Carlos Fuentes in an undated photograph. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In Ireland last week on a pilgrimage with America readers, I had the chance to burrow around in James Joyce’s Dublin, including locales made famous by his life and his literature. At an exhibit in the Museum of Literature Ireland, I came across the following quote about Joyce: “He opened up all the possibilities of language, of reinventing the world through language.” The quote’s author was not an Irishman, but certainly a fellow traveler on the lanes and rambles of literary expression: the famous Mexican novelist, critic and sometime diplomat Carlos Fuentes.

Fuentes knew his Irish authors well; W. B. Yeats shows up in his writing in subterranean ways almost as much as Joyce. In fact, when once explaining why he chose to write in his native Spanish instead of English, Fuentes delivered a sidelong attack on colonizers that was savage enough to warm the most fanatic Irish heart: “The English language, after all, did not need another writer. The English language has always been alive and kicking, and if it ever becomes drowsy, there will always be an Irishman.”

Next week will mark 24 years since the death of Fuentes, sometimes called “the Joyce of Mexico,” “the Balzac of Mexico” or “the Faulkner of Mexico,” though he no doubt considered them all the Fuentes of their own nations. A wizardly innovator of language and narrative, he is universally recognized as one of Latin America’s literary giants and a leader in the Boom Latinoamericano renaissance of the 1960s and 70s, and was also recognized with practically every literary prize imaginable (with the exception, like Joyce, of the Nobel Prize). 

Fuentes was born in 1928 in Panama City, Panama, where his father served as a Mexican diplomat. He spent much of his childhood living in foreign capitals to which his father was posted, including six years in Washington, D.C. He published his first novel, the critically acclaimed Where the Air is Clear, in 1958 while working as a diplomat, following it a year later with The Good Conscience. 

Three years later came two novels: Aura, and then perhaps his most famous work, The Death of Artemio Cruz. Featuring an almost cinematic style and numerous unreliable narrators, the second novel is a dark exploration of the motivations and compulsions of a dying Mexican oligarch who moves over the course of his life from idealistic soldier in the Mexican Revolution to corrupt and cynical powerbroker. Artemio Cruz appears on many a syllabus of Latin American literature courses; I first read it in a class on “Latin American Strongmen” in graduate school, though it  reminded me more of François Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle than anything else.

America’s review of The Death of Artemio Cruz (the magazine reviewed six translations of his novels over the decades) noted that the book was not an easy read but was worth the effort: “If the author is not always intelligible to those who are not well acquainted with all the facets of Mexico’s history, his imagery in many instances is original, vivid and hauntingly poignant.”

Nineteen more novels followed, including two published posthumously, as well as short stories, screenplays, essay collections and more. The best-known in the United States is probably The Old Gringo, which was a bestseller in 1985 and was later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. Fuentes also taught writing at most of the Ivy League universities as well as Cambridge and other schools abroad, and was Mexico’s ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977. His generally leftist politics brought him scrutiny in the United States from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and he was denied a visa to enter the United States on several occasions in the 1960s.

In a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, Fuentes opined at length on the relationship between the United States and Mexico, saying that “having an identity means that you can accept challenges and influences from everywhere,” and that both cultures could benefit from their closeness but also from their differences. “I’m convinced that cultures that live in isolation perish and it is only cultures that communicate and give things to one another that thrive, that live,” he told Moyers. “I’m not afraid of communication with another culture. You have an influence over the culture of Mexico but we have an influence over the culture of the United States.”

That same year, Fuentes’s lifelong friendship with fellow Mexican literary giant Octavio Paz was sundered when the latter published in his Spanish-language magazine a lengthy and unsparing attack on Fuentes by the historian Enrique Krauze, who suggested Fuentes was not really Mexican at all. Titled “Guerilla Dandy,” the piece also called Fuentes a media darling more than a real intellectual. “His work simplifies the country,” Krauze wrote, “his view is frivolous, unrealistic, and, all too often, false.” The essay was later published in English in The New Republic; Fuentes and Paz never spoke again.

Other critics were more generous. In 1987, Fuentes was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, given annually to recognize the lifetime achievements of a Spanish-language writer; the prestigious award had added resonance for Fuentes, who had long cited Cervantes as a primary influence and invoked his themes and style in many of his own writings. He was also given Mexico’s highest honor, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor, in 1999.

Though Fuentes was an atheist, he strongly identified with Mexico’s Catholic culture. “I am a nonbeliever,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1992, “but I am a Catholic in the sense that I belong to a Catholic culture. I can’t get away from it. It impregnates everything—my world view, my view of politics, my view of women, of education, of literature.” He also saw Catholicism as an important part of Latin America’s identity. “I hope [Latin America is] Catholic in outlook forever,” he told the Times, because it was a bulwark against a modernity that had “proven to be so brittle, so contradictory.”

That year, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, also marked the publication of Fuentes’s long historical essay, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, which was accompanied by a BBC television series. Fuentes spoke widely throughout that year on Latin American literature and culture in light of that quincentennial. (Among his stops was Loyola Marymount University for a lecture in the fall of my freshman year there.)

Fuentes died in Mexico City on May 15, 2012, of internal bleeding after several years of heart trouble. He had continued publishing and writing up until the day of his death. After a state funeral in Mexico City, he was buried in Paris’s famous Montparnasse Cemetery. Among the many writers and public figures who offered tributes was France’s president, François Hollande, who said Fuentes “defended with ardor a simple and dignified idea of humanity.”

A final thought: Today is Cinco de Mayo, a holiday that is only celebrated in a small part of Mexico but is often commemorated stateside by, in the words of former America editor Vivian Cabrera, folks “who donned the sombreros and ate Taco Bell” and didn’t realize that “Mexico is more than resorts and fish tacos.” At the same time, Cabrera recognized the importance of taking the opportunity to celebrate Mexican and Mexican-American culture here in the United States. I wonder: If Fuentes—renowned as an interpreter of Latin America to the United States and vice versa, always explaining one to the other—were alive today, what would he think of it all?

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Ars Prophetica” by Timothy Adam Parker. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.