Carlos Fuentes

From Philosopedia

Carlos Fuentes (11 November 1928 - 15 May 2012 )

Fuentes was a novelist, diplomat, and educator. When Deborah Solomon of The New York Times asked about his belief in an afterlife, he responded that he was an atheist, and that

My wife has that belief, but I don't. In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

The son of a Mexican diplomat (Rafael Fuentes Boettiger) and Berta Macías Rivas, he was born in Panama. His father was a member of Mexico's diplomatic corps, and he traveled with his family not only in South American countries but also in 1936 moved to Washington, DC, where he attended a public school and learned to speak English fluently.

Denied visas several times because of his reputation for being a leftist, he was refused permission to come to New York in 1963, angrilly responding, "The real bombs are my books, not me." Congress lifted restrictions against him, and he taught at Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Fuentes married actress Rita Macedo (divorced in 1966; their daughter Natasha died 22 August 2005; they also had a daughter, Cecilia). He married Silvia Lemus, and they had two children (Carlos, who died in 1999 of hemophilia; and Natasha, who died before her parents were 30).

In 1954 he co-founded Revista Mexicana de Literatura. He was on the advisory board of New Perspectives Quarterly.

From 1975 to 1977, he was the Mexican ambassador to France and a member of the Communist Party.

In 1985, he wrote The Old Gringo about Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It became a best seller and was made into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

Works

In 1987 Fuentes won the Cervantes Prize. He is author of numerous books, some that are described as being examples of magic realism:

Los días enmascaradas (1954, short stories)

La región más transparente (1958, novel, Where the Air is Clear)

La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962, novel,The Death of Artemio Cruz)

Cambio de piel (1967, novel, A Change of Skin)

Zona sagrada (1967)

Cumpleaños (1969)

La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969)

El tuerto es rey (1971)

Diana o la cazadora solitaria (1972)

Terra Nostra (1975, novel)

The Hydra Head (1978)

Agua quemada (1981)

Orquídeas a la luz de la luna (1982)

Gringo viejo (1985, novel, The Old Gring)

Cristóbal Nonato (1987)

The Campaign (1990)

Ceremonias del alba (1991)

El naranjo (1993, The Orange Tree)

A New Time For Mexico (1994)

La frontera de cristal (1995)

Los años con Laura Díaz (1999)

En esto creo (2002)

Contra Bush (2004, Against George W. Bush)

At the age of 83, he suffered an internal hemorrhage and was taken from his Mexico City home to the Angeles del Pedregal Hospital, where he died. The New York Times obituary described Fuentes as "Mexico's elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country's history for readers around the world."