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 transparente, and also examines some of the author's other works.

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

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 collections and proposes a new ordering for the stories so that would make the volumes more effective. In the process, he analyzes the narrative techniques employed by Fuentes.

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 Aura/Consuelo as an archetypal witch or, more accurately, a sorceress. The critic argues that this figure encompasses both creative and destructive elements and serves to address the human need to transcend space, time, and identity.

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's short fiction collection Burnt Water.

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.

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, noting his preoccupation with Mexico's colonial past.

In the following essay, Perez examines how Fuentes uses the ancient myth of the "White Goddess" or "Mother Goddess" in his short fiction.

Master of the Short Story:

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 Tzvetan Todorov. While Todorov reserves the genre for certain writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Duncan believes that "Chac Mool" and the work of other Latin American writers also fit Todorov's definition of fantastic literature.

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 only one of two roles, that of the virgin mother or that of the whore. The critic concludes that Fuentes 's story effectively portrays the emptiness and violence that are related to these stereotypical views.

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 finds that the women of the short stories are similar to the men—"incapable of mutual love or shared equality. "

In the following essay, Wing examines Fuentes's treatment of female characters in Cantar de ciegos.

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 … or of the work, making it out, for instance, to be an impenetrable, confused, chaotic hodge-podge … so that the potential reader comes to associate it in his mind with the label "unreadable." The ambition, difficulty, and deliberate excesses inherent in Terra Nostra thus make it the ideal candidate for transformation in...

In the following interview, Fuentes discusses his approach to writing, Latin American writers and literature, and his place in Latin American literature.

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 viejo, and asserts that the author's employment of both "has imbued his novel with remarkable structural coherence and has touched upon human issues which transcend history, geography, and culture."

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 in developing his craft. Throughout both La región más transparente and Cambio de piel, Fuentes portrays a number of artists—poets, novelists, painters—all of whom either abandon their discipline or decide to remain silent, interiorizing the artistic process, rather than communicating their ideas to a society they j...

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 Latin American novels of the last 20 years."

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 archetypes, Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, represent not only two historical cultures but also the origins of the present-day, mestizo trauma of the Mexican mind. Fuentes clearly intends a political and psychological relevance to contemporary México…. Two levels of introspection are supposed to operate during the play—...

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.

In the following review, Kerrigan offers a favorable assessment of The Orange Tree.

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 once objective and arbitrary."

In the following review, Theroux responds negatively to Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone.

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" with the "fantastical" and how this desire resulted in the stories "The Doll Queen," "Chac Mool, " and "A Garden in Flanders."

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. Augustine's Pigeon (1980). In the following review of Burnt Water, he praises Fuentes for his ability to fully describe the destitution of the working class near Mexico City, though he finds certain stories in the collection to be less successful than others.

Below, Weintraub offers a predominantly negative review of A New Time for Mexico.

In the following review, Gallagher offers a primarily positive assessment of A Change of Skin.

In the following review, Shumway offers a mixed assessment of The Buried Mirror.

In the following review, Canby provides a mixed assessment of A New Time for Mexico.

In the following review, Rubin offers synopses of the novellas collected in The Orange Tree.

In the following review, Mead provides a generally positive appraisal of A New Time for Mexico.

Reading [the stories in "Burnt Water"] is somewhat like watching people on a carousel—individuals you won't see again…. Two or three or four return long enough to be recognized, then almost at once they curl out of sight. What remains after you close this book? More than anything else a sense of turbid, vital, gamy, rhythmic human life in Mexico City. Those people who seemed so distinct and unforgettable as they rode by—laughing, waving, shouting, rising and descend...

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 Fuentes, it can offer a wide range of interpretative possibilities. Reflecting the inherent psychic duality of human nature, be it expressed in terms of logos-eros or reason-instinct, literary doubles tend to assume a patently antithetical configuration. That is, writers often "either juxtapose or duplicate two characters; the one representing th...

[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 with a sequence of almost continuous flashes of lightning, his whole world of feeling and emotion. With the bravery of a young man, Señor Fuentes has cleared all ideas of what a novel ought to be from his mind and has decided, quite simply, to put what it is to be Mexican, and all of Mexico, into his book…. He has accepted himself...

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.

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 high tropic. "Burnt water," Fuentes notes, "atl tlachinolli: the paradox of the creation is also the paradox of destruction." That is neatly put, but Fuentes's vision is ultimately less symmetrical than this sentence suggests. The Spanish substituted their world for that of the Aztecs, but the Mexicans sin...

Where the Air Is Clear [La región más transparente] is an attempt to extricate a living imagination from the entombed, self-devouring realities of Mexican consciousness, forever mourning its sundered past, incessantly projecting its possible future shapes, and torn between its ill-defined authenticity and the directing pressure of more advanced societies, much as the nineteenth-century Russian mind was caught between panslavism and the cultured West. Neither a Turgenev nor a Dostoyevsky, Fuent...

What distinguished Carlos Fuentes's impressive first novel, "Where the Air Is Clear," was precisely his ability to manage firmly and sensitively—always as an artist, never as an ideologist—the kind of packed and turbulent social scene that is so often the undoing of the "political" novelist. Taking as his material the passionate revolutionary past and critically-poised present of Mexico, he brought to it with the grace of a true novelist an instinct for the d...

Fuentes is the most ambitious and deliberate of Latin America's "new" novelists, and Terra Nostra is clearly an effort to produce a major work. Whether he has succeeded or not, only time can tell, though I fear that he has not. Fuentes's greatest flaw as a novelist, his intellectualism and hastily gathered erudition, is magnified in Terra Nostra, a huge and unreadable volume that endeavors to recover Mexico's (and by extension Latin America's) Hispanic past. If read...

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 author of the broad-canvas account of the Mexican experience, Where the Air Is Clear (1959), and the brilliant Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), one of the finest Mexican novels of our time. Possibly, there is no other writer who so accurately perceives the Mexican character, as well as the international role that the nation is likely to play in c...

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 ranging variety" of the stories in the collection.

Carlos Fuentes' … ambiguous [and] wide-ranging historical panegyric, Terra Nostra, is an [easy] read but … inconclusive. There is the Old World (Spain), the New World (Mexico) and the Next World (Revolutionary). All are drawn with poetic license and give no clues to the mechanics of power politics. History for Fuentes is not linear but circular. He ruminates at length on the mystic number three: father, son and spirit; mother, father, child; white race, black and red; fire, water, air; ...

[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, and destroying its people. The stories are mined from various literary veins, of which the richest by far is a closely observed social realism. That is the mode, for instance, of "The Son of Andrés Aparicio." Bernabé, the main character, lives in a district of makeshift huts, a barrio so tenuous that it lacks even a ...

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, the Valley of the Fallen and the Escorial palace, the plunder of Flanders, Philip, Franco and their Latin American inheritors. The central theme is, in fact, how a Roman culture pledged to a murderous unity of faith and obedience has waged war on the notions of diversity and fertility. Caught in a sterile dualism—right/wrong, good/ev...

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 serpent. Toward the end, the narrator fantasticates the image in the service of explaining what the secret agent's trade is all about. The serpent is a hydra, and the agent is but one head of the hydra. Cut off that head and a thousand will replace it. The eagle is two-headed. "One head is called the CIA and the other the KGB. Two h...

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 though it has been freshly minted out of the turmoil and subterranean intrigue of current world affairs…. [The] reader scarcely need suspend a single breath of willing disbelief. The CIA, the Israeli spy service, undercover Arab operatives and the ingenious but untested Mexican secret agents, sometimes in the person of the same (double...

Rising in a malignant mist or squatting silently in impenetrable darkness, the Aztec god Chac-Mool presides over [Burnt Water, an] impressive collection of stories about the inhabitants of Mexico City. A symbol of the paradoxes that beset modern Mexicans, he is at once worldly and unknowable, dangerous and faintly ridiculous, real and imaginary. The central question—whether he is alive or dead—is also paradoxical, reflecting the burnt water of the title, for "the Mexican character never...

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 Kubrick could direct it and for only an audience in a narcotized high. This reviewer neither enjoyed the book nor could find himself capable of a favorable review. The problems are many: the writing style; the arrangement of the book; the constant, though not clever, shift of character from one charade to another and from one place to another. Kafkaesque, ma...

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 passions are no more than the organisms on which violation and revenge feed. However many heads the human Hydra grows, 'the two-headed eagle laughs and devours' them. This double-headed eagle—America/Russia—may be the final control on Felix, The Hydra Head's 'unconscious hero', but it takes him a ...