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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Carlos Fuentes

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

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