Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Macías (; ; November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are ''The Death of Artemio Cruz'' (1962), '' Aura'' (1962), '' Terra Nostra'' (1975), ''The Old Gringo'' (1985) and ''Christopher Unborn'' (1987). In his obituary, ''The New York Times'' described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while ''The Guardian'' called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won. His parents were both Mexicans.

Life and career

Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, the latter of whom was a Mexican diplomat. As the family moved for his father's career, Fuentes spent his childhood in various Latin American capital cities, an experience he later described as giving him the ability to view Latin America as a critical outsider. From 1934 to 1940, Fuentes' father was posted to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., where Carlos attended English-language school, eventually becoming fluent. He also began to write during this time, creating his own magazine, which he shared with apartments on his block.

In 1938, Mexico nationalized foreign oil holdings, leading to a national outcry in the U.S.; he later pointed to the event as the moment in which he began to understand himself as Mexican. In 1940, the Fuentes family was transferred to Santiago, Chile. There, he first became interested in socialism, which would become one of his lifelong passions, in part through his interest in the poetry of Pablo Neruda. He lived in Mexico for the first time at the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City with an eye toward a diplomatic career. During this time, he also began working at the daily newspaper ''Hoy'' and writing short stories. He later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

In 1957, Fuentes was named head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. The following year, he published '' Where the Air Is Clear'', which immediately made him a "national celebrity" and allowed him to leave his diplomatic post to write full-time. In 1959, he moved to Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, where he wrote pro-Castro articles and essays. The same year, he married Mexican actress Rita Macedo. Considered "dashingly handsome", Fuentes also had high-profile affairs with actresses Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg, who inspired his novel '' Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone''. His second marriage, to journalist Silvia Lemus, lasted until his death.

Fuentes served as Mexico's ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, resigning in protest of former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's appointment as ambassador to Spain. He also taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell. His friends included Luis Buñuel, William Styron, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and sociologist C. Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated his book ''The Death of Artemio Cruz''. Once good friends with Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Fuentes became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Fuentes supported. In 1988, Paz's magazine '' Vuelta'' carried an attack by Enrique Krauze on the legitimacy of Fuentes' Mexican identity, opening a feud between Paz and Fuentes that lasted until Paz's 1998 death. In 1989, he was the subject of a full-length PBS television documentary, "Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes," which also aired in Europe and was broadcast repeatedly in Mexico.

Fuentes fathered three children, only one of whom survived him: Cecilia Fuentes Macedo, born in 1962. A son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, died from complications associated with hemophilia in 1999 at the age of 25. A daughter, Natasha Fuentes Lemus (born August 31, 1974), died of an apparent drug overdose in Mexico City on August 22, 2005, at the age of 30.

Writing

Carlos Fuentes has been called "the Balzac of Mexico". Fuentes himself cited Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner and Balzac as the most important writers to him. Maya Yagg
The Latin Master
The Guardian 5 May 2001 He also named Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, Miguel Angel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges. European modernists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust has also been cited as important influences on his writing, with Fuentes applying the influence from them on his main theme; Mexican history and identity.

Fuentes described himself as a pre-modern writer, using only pens, ink and paper. He asked, "Do words need anything else?" Fuentes said that he detested those authors who from the beginning claim to have a recipe for success. In a speech on his writing process, he related that when he began the writing process, he began by asking, "Who am I writing for?"

Early works

Fuentes' first novel, '' Where the Air Is Clear'' (''La región más transparente''), was an immediate success on its publication in 1958. The novel is built around the story of Federico Robles – who has abandoned his revolutionary ideals to become a powerful financier – but also offers "a kaleidoscopic presentation" of vignettes of Mexico City, making it as much a "biography of the city" as of an individual man. The novel was celebrated not only for its prose, which made heavy use of interior monologue and explorations of the subconscious, but also for its "stark portrait of inequality and moral corruption in modern Mexico".

A year later, he followed with another novel, ''The Good Conscience'' (''Las Buenas Conciencias''), which depicted the privileged middle classes of a medium-sized town, probably modeled on Guanajuato. Described by a contemporary reviewer as "the classic Marxist novel", it tells the story of a privileged young man whose impulses toward social equality are suffocated by his family's materialism.

Latin American boom

Fuentes was regarded as a leading figure of the Latin American boom in the 1960s and 1970s along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar.

Fuentes' novel, ''The Death of Artemio Cruz'' (''La muerte de Artemio Cruz'') appeared in 1962 and is "widely regarded as a seminal work of modern Spanish American literature". Like many of his works, the novel used rotating narrators, a technique critic Karen Hardy described as demonstrating "the complexities of a human or national personality". The novel is heavily influenced by Orson Welles' '' Citizen Kane'', and attempts literary parallels to Welles' techniques, including close-up, cross-cutting, deep focus, and flashback. Like ''Kane'', the novel begins with the titular protagonist on his deathbed; the story of Cruz's life is then filled in by flashbacks as the novel moves between past and present. Cruz is a former soldier of the 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".

A prolific writer, Fuentes subsequent work in the 1960s include the novel '' Aura'' (1962), the short story collection ''Cantar de Ciego'' (1966), the novella ''Zona Sagrada'' (1967) and '' A Change of Skin'' (1967), an ambitious novel that attempts to define a collective Mexican consciousness by exploring and reinterpreting the country's myths.Carlos Fuentes: Mexican writer and diplomat
Encyclopaedia Britannica

Fuentes' 1975 '' Terra Nostra'', perhaps his most ambitious novel, is described as a "massive, Byzantine work" that tells the story of all Hispanic civilization. ''Terra Nostra'' shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. Like ''Artemio Cruz'', the novel also draws heavily on cinematic techniques. The novel won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1976 and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1977.

It was followed by ''La Cabeza de la hidra'' (1978, ''The Hydra Head''), a spy thriller set in contemporary Mexico and ''Una familia lejana'' (1980, ''Distant Relations''), a novel that explores many themes including the relations between the Old world and the New.

Later works

His 1985 novel ''The Old Gringo'' (''Gringo viejo''), loosely based on American author Ambrose Bierce's disappearance during the Mexican Revolution, became the first U.S. bestseller written by a Mexican author. The novel tells the story of Harriet Winslow, a young American woman who travels to Mexico, and finds herself in the company of an aging American journalist (called only "the old gringo") and Tomás Arroyo, a revolutionary general. Like many of Fuentes' works, it explores the way in which revolutionary ideals become corrupted, as Arroyo chooses to pursue the deed to an estate where he once worked as a servant rather than follow the goals of the revolution. In 1989, the novel was adapted into the U.S. film ''Old Gringo'' starring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, and Jimmy Smits. A long profile of Fuentes in the U.S. magazine, "Mother Jones," describes the filming of "The Old Gringo" in Mexico with Fuentes on the set.

In the mid-1980s Fuentes began to conceptualize his total fiction, past and future, in fourteen cycles called "La Edad del Tiempo", explaining that his total work is a lengthy reflection on time. The plan for the cycle first appeared as a page in the Spanish edition of his satirical novel ''Christopher Unborn'' in 1987, and as a page in his subsequent books with minor revisions to the original plan.

In 1992 he published ''The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World'', an historical essay that attempts to cover the entire cultural history of Spain and Latin America. The book was a complement to a Discovery Channel and BBC
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