well as his discovery of Borges and the tango.
At sixteen, Carlos Fuentes settled in Mexico, where he pursued his studies and maintained an active and sophisticated social life. Finishing his bachelor’s, he debated between his passion and the duty to pursue a “healthy” university degree. In the end, he would follow the advice of Alfonso Reyes: “You should become a lawyer, an attorney; then, you’ll be able to whatever you most enjoy, like I did.” So, while finishing law school (and having spent two years in Europe taking classes in International Studies), he finally resolved to become a writer.
In 1954 he published his first book, Los días enmascarados, comprised of six fantastic stories. In the following years, he founded and edited the Revista Mexicana de Literatura with Emmanuel Carballo while finishing his novel La región más transparente, which was published in 1958 to great praise; the variety of resources the writer used to give voice to a whole society, to express the desires of its inhabitants, their thoughts, and their vices, were early indications that with time Carlos Fuentes would be one of the most recognized novelists of the Spanish language. Then he got married to Rita Macedo, one of Luis Buñuel’s favorite actresses. It was actually in the decrepit mansion of the film producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce where Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez—“there during the heat waves of 1961”—had their first encounter. The Mexican writer has since stated, “we were friends forever, to such an extent that I can mark out the stages of my life after my thirty-second year using the milestones of my friendship with Gabo.”
“1962 was the fullest year of my life, when I best loved, wrote, struggled . . .” Aura and La muerte de Artemio Cruz appear, confirming Fuentes as one of the great literary voices of the moment, and around the same time, his first daughter, Cecilia (his Fuentecita), was born. A year later, Gallimard published La región más transparente (La plus limpide région), thus initiating a lasting relationship between Fuentes and Paris, where that same year he met Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo, and Jorge Semprún. In the end he decided to take up residence in Europe (Rome, Paris, Venice, London), involving himself in the social movements alive throughout the continent at that time. After divorcing Rita Macedo, he married the renowned journalist Silvia Lemus, with whom he had two children, Carlos and Natasha (both sadly deceased). The family lived a constant coming and going between France and the United States, where the writer developed a prolific academic life. It was precisely his interest in language, in the American continent, that lead him to write his most ambitious project, Terra nostra (1975), “a response to the loss of the narrative subject, of the psychologically complete character, torn to shreds by the brutality of the twentieth century’s heartless history.” The book won the Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 1977, for many readers and critics it is considered one of the pillars of Latin American literature in the twentieth century.
In 1987 he won the Premio Cervantes and his writing continued to shift between channels of realism, fantasy, and the psychological perspective. All of his literary obsessions are melded together in El naranjo, o los círculos del tiempo (1993), a synthesis representative of his body of work in which he closes his narrative cycle “La edad del tiempo.” Sadly, as the pages of this anthology were being finalized, Carlos Fuentes passed away in Mexico May 15, 2012. A few days before his death, the writer completed two posthumous works: Federico en su balcón and Personas. In 1994 his work had taken a turn with the publication of Diana o la cazadora solitaria. The book presents a loving relationship between the writer and the actress Jean Seberg, years after her death in Paris.
Now in the new century, his novels Adán en Edén (2009) and Vlad (2010) have come to expand a body of work capable of incorporating neologisms into a language that is always alive and colloquial, confirming Carlos Fuentes as one of the most important writers in all of his country’s literature, able to continue enriching Mexican letters with the greatest resources of the European vanguards.
THE ACORN
THE TORTURE OF DOCTOR JOHNSON
I selected these fragments from Terra Nostra because they have the unfortunate habit of summarizing my approach to storytelling.
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD
My dead are all the ancestors I remember (very few) and all of those I am unable to recall (the immensity). I am who I am thanks to them. But in particular I cite my grandmothers. I will tell you why: when I was four I arrived in Washington, D.C. and went to public school and my parents demanded that every summer I go back to Mexico to stay with my grandmothers so that I wouldn’t forget Spanish. So I owe the Spanish language to my grannies. One was from Veracruz, the other was from Sonora, two extremes of Mexico, and with very different personalities. My father’s mother was German, she was very strict and very disciplined. Her husband became paralyzed and she set up a boarding house and every Sunday we would go to a pyramid. She collected pyramids so it was essential for my education, we went to the pyramids again and again and there are lots of pyramids in Mexico. She had a wonderful, severe personality. She didn’t do jokes or anything of the sort. I revered her as I did my other grandmother who brought up her three daughters by becoming the cake-making teacher after her husband died. This great repostería. And then her old friend Alvaro Bregón became president of México—he had delivered milk to her when he was a little boy—and she asked him for a post in the ministry of education which was headed by the great Vasconcelos. So she became a school inspector. And then she married off her three daughters and she was hell for her sons-in-law, whom she bailed out and corrected. One of them was a general and she said “you’ve only had battles with me, general, and you’ve lost them all.” And to the others she would say “didn’t they teach you manners at home?” She got along very well with my father, but she was like a bird that pecked at the greatness of the other men. But her daughters loved her as did her grandchildren, we were very close to her. She came from the north of Mexico, the mining town of Alamos and Mazatlán, the poet’s city and had millions of memories. And she made me read, she made me read Eça de Queirós. When I went from childhood reading to adult reading she was with me and said that I had to read Eça de Queirós and that was very important. My other grandmother gave me books for children that were horrifying, they were all about murders and mutilations and abductions. They were called Las tardes de la granja and an old man called Palemon sat with children and told them these horrifying stories. So you see, these are two very important influences in my life, apart from many others, but I would like to choose these two. The grannies always stay with you, later you go to Faulkner.
CODA
Your life has brought you to live in many different countries and have to communicate in many different languages. How has that affected you as a writer?
I was very privileged in having that kind of childhood, living in Mexico and then in Chile and Argentina—so it was very broad. But I was also anchored in a very nationalist period of Mexican writing, when literature was considered national, and writers had to be national. I remember when Alfonso Reyes, our great polygraphist, was attacked by these nationalistic minions saying “you talk about Greece, why don’t you talk about Mexico?” And it demonstrated that he also talked about Mexico, but that they hadn’t read him. Now that has evaporated, it is no longer consequential. The younger generation of Mexican writers can write about Germany or Russia or whatever they feel with no obligation to the Mexican nation. But let’s go beyond that, I think what you have are writers, you have Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, you have Juan Goytisolo or Philip Roth, who happen to write in this or that language or have this or that nationality but who are no longer simply a part of a nationalistic canon. Thankfully, because it was very limiting and noxious I think. So I take pride in myself that, because of my upbringing, I was outside of that kind of nationalistic feeling. I got battered for it when I began writing, they said “Oh, he doesn’t write about Mexico, he writes about witches and silly things” and then I wrote a very Mexican novel, the La región más transparente, and they said “Oh he
