civil division.