Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes is this year’s Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies at Cambridge. His most recent novel is The Old Gringo.

A Show of Heads

Carlos Fuentes, 19 March 1987

In the autumn of 1967 in London, I coincided with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding incarnation: the Latin American dictators.

Instant Fellini: Carlos Fuentes

Tessa Hadley, 12 February 2009

In ‘Eternal Father’, the last story in Happy Families, three sisters meet for a candlelit reunion around their father’s coffin, in a sunken park in Mexico City, ‘a cool,...

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Closer to God

Adam Bradbury, 14 May 1992

‘Mexican literature will be great because it’s literature, not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We...

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Clean Sweep

Philip Horne, 10 May 1990

Klima’s fine, disconsolate novel is scarcely the cliché its blurb makes it out – ‘a moving account of the fate of the dissident artist under an oppressive regime’...

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Acapulcalypse

Patrick Parrinder, 23 November 1989

Christopher, the new Columbus, is conceived on a beach at Acapulco at the beginning of 1992. Mexico’s overseas debt stands at $1492 billion, soon to rise to $1992 billion, and the Yucatan...

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Fuentes the Memorious

John Sutherland, 19 June 1986

Carlos Fuentes is one of those unusual novelists who would make the International Who’s Who even if he had never written a novel. As a public man, Fuentes’s career has been directed...

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Playing

Robert Taubman, 5 August 1982

‘There was a story that began –’ begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on...

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Heartlessness is not enough

Graham Hough, 21 May 1981

Critical reactions to Muriel Spark puzzle me a good deal. The general consensus among reviewers seems to find her riotously funny; and in the midst of this open-hearted merriment I am a skeleton...

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