His heroine is a woman of flesh and blood, ardent in love, inconsolable in grief. But the wider political background is just as important in the context of the narrative. It's a good theory, but all too often it results in a literary carelessness, a painful squandering of ideas and people. This is more than a novel about grabbing power and a failed revolution. Fuentes, as he has aged, has brought suffering and truncated lives into his vision.
Death can kill the future but it can also resurrect the past and, with it, a second future.
It is an aspect of Fuentes' courage, as well as his talent, that he clings to this idea. There's tons of kindergarten Marxism here. It is fictionally impaired. Instead of characters configuring ideas, it is the ideas that configure the characters. Fuentes writes well of places, ideas, confrontations.