Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes was an influential Mexican novelist, essayist, and playwright, recognized as a key figure in the Latin American literary boom of the twentieth century. Born in 1928, he was the son of a diplomat and spent his formative years in various countries, which contributed to his broad cultural perspective. Fuentes became known for his explorations of Mexican identity, history, and the enduring impact of the Mexican Revolution, often critiquing its unfulfilled promises through his works. His literary debut, "Los días enmascarados," was published in 1954, and he gained international acclaim with novels like "The Death of Artemio Cruz," which offers a poignant reflection on Mexican society and its historical struggles.
Fuentes's writing is characterized by realism and experimental narrative techniques, drawing on mythological roots while addressing contemporary issues. His political engagement often put him at odds with the authorities, leading to periods of exile and censorship. Throughout his career, he produced a diverse body of work, including novels, essays, and screenplays, earning him a prominent place in both Mexican literature and global literary discourse. Fuentes's legacy continues to resonate, as his narratives provide critical insights into the complexities of Mexican culture and identity.
Carlos Fuentes
Mexican novelist, short-story writer, and playwright
- Born: November 11, 1928
- Birthplace: Panama City, Panama
- Died: May 15, 2012
- Place of death:Mexico City, Mexico
Biography
Carlos Fuentes gained international recognition as a significant writer associated with the so-called boom period in Latin American literature, and he came to be regarded by many as Mexico’s foremost novelist in the twentieth century. The son of a career diplomat, Rafael Fuentes, and Berta Macias Rivas, Carlos Fuentes grew up in many different countries and attended excellent schools in several of the major capitals of the Americas. He learned English at the age of four while living in Washington, D.C., and for a time he lived in Santiago, Chile, and in Buenos Aires, before returning to study law at the University of Mexico. He also spent some time at the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva.
From 1950 to 1952 Fuentes was a member of the Mexican delegation to the International Labor Organization in Geneva. Upon his return to Mexico in 1954 he became assistant head of the press section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 1955 to 1956 he served in a similar capacity at the University of Mexico. During much of the time that he was head of the department of cultural relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from1957 to 1959, he was also editor of Revista mexicana de literatura; he later edited and coedited the leftist journals El espectador, Siempre, and Politica. After 1959 he devoted himself to writing novels, book reviews, political essays, film scripts, and plays. From 1975 to 1977 he served as Mexico’s ambassador to France. Fuentes was married to the well-known Mexican actress Rita Macedo in 1959, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969, and in 1973 he married Sylvia Lemus, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Fundamentally a realist, Fuentes’s search for the quintessence of Mexican reality often led him to its mythological roots. Yet for him Mexico’s Aztec, Christian, or revolutionary past was not merely a literary theme but a powerful force to be reckoned with in representing society. The principal concern of his fiction is the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the failure of its promises, a subject that earned him both the hostility of the Mexican establishment and the admiration of a new generation that looked to him for ideological leadership.
Fuentes began his literary career with a collection of short stories, Los días enmascarados (Masked days), published in 1954. In this work he denounces customs and primitive modes of life that he views as a burden to modern Mexican life. He develops this subject matter further in Where the Air Is Clear, a phenomenal and influential first novel, in which he attempts to create both a “biography of a city” and a “synthesis of present-day Mexico.” A panorama of the Mexico City of the early 1950s, the novel is filled with insights into a country whose social revolution soon ceased to be truly revolutionary. Through his range of characters Fuentes investigates the essence of twentieth-century Mexicans and their many formative influences and finds no foundation—no shared philosophy or sense of purpose—that would prevent the strong from preying upon the weak.
The suppression of the revolutionary instinct is the focus of The Good Conscience, a more conventional novel that Fuentes intended as the first volume in a planned tetralogy he later abandoned. The Death of Artemio Cruz, the novel that achieved world fame for him, is a richly orchestrated historical novel once again depicting the failure of the revolution, this time through the eyes of the dying robber baron Artemio Cruz, who recalls scenes from his life. In the novel, as in Where the Air Is Clear, Fuentes presents a panoramic view of recent Mexican history. In both The Death of Artemio Cruz and Terra nostra Fuentes uses a variety of narrators to tell his story, as well as the technique of second-person narrative. A Change of Skin describes, at the narrative level, the pilgrimage of five characters from Mexico City to Vera Cruz for Holy Week. The book’s more fundamental concern, however, is with human beings’ primitive and persistent notions of vengeance and atonement. Some critics found the book symbolically overburdened, yet other readers found A Change of Skin to be a work close to greatness in its scope, energy, and skill of characterization. Fuentes’s novel Federico en su balcón (Friedrich on his balcony) was published posthumously in 2012.
As a result of his outspoken political views Fuentes was forbidden entry into Puerto Rico in February 1969. Because of his denunciation of the Mexican government’s brutal repression of student demonstrations during the 1968 Olympic Games he was even for a time denied entry into his own country. Although most critics agree that The Death of Artemio Cruz is Fuentes’s most technically successful novel, others believe that the bulk of his work is more clever than substantial; they find that he neglects the most important feature of his subcontinent’s culture: the Indianist movement. Perhaps the most valuable contributions of Fuentes’s writing are that it has introduced experimental techniques into mainstream Latin American fiction and it has helped to define the Mexican national character.
Author Works
Long Fiction
La región más transparente, 1958 (Where the Air Is Clear, 1960)
Las buenas conciencias, 1959 (The Good Conscience, 1961)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962 (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964)
Aura, 1962 (novella; English translation, 1965)
Zona sagrada, 1967 (novella; Holy Place, 1972)
Cambio de piel, 1967 (A Change of Skin, 1968)
Cumpleaños, 1969 (novella)
Terra nostra, 1975 (English translation, 1976)
La cabeza de la hidra, 1978 (The Hydra Head, 1978)
Una familia lejana, 1980 (Distant Relations, 1982)
Gringo viejo, 1985 (The Old Gringo, 1985)
Cristóbal nonato, 1987 (Christopher Unborn, 1989)
La Campaña, 1990 (The Campaign, 1991; first volume of trilogy El tiempo romantico)
Diana: O, La Cazadora Solitaria, 1994 (Diana, the Goddess Who Hunts Alone, 1995)
Los años con Laura Diáz, 1999 (The Years with Laura Diaz, 2000)
Instinto de Inez, 2001 (Inez, 2002)
La silla del águila, 2002 (The Eagle's Throne, 2007)
La voluntad y la fortuna, 2008 (Destiny and Desire, 2011)
Adán en Edén, 2009
Vlad, 2010
Federico en su balcón, 2012
Short Fiction
Los días enmascarados, 1954
Cantar de ciegos, 1964
Poemas de amor: Cuentos del alma, 1971
Chac Mool y otros cuentos, 1973
Agua quemada, 1980 (Burnt Water, 1980)
Constancia, y otras novelas para vírgenes, 1989 (Constancia, and Other Stories for Virgins, 1990)
Días enmascarados, 1990 (includes Los días enmascarados and Cantar de ciegos)
El naranjo: O, Los círculos del tiempo, 1993 (The Orange Tree, 1994)
La frontera de cristal: Una novela en nueve cuentos, 1993 (The Crystal Frontier: A Novel in Nine Stories, 1997)
Inquieta compañía, 2004
Todas las familias felices, 2006 (Happy Families, 2008)
Drama
Todos los gatos son pardos, pb. 1970, revised pb. 1991 (as Ceremonias del alba)
El tuerto es rey, pb. 1970
Orquídeas a la luz de la luna, pb. 1982 (Orchids in the Moonlight, 1982)
Ceremonias del alba, 1991
Screenplays
El acoso, 1958 (with Luis Buñuel; adaptation of Alejo Carpentier’s novel)
Children of Sanchez, 1961 (with Abbey Mann; adaptation of Oscar Lewis’s work)
Pedro Páramo, 1966
Tiempo de morir, 1966
Los caifanes, 1967
Nonfiction
The Argument of Latin America: Words for North Americans, 1963
Paris: La revolución de mayo, 1968
La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 1969
El mundo de José Luis Cuevas, 1969
Casa con dos puertas, 1970
Tiempo mexicano, 1971
Los reinos originarios: Teatro hispano-mexicano, 1971
Cervantes: O, La crítica de la lectura, 1976 (Cervantes: Or, The Critique of Reading, 1976)
Myself with Others: Selected Essays, 1988
Valiente mundo nuevo: Épica, utopía y mito en la novela, 1990
El espejo enterrado, 1992 (The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, 1992)
Geografia de la novela, 1993
Tres discursos para dos aldeas, 1993
Nuevo tiempo mexicano, 1994 (A New Time for Mexico, 1996)
Latin America: At War with the Past, 2001
En esto creo, 2002
Edited Text
The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories, 2000 (with Julio Ortega)
Bibliography
Brody, Robert, and Charles Rossman, eds. Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View. 1982. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. Print.
Brushwood, John S. Mexico in Its Novel. Austin: U of Texas P, 1966. Print.
Dupont, Denise. “Baroque Ambiguities: The Figure of the Author in Terra nostra.” Latin American Literary Review 30 (Jan.–June, 2002): 5–19. Print.
Duran, Gloria. The Archetypes of Carlos Fuentes: From Witch to Androgyne. Hamden: Archon, 1980. Print.
Fainaru, Steve. “Poisoned Pen.” The Boston Globe 4 Nov. 1997: E1. Print.
Faris, Wendy B. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Ungar, 1983. Print.
Guzmán, Daniel de. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Twayne, 1972. Print.
Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1997. Print.
Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text, and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Lang, 1993. Print.
Morton, A. D. “The Social Function of Carlos Fuentes: A Critical Intellectual or in the ‘Shadow of the State’?” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22 (2003): 25–51. Print.
O’Connor, Anne-Marie. “In His Latest Work, Novelist Carlos Fuentes Uses the U.S.-Mexico Border to Explore the Love-Hate Relationship between Americans and Immigrants.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 24 Oct. 1997. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.
Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, México and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Print.
Weiss, Jason. “At the Frontier.” Rev. of The Crystal Frontier, by Carlos Fuentes. Boston Globe 16 Nov. 1997: L1. Print.
Williams, Raymond Leslie. The Writings of Carlos Fuentes. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. Print.