The eponymous dying man is a former soldier of the Mexican Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution) who has become wealthy and powerful through ‘violence, blackmail, bribery, and brutal exploitation of the workers’.
The novel explores the corrupting effects of power and criticizes the distortion of the revolutionaries’ original aims through ‘class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and failure of land reform’. Narrators take turn in bringing back the past by means of snapshot recollection.
By these means Fuentes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes) builds up a picture of one life and its times.
Carlos Fuentes
307 pages in Farrar Straus Giroux paperback edition.
ISBN 978-0374531805