Carlos Fuentes

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Carlos Fuentes (1928- )

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Mexican novelist, journalist, playwright, and essayist, who made his international breakthrough with The Death of Artemio Cruz in 1962. Major themes in Fuentes's work are the limitless power of fantasy, the dilemma of national identity, and the promise and failure of the Mexican revolution. Fuentes has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.

"I tighten my face muscles, I open my right eye, and I see it reflected in the squares of glass sewn onto a woman's handbag. That's what I am. That's what I am. That old man whose features are fragmented by the uneven squares of glass. I am that eye. I am that eye. I am that eye furrowed by accumulated rage, and old, forgotten, but always renewed rage." (from The Death of Artemio Cruz)

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Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City, but his parents were Mexican, and he later became a Mexican citizen. Fuentes's father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, loved books and movies. He was a career diplomat and travelled all over the world. At the age of twenty-five, he married the eighteen-year-old Berta Macías Rivas, Fuentes's mother, who was not so liberal-minded as his father. As a child Fuentes lived with his family in the United States, Chile, and Argentina. Berta insisted that the family spoke only Spanish at home, but after education in Washington, Fuentes became bilingual from an early age. At home his father made him read Mexican history, which Fuestes saw as a history of crushing defeats compared with the United States. "I learned to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico", Fuentes once said.

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Fuentes's upbringing was privileged. He received a cosmopolitan education in private schools. At the age of 16 Fuentes returned to Mexico, where he attended the prestigious Colegio de México. As a posture of rebellion, Fuentes decided to be a writer, but eventually followed the advice of Alfonso Reyes: "You must become a licenciado, a lawyer; then you can do whatever you please, as I did." Fuentes entered the School of Law at the National University of Mexico, receiving his LL.B. in 1948. He also studied economics at Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva. During his university years Fuentes became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party. In 1959 Fuentes married the famous Mexican actress Rita Macedo; they had a daughter. Macedo, "dark-skinned, with large, almond-shaped eyes and prominent cheekbones," as Fuentes described her, appeared in the last scene of Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966. In 1973 Fuentes married Sylvia Lemus; they had two children.

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Fuentes started his writing career in the late 1940s. Along with Emmanuel Carballo and Octavio Paz he founded the review Revista Mexicana de Literatura in 1954. He edited El Espectador (1959-61), Siempre from 1960, and Política from 1960. Fuentes's first collection of short stories, Los días emmascarados, was published in 1954. La región más transparente (1958, Where the Air Is Clear) was Fuentes's first novel. It gave a panoramic picture of Mexico City and has been compared to John Dos Passos's novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), set in New York City. The narrator is an Indian, who has a double personality as an avatar of the Aztec God of war and a trickster.

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Fuentes has been often paired with the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, of whom he has also written. "... he seemed to be literally looking inside himself, as if this were the only thing that counted in matters of sight," Fuentes wrote in 'Borges in Action', "seeing outside being a totally frivolous affair." When Borges uses history as a basis for pure fantasy, Fuentes maintains a realistic stance of power and politics in Latin America - myths of the past and wide range of cultural references are combined with social critique. Fuentes also uses experimental techniques familiar from the nouveau roman and postmodern fiction. In later novels Fuentes has dealt the question of Mexican identity and its relationship to other cultures.

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The Death of Artemio Cruz is told in the first, second, and third person. Artemio Cruz is a poor peon and supporter of revolutionary ideals. He gains wealth and becomes a corrupt, ruthlessness business magnate, a symbol of international capitalist greed. As he lies on his deathbed, Fuentes follows his fragmented thoughts and images wavering between past and present. The haunting novella Aura (1962) is told in the second person narrative. Thus the reader and the fictional protagonist are united in a story which deterministically leads to change of identities. A young historian, Felipe Motero, starts to complete the memoirs of General Llorente in a strange, old house. He fells in love with the beautiful young Aura. She is the niece of his employer, Señora Consuelo, the widow of the general. Eventually Felipe finds his reincarnated identity and Consuelo tells him that Aura is the projection of her younger self. Fuentes started to write the novel in Paris, which he has called a double city. In the story Fuentes recreated a girl he had met as a child in Mexico and years later again in Paris: "She was another, she had been another, not she who was going to be but she who, always, was being."

Terra Nostra (1975) is Fuentes's major novel on Spanish and Latin American history. It moves freely in time from ancient Rome to the apocalyptic end of the 20th century. "Time is the subject matter of all my fiction", Fuentes has once said. One of the main settings is the 16th century Spain, where Philip II constructs the monastery-palace of El Escorial. El gringo viejo (1985, The Old Gringo) was a triangle drama of an American woman, Harriet Winslow, Tomás Arroyo, a general, and the American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeaed during Pancho Villa's revolution in 1913. "She sees, over and over, the specters of Tomás Arroyo and the moon-faced woman and the old gringo cross her window. But they are not ghosts. They have simply mobilized their old pasts, hoping that she would do the same and join them." The book was filmed by Luis Puenzo in 1989, starring Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck. In Instinto de Inez (2001) Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a symphony conductor, realizes at the age of 93, that the future means for him death but in the past are love and Inez, the eternity. Like Artemio Cruz at the end of his life, Garbriel studies the choices he has made in his life. At the center of the story is a mystic crystal seal which unites space and time. Fuentes dedicated the book to his son Carlos Fuentes Lemus, who died in 1999.

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