Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Macías, born November 11, 1928, in Panama City and dying May 15, 2012, was a Mexican novelist, essayist, and diplomat who served as his country’s ambassador to France. His notable books include The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, and Christopher Unborn. The New York Times called him “one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world” and a key figure in the Latin American Boom, the surge of literature from the region in the 1960s and 1970s, while The Guardian labeled him “Mexico’s most celebrated novelist.” He received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize and Mexico’s Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor in 1999, and was frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate, though he never won.

Life and career

Fuentes was the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, a Mexican diplomat. Because his father’s career required frequent moves, Fuentes grew up in various Latin American capitals, an experience he later said let him view the region as a critical outsider. From 1934 to 1940, his father was stationed at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., where Carlos attended English-language school and became fluent. He started writing then, producing his own magazine for neighbors.

In 1938, Mexico nationalized foreign oil holdings, sparking U.S. outrage; Fuentes later said this event made him understand himself as Mexican. In 1940, the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where he developed an interest in socialism, partly through Pablo Neruda’s poetry. He first lived in Mexico at age 16, studying law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a diplomatic career in mind, while also working at the newspaper Hoy and writing short stories. He later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

In 1957, Fuentes became head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. The next year, his novel Where the Air Is Clear made him a national celebrity and let him leave diplomacy to write full-time. In 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, he moved to Havana and wrote pro-Castro pieces. That same year, he married Mexican actress Rita Macedo.

Known as dashingly handsome, he had affairs with actresses Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg, who inspired his novel Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone. His second marriage, to journalist Silvia Lemus, lasted until his death. He served as Mexico’s ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, resigning to protest former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s appointment as ambassador to Spain.

He taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell. His friends included Luis Buñuel, William Styron, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and C. Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated The Death of Artemio Cruz. Once close with Nobel-winning poet Octavio Paz, Fuentes became estranged from him in the 1980s over the Sandinistas, whom Fuentes backed.

In 1988, Paz’s magazine Vuelta published an attack by Enrique Krauze questioning Fuentes’ Mexican identity, sparking a feud that lasted until Paz’s death in 1998. In 1989, a PBS documentary, “Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes,” aired in the U.S., Europe, and repeatedly in Mexico. Fuentes had three children; only Cecilia Fuentes Macedo, born in 1962, survived him. His son Carlos Fuentes Lemus died in 1999 at age 25 from hemophilia complications, and his daughter Natasha Fuentes Lemus, born in 1974, died of an apparent drug overdose in Mexico City in 2005 at age 30.

Writing

Fuentes has been called the Balzac of Mexico. He cited Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner, and Balzac as his most important influences, along with Latin American writers Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Jorge Luis Borges, and European modernists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. He applied these influences to his central theme: Mexican history and identity. He described himself as a pre-modern writer, using only pens, ink, and paper, asking, “Do words need anything else?” He said he disliked authors who claimed to have a recipe for success, and when starting a work, he asked, “Who am I writing for?” His first novel, Where the Air Is Clear, published in 1958, was an immediate success.

Early works

It centers on Federico Robles, a man who abandons revolutionary ideals to become a financier, but also offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of Mexico City, functioning as a biography of both a man and a city. The novel was praised for its interior monologues, explorations of the subconscious, and stark depiction of inequality and moral corruption. The next year, he published The Good Conscience, about the privileged middle classes of a medium-sized town, likely modeled on Guanajuato.