How Carlos Fuentes reinvented the novel
The Mexican author's British editor remembers the man and his consequences
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Carlos Fuentes was one of the most extraordinary writers in an extraordinary generation that included Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Together the ‘Boom’ generation, as they came to be known, reinvented the novel in Latin America and made it into a force that commanded international attention.
Carlos was a natural diplomat, not very far beneath whose suave and elegant exterior was a passionate man of principle; as the Telegraph’s obituary pointed out, he refused as a teenager to attend school in Buenos Aires, where his father was serving as ambassador, in protest at right-wing Argentine extremism; later he would resign his post as his country’s Ambassador in Paris in protest at the appointment of the former President, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who had been heavily implicated in the Tlatelolco massacre of students in 1968 in Mexico City, as ambassador to Spain.
But these were extreme moments and although he was a passionate advocate of justice and human rights, most of the time his charm and good humour, albeit driven by that passion and energy, seemed to make good things happen effortlessly. Gerald Martin tells the story in his superb biography of García Márquez of how it was Fuentes who prepared the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude by taking it up, sharing his enthusiasm and the first three chapters first with his friends (including Julio Cortázar, who was as excited and astonished by what he read as Fuentes had been), and then more widely by arranging their early publication in a Spanish-language magazine in Paris in August 1966. In an interview with the editor he dubbed those pages ‘magisterial’, spoke of the novel as a masterpiece and cleverly referred to it as ‘a work in progress’ – the reference to Joyce was as genuine as it was conscious. It was a brilliant and daring strategy (after all, García Márquez hadn’t yet finished his book!), and it was this championing that helped to create the taste by which One Hundred Years of Solitude (not to mention many later books by many other writers) would be enjoyed. I have a treasured and battered copy of Barbara Howes’ excellent 1973 anthology called The Eye of the Heart, which collects together stories by 42 amazing writers from Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector (translated by Elizabeth Bishop, no less), to Gabriela Mistral and Jorge Luis Borges. The ‘Boom’ continued to resonate as its ripples spread outwards.
Carlos never ceased to seize the initiative and less than 10 years ago was the prime mover behind the Hay Festival expanding beyond the Wye Valley and taking root in Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. Peter Florence had been lamenting the fact that he could not persuade García Márquez to come to Wales. After listening carefully, Carlos said: ‘Gabo doesn’t like the climate of the Northern Hemisphere, he doesn’t speak English well and he likes to stay at home, but if Gabo won’t come to Hay, why not take Hay to Cartagena?’ Like all anecdotes, it simplifies, even if it contains a kernel of truth. Fuentes went on to make introductions, open doors and set up meetings, in such an easy and joyful way that influential people who might otherwise have been circumspect were glad to be part of the adventure. There was a huge amount of work to be done after that, and Peter Florence and Cristina Fuentes (no relation) made it happen, but it was Carlos, says Florence, who enabled it and led to the festival beginning to think about going out into the world as well as bringing the world to Hay.
In the year of his 80th birthday, Carlos was approached by the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi to ask if he and a group of friends might put on a series of events in celebration of the now grand old man. Typically and graciously, the grand old man accepted the honour on condition that any celebrations would not be about him. His 80th birthday party became a national festival with more than 40 events running through November and December 2008, comprising readings, events, screenings and lectures, that involved many of the greatest Latin American thinkers and writers and significantly the new generation coming up in a wonderful, generous celebration of the best in Latin American culture. It was a great moment. ¡Viva Carlos!
Carlos Fuentes, who has died aged 83, was the most influential Mexican novelist of his generation and a catalyst for the literary explosion that introduced Latin American writers to a worldwide audience.
![]()
Alongside Colombia’s Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, the Chilean Jose Donoso and Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, Fuentes built a bridge between Latin and anglophone cultures.
They were often described collectively as the “Magical Realists”, but such a title diminished the range of Fuentes’ fiction. For he was an imaginative and innovative novelist who moved smoothly between genres. Social documentary, stream of consciousness, myth, fantasy, ghost stories and political commentary flowed from his pen, whilst major novels such as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra and The Years With Laura Diaz had an epic sweep and grandeur.
In such works he examined his country’s history, its revolution, the corruption of power and the dilemma of national identity. He addressed his country’s uneasy, shifting relationship with its northern neighbour, the United States, and celebrated the cultural and linguistic re-colonisation of territory such as California, that had been appropriated in the 19th century. These were interests that rippled outwards, developing into a metaphor that reflected Latin America’s relationship to the rest of the world.
Having been raised in America as the son of a diplomat, Fuentes was qualified to explore “the crystal frontier” between the two countries. But although his views were often condemned in the States — and he was barred from entering the country for most of the 1960s — his was, in the words of his friend the American novelist William Styron, “a purposely ambiguous approach, because he knows the culture so well, he neither panders to it, nor is he promiscuously critical”.
A globetrotter who divided his time between Mexico City and London, Carlos Fuentes was an independent, intellectual, political observer and occasional diplomat who owed allegiance to no party and whose lifelong concern was the promotion of social justice.
Carlos Manuel Fuentes Macias was born on November 11 1928 in Panama City. His father served as ambassador to Italy and Portugal, and Carlos was educated in Santiago and Washington, DC. He did not live in Mexico until he was 16. “I learnt to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico,” he recalled. Driving across Depression-era America to visit his grandmother, he passed Texan restaurants displaying “No Dogs Or Mexicans” signs: “You felt a great sense of tension between these two countries with one of the longest land borders in the world. It affirmed my sense of being Mexican very much.”
Having been politicised by Franklin D Roosevelt — “he solved the same problems that gave rise to the fascist dictatorships in Europe” — the teenage Fuentes was appalled by Argentine Right-wing extremism and refused to attend school in Buenos Aires when his father was posted there. Instead he “discovered Borges, the tango and woman. I owe the Argentine dictatorship at least three favours.”
Although determined to be a novelist, after studying literature at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico he trained to become a lawyer at the Institute of Higher International Studies in Geneva.
There, an encounter with an elegantly dressed, pheasant-eating Thomas Mann in an expensive restaurant in Zurich persuaded him to take his chance. Turning down a good job with the International Labour Organisation, he worked as a press secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, alongside the Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz, as the editor of a literary periodical, Revista Mexicana de Literatura.
In 1958 he published his first novel, Where The Air Is Clear, which became an immediate success and allowed him to write full time. A portrayal of the Mexico City of his youth, Fuentes’s study of a metropolis in the making stunned critics with its — and his — sophistication. One critic professed himself astonished by a Mexican who “spoke perfect English [and] had read every novel and seen every painting and every movie in every capital of the world”.
Although this success prefigured the Latin American literary boom, Fuentes was conscious of the opportunity. “Literature in the English language is so rich and there isn’t a gap from Chaucer to the present.” he observed. “But after Don Quixote there isn’t a single novel in Spanish worth reading until you come to the second half of the 19th century. The heirs to Cervantes are Lawrence Sterne and Diderot.”
The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) was one of the first Latin American novels to use “stream of consciousness” and betrayed Fuentes’s debt to the Modernists. The novel described a dying man looking back on the uprising in which he rose to power, only to see his ideals corrupted and betrayed. An exploration of the 1910-20 Mexican revolution, which the author considered “a political failure but a cultural watershed”, the novel gained him international recognition.
But his political views won him notoriety. Support for Fidel Castro led him to be denied entry to the United States, and after protesting against the brutal suppression of Mexican students by the government at Tlatelolco Square, he spent much of the Sixties in exile in Paris.
He remained capable of causing controversy. A Change of Skin (1967), which described a group travelling from Mexico City to Veracruz, was described as “pornographic, communist, anti-Christian, anti-German and pro-Jewish”. Banned in Spain, it nevertheless won Barcelona’s most important literary award.
When he was refused entry to Puerto Rico because he was banned from America, Fuentes enlisted a battalion of heavyweights — including Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, Styron and Senator William Fulbright — who lobbied for the ban to be lifted.
In 1974, after being restored to favour at home and abroad, Fuentes was appointed ambassador to France. He served for three years before resigning in protest at the appointment of the former President, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who had been heavily implicated in the Tlatelolco massacre, as ambassador to Spain.
Fuentes subsequently held a series of fellowships at American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, which allowed him to “attack American foreign policy not in the back yard, but right here, in the front yard." He had been Professor at Large at Brown University since 1995.
Throughout he continued to publish. Terra Nostra (1975) moved freely between the Roman empire, the Spain of Philip II and the late 20th century. The Old Gringo (1985) explored the frontier between the United States and Mexico through the story of an American journalist, Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during Pancho Villa’s revolution. In 1989 it became a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
Fuentes returned to the border in The Crystal Frontier (1995), a collection of nine loosely-connected stories following Latinos across the Rio Grande to a new, invisible life in California. Despite the brutal realities of life for economic migrants, the novelist relished the “silent reconquest” of Mexican territories appropriated in 1848.
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1994) was a thinly-veiled portrait of the actress Jean Seberg, with whom Fuentes had had an affair in Durango in 1969. He had many celebrity friends, within and outside the literary world. In addition to Mailer, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, he counted Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, JK Galbraith and Shirley MacLaine among his confidants, and he claimed that Bill Clinton gave him the idea for The Eagles’ Throne (2006), a futuristic, epistolary novel which mixed sex, politics, identity and Mexico into a familiar brew. Many critics considered his memoirs, Myself With Others (1988), to exhibit unacceptable levels of name-dropping. Angela Carter, a fan of the novels, noted an “inextricable streak of vulgarity”.
Advancing years saw no let-up in his productivity. In 2001 the opera-loving author published Inez, in which an elderly conductor reviewed his lifelong passion for a Mexican diva. Suffused with ghosts, the novel viewed life and death as two sides of the same coin and created “a sense of rebirth through music”. In the same year he published The Years with Laura Diaz, a counterpoint to Artemio Cruz and an epic account of 20th-century Mexican history written, unexpectedly, from a female point of view.
Having lived in London whilst writing and presenting the television series The Buried Mirror (1992), an exploration of Latin literature and culture, Fuentes divided his time between Earl’s Court and Mexico City. In London he was free to write, whereas at home his life was consumed by politics and the obligations of celebrity.
In 2008 he published Destiny and Desire: a Novel, in which the narrator was a severed head.
Although he had helped “transform Latin American literature”, some critics considered that he became “stuck in a vision of history and literature that belonged to the Sixties’ nouveau roman”. This view was not shared by his successors – young novelists such as Ignacio Padilla, who considered him “the best example you can be both local and universal, read both as a portrait of Mexico and as an epic of the world looking for its own identity”.
He won the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and in 1992 was appointed to France’s Légion d’honneur.
Carlos Fuentes married, in 1959, the actress Rita Macedo, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1972, and the following year he married the television journalist Sylvia Lemus. They had a daughter and a son, both of whom predeceased him.
Sources: 1, 2.
The Mexican author's British editor remembers the man and his consequences
Carlos Fuentes was one of the most extraordinary writers in an extraordinary generation that included Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Together the ‘Boom’ generation, as they came to be known, reinvented the novel in Latin America and made it into a force that commanded international attention.
Carlos was a natural diplomat, not very far beneath whose suave and elegant exterior was a passionate man of principle; as the Telegraph’s obituary pointed out, he refused as a teenager to attend school in Buenos Aires, where his father was serving as ambassador, in protest at right-wing Argentine extremism; later he would resign his post as his country’s Ambassador in Paris in protest at the appointment of the former President, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who had been heavily implicated in the Tlatelolco massacre of students in 1968 in Mexico City, as ambassador to Spain.
But these were extreme moments and although he was a passionate advocate of justice and human rights, most of the time his charm and good humour, albeit driven by that passion and energy, seemed to make good things happen effortlessly. Gerald Martin tells the story in his superb biography of García Márquez of how it was Fuentes who prepared the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude by taking it up, sharing his enthusiasm and the first three chapters first with his friends (including Julio Cortázar, who was as excited and astonished by what he read as Fuentes had been), and then more widely by arranging their early publication in a Spanish-language magazine in Paris in August 1966. In an interview with the editor he dubbed those pages ‘magisterial’, spoke of the novel as a masterpiece and cleverly referred to it as ‘a work in progress’ – the reference to Joyce was as genuine as it was conscious. It was a brilliant and daring strategy (after all, García Márquez hadn’t yet finished his book!), and it was this championing that helped to create the taste by which One Hundred Years of Solitude (not to mention many later books by many other writers) would be enjoyed. I have a treasured and battered copy of Barbara Howes’ excellent 1973 anthology called The Eye of the Heart, which collects together stories by 42 amazing writers from Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector (translated by Elizabeth Bishop, no less), to Gabriela Mistral and Jorge Luis Borges. The ‘Boom’ continued to resonate as its ripples spread outwards.
Carlos never ceased to seize the initiative and less than 10 years ago was the prime mover behind the Hay Festival expanding beyond the Wye Valley and taking root in Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. Peter Florence had been lamenting the fact that he could not persuade García Márquez to come to Wales. After listening carefully, Carlos said: ‘Gabo doesn’t like the climate of the Northern Hemisphere, he doesn’t speak English well and he likes to stay at home, but if Gabo won’t come to Hay, why not take Hay to Cartagena?’ Like all anecdotes, it simplifies, even if it contains a kernel of truth. Fuentes went on to make introductions, open doors and set up meetings, in such an easy and joyful way that influential people who might otherwise have been circumspect were glad to be part of the adventure. There was a huge amount of work to be done after that, and Peter Florence and Cristina Fuentes (no relation) made it happen, but it was Carlos, says Florence, who enabled it and led to the festival beginning to think about going out into the world as well as bringing the world to Hay.
In the year of his 80th birthday, Carlos was approached by the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi to ask if he and a group of friends might put on a series of events in celebration of the now grand old man. Typically and graciously, the grand old man accepted the honour on condition that any celebrations would not be about him. His 80th birthday party became a national festival with more than 40 events running through November and December 2008, comprising readings, events, screenings and lectures, that involved many of the greatest Latin American thinkers and writers and significantly the new generation coming up in a wonderful, generous celebration of the best in Latin American culture. It was a great moment. ¡Viva Carlos!
Carlos Fuentes, who has died aged 83, was the most influential Mexican novelist of his generation and a catalyst for the literary explosion that introduced Latin American writers to a worldwide audience.
Alongside Colombia’s Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, the Chilean Jose Donoso and Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, Fuentes built a bridge between Latin and anglophone cultures.
They were often described collectively as the “Magical Realists”, but such a title diminished the range of Fuentes’ fiction. For he was an imaginative and innovative novelist who moved smoothly between genres. Social documentary, stream of consciousness, myth, fantasy, ghost stories and political commentary flowed from his pen, whilst major novels such as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra and The Years With Laura Diaz had an epic sweep and grandeur.
In such works he examined his country’s history, its revolution, the corruption of power and the dilemma of national identity. He addressed his country’s uneasy, shifting relationship with its northern neighbour, the United States, and celebrated the cultural and linguistic re-colonisation of territory such as California, that had been appropriated in the 19th century. These were interests that rippled outwards, developing into a metaphor that reflected Latin America’s relationship to the rest of the world.
Having been raised in America as the son of a diplomat, Fuentes was qualified to explore “the crystal frontier” between the two countries. But although his views were often condemned in the States — and he was barred from entering the country for most of the 1960s — his was, in the words of his friend the American novelist William Styron, “a purposely ambiguous approach, because he knows the culture so well, he neither panders to it, nor is he promiscuously critical”.
A globetrotter who divided his time between Mexico City and London, Carlos Fuentes was an independent, intellectual, political observer and occasional diplomat who owed allegiance to no party and whose lifelong concern was the promotion of social justice.
Carlos Manuel Fuentes Macias was born on November 11 1928 in Panama City. His father served as ambassador to Italy and Portugal, and Carlos was educated in Santiago and Washington, DC. He did not live in Mexico until he was 16. “I learnt to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico,” he recalled. Driving across Depression-era America to visit his grandmother, he passed Texan restaurants displaying “No Dogs Or Mexicans” signs: “You felt a great sense of tension between these two countries with one of the longest land borders in the world. It affirmed my sense of being Mexican very much.”
Having been politicised by Franklin D Roosevelt — “he solved the same problems that gave rise to the fascist dictatorships in Europe” — the teenage Fuentes was appalled by Argentine Right-wing extremism and refused to attend school in Buenos Aires when his father was posted there. Instead he “discovered Borges, the tango and woman. I owe the Argentine dictatorship at least three favours.”
Although determined to be a novelist, after studying literature at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico he trained to become a lawyer at the Institute of Higher International Studies in Geneva.
There, an encounter with an elegantly dressed, pheasant-eating Thomas Mann in an expensive restaurant in Zurich persuaded him to take his chance. Turning down a good job with the International Labour Organisation, he worked as a press secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, alongside the Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz, as the editor of a literary periodical, Revista Mexicana de Literatura.
In 1958 he published his first novel, Where The Air Is Clear, which became an immediate success and allowed him to write full time. A portrayal of the Mexico City of his youth, Fuentes’s study of a metropolis in the making stunned critics with its — and his — sophistication. One critic professed himself astonished by a Mexican who “spoke perfect English [and] had read every novel and seen every painting and every movie in every capital of the world”.
Although this success prefigured the Latin American literary boom, Fuentes was conscious of the opportunity. “Literature in the English language is so rich and there isn’t a gap from Chaucer to the present.” he observed. “But after Don Quixote there isn’t a single novel in Spanish worth reading until you come to the second half of the 19th century. The heirs to Cervantes are Lawrence Sterne and Diderot.”
The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) was one of the first Latin American novels to use “stream of consciousness” and betrayed Fuentes’s debt to the Modernists. The novel described a dying man looking back on the uprising in which he rose to power, only to see his ideals corrupted and betrayed. An exploration of the 1910-20 Mexican revolution, which the author considered “a political failure but a cultural watershed”, the novel gained him international recognition.
But his political views won him notoriety. Support for Fidel Castro led him to be denied entry to the United States, and after protesting against the brutal suppression of Mexican students by the government at Tlatelolco Square, he spent much of the Sixties in exile in Paris.
He remained capable of causing controversy. A Change of Skin (1967), which described a group travelling from Mexico City to Veracruz, was described as “pornographic, communist, anti-Christian, anti-German and pro-Jewish”. Banned in Spain, it nevertheless won Barcelona’s most important literary award.
When he was refused entry to Puerto Rico because he was banned from America, Fuentes enlisted a battalion of heavyweights — including Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, Styron and Senator William Fulbright — who lobbied for the ban to be lifted.
In 1974, after being restored to favour at home and abroad, Fuentes was appointed ambassador to France. He served for three years before resigning in protest at the appointment of the former President, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who had been heavily implicated in the Tlatelolco massacre, as ambassador to Spain.
Fuentes subsequently held a series of fellowships at American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania and Columbia, which allowed him to “attack American foreign policy not in the back yard, but right here, in the front yard." He had been Professor at Large at Brown University since 1995.
Throughout he continued to publish. Terra Nostra (1975) moved freely between the Roman empire, the Spain of Philip II and the late 20th century. The Old Gringo (1985) explored the frontier between the United States and Mexico through the story of an American journalist, Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during Pancho Villa’s revolution. In 1989 it became a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
Fuentes returned to the border in The Crystal Frontier (1995), a collection of nine loosely-connected stories following Latinos across the Rio Grande to a new, invisible life in California. Despite the brutal realities of life for economic migrants, the novelist relished the “silent reconquest” of Mexican territories appropriated in 1848.
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1994) was a thinly-veiled portrait of the actress Jean Seberg, with whom Fuentes had had an affair in Durango in 1969. He had many celebrity friends, within and outside the literary world. In addition to Mailer, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, he counted Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, JK Galbraith and Shirley MacLaine among his confidants, and he claimed that Bill Clinton gave him the idea for The Eagles’ Throne (2006), a futuristic, epistolary novel which mixed sex, politics, identity and Mexico into a familiar brew. Many critics considered his memoirs, Myself With Others (1988), to exhibit unacceptable levels of name-dropping. Angela Carter, a fan of the novels, noted an “inextricable streak of vulgarity”.
Advancing years saw no let-up in his productivity. In 2001 the opera-loving author published Inez, in which an elderly conductor reviewed his lifelong passion for a Mexican diva. Suffused with ghosts, the novel viewed life and death as two sides of the same coin and created “a sense of rebirth through music”. In the same year he published The Years with Laura Diaz, a counterpoint to Artemio Cruz and an epic account of 20th-century Mexican history written, unexpectedly, from a female point of view.
Having lived in London whilst writing and presenting the television series The Buried Mirror (1992), an exploration of Latin literature and culture, Fuentes divided his time between Earl’s Court and Mexico City. In London he was free to write, whereas at home his life was consumed by politics and the obligations of celebrity.
In 2008 he published Destiny and Desire: a Novel, in which the narrator was a severed head.
Although he had helped “transform Latin American literature”, some critics considered that he became “stuck in a vision of history and literature that belonged to the Sixties’ nouveau roman”. This view was not shared by his successors – young novelists such as Ignacio Padilla, who considered him “the best example you can be both local and universal, read both as a portrait of Mexico and as an epic of the world looking for its own identity”.
He won the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and in 1992 was appointed to France’s Légion d’honneur.
Carlos Fuentes married, in 1959, the actress Rita Macedo, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1972, and the following year he married the television journalist Sylvia Lemus. They had a daughter and a son, both of whom predeceased him.
Sources: 1, 2.