![]() Fuentes himself cited Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner and Balzac as the most important writers to him. Writing Ĭarlos Fuentes has been called "the Balzac of Mexico". A daughter, Natasha Fuentes Lemus (born August 31, 1974), died of an apparent drug overdose in Mexico City on August 22, 2005, at the age of 30. A son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, died from complications associated with hemophilia in 1999 at the age of 25. įuentes fathered three children, only one of whom survived him: Cecilia Fuentes Macedo, born in 1962. ![]() ![]() In 1989, he was the subject of a full-length PBS television documentary, "Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes," which also aired in Europe and was broadcast repeatedly in Mexico. ![]() In 1988, Paz's magazine Vuelta carried an attack by Enrique Krauze on the legitimacy of Fuentes' Mexican identity, opening a feud between Paz and Fuentes that lasted until Paz's 1998 death. Once good friends with Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Fuentes became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Fuentes supported. Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated his book The Death of Artemio Cruz. His friends included Luis Buñuel, William Styron, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and sociologist C. He also taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell. įuentes served as Mexico's ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, resigning in protest of former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's appointment as ambassador to Spain. His second marriage, to journalist Silvia Lemus, lasted until his death. Considered "dashingly handsome", Fuentes also had high-profile affairs with actresses Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg, who inspired his novel Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone. The same year, he married Mexican actress Rita Macedo. In 1959, he moved to Havana in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, where he wrote pro-Castro articles and essays. The following year, he published Where the Air Is Clear, which immediately made him a "national celebrity" and allowed him to leave his diplomatic post to write full-time. In 1957, Fuentes was named head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. He later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. During this time, he also began working at the daily newspaper Hoy and writing short stories. He lived in Mexico for the first time at the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City with an eye toward a diplomatic career. There, he first became interested in socialism, which would become one of his lifelong passions, in part through his interest in the poetry of Pablo Neruda. In 1940, the Fuentes family was transferred to Santiago, Chile. he later pointed to the event as the moment in which he began to understand himself as Mexican. In 1938, Mexico nationalized foreign oil holdings, leading to a national outcry in the U.S. He also began to write during this time, creating his own magazine, which he shared with apartments on his block. From 1934 to 1940, Fuentes' father was posted to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., where Carlos attended English-language school, eventually becoming fluent. As the family moved for his father's career, Fuentes spent his childhood in various Latin American capital cities, an experience he later described as giving him the ability to view Latin America as a critical outsider. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, the latter of whom was a Mexican diplomat. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency.
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