CARLOS FUENTES - A WRITER TO RECKON WITH

 

General Douglas MacArthur said in his farewell address in 1951 that old soldiers never die; they just fade away. Writers and artists, however, neither die nor fade. They remain with us, leaving the legacy of their thoughts on the printed page. We can summon their prose—its cadence, its style, its ideas—whenever we choose, and in doing so, we carry their voices forward to newer and younger generations. These voices become what we call classics. And all of us who come after inherit their work.
Each time we open a book by Carlos Fuentes, we re-create his ideas and commune with a writer no longer alive in the flesh, yet whose thought will endure as long as humanity endures.
Carlos Fuentes Macías (Panamá City, 11 November 1928 – Mexico City, 15 May 2012) was a Mexican hombre del mundo. Son of a diplomat, he spent his childhood in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Washington, Quito, and other world capitals. He later entered the diplomatic service himself, serving as ambassador to London and Paris.
He lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Cambridge.
At thirty, he published his first novel, La región más transparente, now a classic, in which the Spanish, Indigenous, and mestizo worlds converge in a vibrant portrait of Mexico City and of the nation’s cultural fabric.
His 1984 novel Gringo viejo was filmed as Old Gringo, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, and became a U.S. best seller.
His honors include the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, the Cervantes Prize, the Príncipe de Asturias Award, and the Gran Cruz de la Orden de Isabel la Católica. Since 2001, he was a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. Everything except the Nobel, though that prize, as we know, is at times as whimsical as a lottery.
He is today one of the most widely read Spanish-language authors in the world, and rightly so. That is why I said at the outset that writers of his stature do not die or fade away: they remain among us, giving us what we sometimes call culture—something he explored with uncommon brilliance in his fiction and essays. He even managed to captivate the American, English-speaking readership, a difficult audience to win and keep.
Fuentes was a sharp critic of both Mexico and the United States, outspoken and never afraid to say what he thought. He was once denied entry into the U.S.—an honor not unfamiliar to other writers of conviction.
He carried on a lifelong love affair with language and with words. As one of Mexico’s greatest authors, he gives us every reason to pick up one of his novels today:
La voluntad y la fortuna (Destiny and Desire)
La frontera de cristal (The Crystal Frontier)
Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz)
Gringo viejo (Old Gringo)
“Los sajones nunca dicen lugares comunes — por eso me gustan los latinos.”
(Anglos never use trite expressions. That is why I like Latinos.)
—Carlos Fuentes, Cantar de ciegos, 1964
Read one of his novels and let him speak to you. And listen closely.