CARLOS FUENTES:CARLOS FUENTES, who died on Tuesday aged 83, was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world.
Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, his panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world.
Fuentes was a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortáza, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s known as “El Boom”. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.
Fuentes received wide recognition in the US in 1985 for his novel The Old Gringo, a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a bestseller north of the border, and was made into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
In the tradition of Latin American writers, Fuentes was politically engaged, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticised the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada.
Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He sympathised with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, and skewered the administration of George W Bush over its antiterrorism tactics and immigration policies, calling them unduly harsh.
He was also critical of Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez, however, calling him a “tropical Mussolini”, and of his own country’s failure to stem its rampant drug violence. On the day he died the newspaper Reforma published a hopeful essay by him on the change of power in France.
Fuentes was appointed the Mexican ambassador to France in 1975, but he resigned two years later to protest against the appointment of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz as ambassador to Spain. Diaz Ordaz had been president of Mexico in 1968 when Mexican troops opened fire on student protesters in Mexico City.
But it was mainly through his literature, Fuentes believed, that he could make his voice heard, and he did so prolifically and inventively, tracing the history of modern Mexico in layered stories that also explored universal themes of love, memory and death.
In The Death of Artemio Cruz, a 1962 novel many call his masterpiece, his title character, an ailing newspaper baron confined to bed, looks back at his climb out of poverty and his heroic exploits in the Mexican Revolution, concluding that it had failed in its promise of a more egalitarian society.
His novels remained ambitious and topical. His last, Destiny and Desire (2011), is a sprawling work that Michael Wood, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described as “not exactly a parody of War and Peace, but certainly a spectral, playful revision of the idea of a novel that competes with history”.
Although Fuentes wrote in just about every genre he declined to write an autobiography. “One puts off the biography like you put off death” he once said. “To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.”
Carlos Fuentes was born on November 11th, 1928, in Panama, the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, a member of Mexico’s diplomatic corps. As his father moved among Mexican embassies, Fuentes spent his early childhood in several South American countries. Then, in 1936, the family was transferred to Washington, where he learned to speak English.
In 1940 the family was transferred to Santiago, Chile, where he began to experiment with writing. In an interview with The Times in 1985, Fuentes said he first had to decide “whether to write in the language of my father or the language of my teachers”. He chose Spanish, he said, because he believed it offered more flexibility.
He was 16 when his family returned to Mexico. He knew his homeland through the stories his grandmothers had told during the summers he spent with them. “I think I became a writer because I heard those stories,” he said in 2006 in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit organisation in Washington.
Fuentes is survived by his wife, Silvia Lemus, and a daughter, Cecilia, by a previous marriage to the actress Rita Macedo, who died in 1993. Two children from his marriage to Lemus, Carlos and Natasha, died before they were 30.
Fuentes received the National Order of Merit, France’s highest civilian award given to a foreigner; Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for literature in 1994; and, in 1987, the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honour. – (New York Times)
Carlos Fuentes: born November 11th, 1928; died Tuesday, May 15th, 2012