Biography EssayBorn in Panama City on 11 November 1928, under the astrological sign of Scorpio, as he is fond of mentioning, Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico's premier novelists, is the son of Rafael Fue...
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Carlos Fuentes (born 1928) was a Mexican short-story writer, novelist, essayist, and political writer whose works are a mixture of social protest, realism, psychological insight, and fantasy.Carlos Fu...
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Author, diplomat, editor, political writer, and essayist, Carlos Fuentes wears all these hats in his works which blend realism, fantasy, social protest, psychological insight, and history. Books such ...
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November 11, 1928. Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City to Berta Macias Rivas and Dr. Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, a diplomat attached to the Mexican legation. "The problem of my baptism then arose. As...
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Born in Panama City on 11 November 1928, under the astrological sign of Scorpio, as he is fond of mentioning, Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico's premier novelists, is the son of Rafael Fuentes Boettiger,...
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Critical Essay by Juan Goytisolo
One of the usual tactics of critical terrorism (whether or not it is legitimized by the power of the State) is to create a scarecrow-image, either of the author Ȃ...
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Critical Essay by Selden Rodman
Carlos Fuentes' … ambiguous [and] wide-ranging historical panegyric, Terra Nostra, is an [easy] read but … inconclusive. There is the Old World (Sp...
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Critical Essay by John Butt
Terra Nostra exploits every possibility in the language to make a truly memorable denunciation of the Hispanity symbolized by the Inquisition, the rape of the New World, th...
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Critical Essay by Roberto GonzÁlez Echev ArrÍa
Fuentes is the most ambitious and deliberate of Latin America's "new" novelists, and Terra Nostra is clearly an effort...
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Critical Essay by Alan Cheuse
Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's most versatile novelist, has looked the spy novel in the eye and produced a controversial world-class thriller. The Hydra Head reads as th...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Burgess
Early on in ["The Hydra Head"] an elevator attendant looks, as if for the first time, at the design on a Mexican peso—the eagle strangling the se...
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Critical Essay by Donald A. Yates
Fuentes has a background in international politics and a political commitment that, traditionally, few North American writers bring to their work. Moreover, he is the...
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Critical Essay by Reverend James M. Murphy
For a legion of reasons [The Hydra Head] was both difficult to read and hard to put down. Should it be raised to the cinema screen, only a Fellini or a Kubri...
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Critical Essay by Victoria Neumark
Fuentes's meta-thriller [The Hydra Head] takes the Arab-Israeli conflict as its paradigm of political dirty tricks; Mexican oil-fields, Mexican men and their ...
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Critical Essay by Richard Gilman
Where the Air Is Clear [La región más transparente] is an attempt to extricate a living imagination from the entombed, self-devouring realities of Mexica...
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Critical Essay by The Atlantic Monthly
Rising in a malignant mist or squatting silently in impenetrable darkness, the Aztec god Chac-Mool presides over [Burnt Water, an] impressive collection of stori...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Penner
[Fuentes' scenes in Burnt Water] draw vitality partly from their vivid sense of place: a Mexico City sprawling and ugly, corrupt and provincial, destroyed by, ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wood
The burnt water of [the collection entitled Burnt Water] is the lake of the Aztecs, drained by the conquering Spanish, who wished to recreate their arid homeland in this...
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Critical Essay by Anthony West
[From every page of "Where the Air Is Clear,"] one hears the passionate voice of a man talking of what is of vital concern to him, and illuminating, as wit...
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Critical Essay by Saul Maloff
What distinguished Carlos Fuentes's impressive first novel, "Where the Air Is Clear," was precisely his ability to manage firmly and sensitively ...
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Critical Essay by Lanin A. Gyurko
In several of his narratives, Carlos Fuentes focusses on the predicament of the Mexican artist, whom he evokes as facing formidable social and psychological obstacles...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Chrzanowski
Although the technique of the double is sometimes viewed as a facile device of melodrama, in the hands of a skillful and sophisticated writer such as Carlos Fuente...
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Critical Essay by A. John Skirius
In his play, Todos los gatos son pardos, Carlos Fuentes interprets the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire as the acting out of two opposite mentalities. The archety...
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Critical Essay by Evan Connell
Reading [the stories in "Burnt Water"] is somewhat like watching people on a carousel—individuals you won't see again…. Two or three o...
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In the following review, Gallagher offers a primarily positive assessment of A Change of Skin.
In an interview Carlos Fuentes once said that the Latin-American novel was now firmly out of its epic, Ma...
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In the following review, Rubin offers synopses of the novellas collected in The Orange Tree.
In the midst of his long literary career, Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's most famous living writer, also s...
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In the following review, Kerrigan offers a favorable assessment of The Orange Tree.
Carlos Fuentes established his international reputation over three decades ago, with The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962...
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In the following review, Theroux responds negatively to Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone.
Sexual postures can look so funny and vulnerable that the very notion of the distinguished author of this in...
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In the following review, Mead provides a generally positive appraisal of A New Time for Mexico.
"We turn on the television sets of the Mexican mind," writes Carlos Fuentes in A New Time ...
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In the following review, Canby provides a mixed assessment of A New Time for Mexico.
Carlos Fuentes is many things: a diplomat and self-described "transopolitan" who wears Savile Row sui...
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Below, Weintraub offers a predominantly negative review of A New Time for Mexico.
The focus of this collection of essays [A New Time for Mexico] is largely on events during the last two full calendar ...
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In the following interview, Fuentes discusses his approach to writing, Latin American writers and literature, and his place in Latin American literature.
[Dwyer:] On what project are you working now?
...
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In the following essay, Wing examines Fuentes's treatment of female characters in Cantar de ciegos.
It was José Donoso who first drew my attention to what are central features of the six...
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In the following essay, Chrzanowski analyzes Fuentes's use of the "double" or "doppelgänger" literary device as well as the theme of patricide in El gringo vi...
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In the following review of Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins, Donoghue notes Fuentes's ability to present bizarre, extraordinary elements in his fiction in a manner that is "at on...
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In the following essay, Van Delden explores Fuentes's treatment of the "nature of the self and its relations to history and the community" in La región más transpare...
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In the following review, Echevarria provides a highly laudatory assessment of The Campaign, declaring it not only "Fuentes's best novel so far," but "also one of the best L...
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In the following review, Shumway offers a mixed assessment of The Buried Mirror.
In 1856, Argentina's first great historian, Bartolome Mitre, published a collection of short biographies titled ...
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In the following essay, Van Delden surveys Fuentes's handling of the identity of Mexico as a nation in his works, particularly in Agua Quemada.
George Orwell claimed that politics gave him the ...
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Sommers was an American educator and critic whose books included After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel (1968). In this review of Cantar de ciegos, Sommers praises the "wide ran...
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In the following essay, Perez examines how Fuentes uses the ancient myth of the "White Goddess" or "Mother Goddess" in his short fiction.
Any reading but the most superfici...
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In the following essay, Wing analyzes the female characters in Cantar de ciegos, noting that they are different from the sentimental female characters in Fuentes's novels. Instead, the critic f...
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In the following analysis of the story "Mother's Day, " Valdes describes how Fuentes portrays masculine characters who stereotype the females in their lives, allowing the women on...
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In the following review of The Orange Tree, Kerrigan comments on Fuentes 's innovative treatment of time and the author's attempt to "reanimate history" in the collection.
...
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In this review of The Orange Tree, Hopkinson finds Fuentes's ideas "predictable" and "tired" and declares that the book is only partially redeemed by its humor.
Carl...
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In the following essay, Fuentes describes his perceptions of the short story and his literary influences in the genre. In the process, he discusses his desire to mesh the "realistic" wit...
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Reeve is an American critic and educator and the author of An Annotated Bibliography of Carols Fuentes (1970). In the following essay, Reeve traces the trajectory of Fuentes's short fiction, no...
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Master of the Short Story:
With Cantar de Ciegos [Song of the Blind], Fuentes keeps an old promise. He shows he is one of the few Latin American writers who have completely mastered the strict discip...
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In the following essay, Ciccone focuses on three of Fuentes 's stories from Los días enmascarados in order to discuss the author's treatment of temporality and the supernatural
Carl...
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Connell is an American novelist and author of short stories and nonfiction whose books include the novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), as well as the collected short story volume St. Augu...
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Durán is an American educator and critic. Here, she presents a survey of critical responses to Aura and offers her own analysis of the novella. Durán finds that Fuentes uses the figure of Au...
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Brushwood is an American critic and educator specializing in Mexican, Mexican American, and Spanish American literature. In the following essay, he examines the reading experience of two Fuentes story...
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Faris is an American critic and educator. In this excerpt from her book-length study of Fuentes's work, she comments on the elements of magical realism that she detects in Aura and in Fuentes&#...
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In the following essay, Duncan attempts to place Fuentes's story "Chac Mool" within the tradition of "fantastic" literature as the term is defined by the critic Tzve...
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Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
