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| Carlos Fuentes |
Carlos Fuentes is perhaps Mexico's most celebrated writer. Across more than twenty novels, he writes of the
passions and politics of a nation perpetually in turmoil. He also served as
Ambassador to Paris, a time he eludes to fondly, before returning to Mexico
City.
The Death of
Artemio Cruz" [1962] is the best known of the translated fictions, a portrayal of a powerful, and largely corrupt, man on his deathbed as he imagines
the past and rails against death. In this novel, Fuentes wrote the first of
many graphic depictions of sex, including an odd characterization of Christ in sensualized
circumstance, and in one of his later novels "Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts
Alone" [1995] he once again uses the bedroom as a place where personal and
political clashes are won and lost.
The plot line is skimpy, the novel
largely philosophical rambling on political upheavals and cultural struggles,
and these reflections are the best part of the book. As the sixties come to a
close, a successful adulterous writer is drawn into an unusually intense affair
with an American actress. As they come to each other and resist each other with
equal force, he contemplates the pretense of Hollywood versus lost souls in his
own country, including his own, and the inability of humans to connect in a
meaningful way through time. Like the goddess Diana, the actress is equal parts
pretense, desire and weakness.
"The young people of Paris, in
May 1968, had rebelled against what they vaguely called the tyranny of
consumption, a society that exchanged being for seeming and took acquisition as
a proof of existence. A Mexican, no matter how much he travels the world, is
always anchored in a society of need; we return to the need that surrounds us
on all sides in Mexico, and if we have even the slightest spark of conscience,
it's hard for us to imagine a world where you can get everything you might want
immediately, even pink toothpaste. I've always told myself that the vigor of
Latin American art derives from the enormous risk of throwing yourself into the
abyss of need, hoping to land on your feet on the other side, the side of
satisfaction. It's very hard for us - if not for us personally, then in the
name of all those around us."
Diana responds at another point
that "There are forces that present themselves once and never again.
Forces, she repeated, sleepily nodding several times, staring at the polished
nails of her bare feet, her chin perched on her knees. Forces, not opportunities.
Forces for love, politics, artistic creation, sports, who knows what else. They
come by only once. It's useless to try to recover them. They're gone, mad at us
because we paid them no mind. We didn't want passion. Then passion didn't want
us either."
Fuentes often seizes an opportunity
to decry the "gringo" effect on his country and suggests that migration northward has been
stimulated as much by the needs of the American people, even as they scorn
immigrants, as a failure of his own government to improve quality of life in
his homeland.
I hung on every line and enjoyed
playing voyeur as these two souls marched towards their own demise. Few
surprises in this novel full of elegant thoughts. The book is hard to find,
mostly used copies, and worth the search. Fuentes passed away in 2012 but his
passions live on.
I'll leave you with this great
passage: "New Year's Eve. This passage from 1969 to 1970 was worthy of
celebration because it marked the end of one decade and the beginning of a new
one. But no one agrees about what that final zero means at the end of a year.
Were the sixties coming to an end and the seventies beginning, or were the
1960's demanding one more year, a final agony of partying and crime, revolt and
death, for that decade replete with major events, tangible and intangible, guts
and dreams, cobblestones and memories, blood and desire: the decade of Vietnam
and Martin Luther King, the Kennedy assassinations and May 1968 in Paris, the
Democratic convention in Chicago and the massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza, the
death of Marilyn? A decade that seemed to be programmed for television, to fill
the sterile scheduling wastelands of blank screens but leave them breathless,
making miracles banal, transforming the little electronic postage stamp into
our daily bread, the expected into the unexpected, the facsimile of reality
that culminated, even before the 1970's had begun, in mankind's first step on
the moon. Our immediate suspicion: was the flight to the moon filmed in a TV
studio? Our instantaneous disenchantment: can the moon go on being our romantic
Diana after a gringo leaves his shit up there?"
If you want to learn more about
Latin American writers, join educator Nancy Rayl and I on September 28th at 3:00
PM at Laguna Beach Books for the first of a quarterly salon on international
literature.
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