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| 1928 - 2012 |
Mexico lost a leading novelist
Tuesday when Carlos Fuentes died at 83. Carlos
Fuentes was many things: acclaimed author, brilliant mind,
ambassador to France, literary award winner, and a recipient of France’s Legion
of Honor medal and Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award.
Here's some of AP's obituary:
He wrote his first novel,
"Where the Air Is Clear," at age 29, laying the foundation for a boom
in Spanish contemporary literature during the 1960s and 1970s. He published an
essay on the change of power in France in the newspaper Reforma the day he
died.
His generation of writers, including
Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, drew global
readership and attention to Latin American culture during a period when
strongmen ruled much of the region.
"The Death of Artemio
Cruz," a novel about a post-revolutionary Mexico that failed to keep its
promise of narrowing social gaps, brought Fuentes international notoriety.
The elegant, mustachioed author's
other contemporary classics included "Aura," "Terra
Nostra," and "The Good Conscience." Many American readers know
him for "The Old Gringo," a novel about San Francisco journalist Ambrose
Bierce, who disappeared at the height of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. That
book was later made into a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.
Fuentes was often mentioned as a
candidate for the Nobel prize but never won one. A busy man, Fuentes wrote plays
and short stories and co-founded a literary magazine. He was also a columnist,
political analyst, essayist and critic.
Quotes:
“I need, therefore I imagine.”
“I live through risk. Without risk
there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down
and break your neck.”
“Religion is dogmatic. Politic is
ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being
equivocal,”
“Perfect order is the forerunner of
perfect horror.”
“There must be something beyond
slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all
help search for it.”
“What the United States does best is
to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
“Chaos: it has no plural.”
“One wants to tell a story, like
Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind.
It's a way of stalling death.”
― Carlos
Fuentes
