A peasant flees a burning house and finds himself leading men in the Revolution, fighting up and down the sierra for causes explained to him by people who despise him. Azuela was an army doctor with Villa's forces and wrote this from the saddle, publishing it in an El Paso newspaper in 1915 while the war was still going; it is the novel of the Mexican Revolution, and it makes no promises. Fifty-nine plates of revolution and its aftermath by painters from Munch to Michałowski, 1834 to 1926, run through the text like the war's long shadow.
