Carlos Fuentes, RIP

The New York Times:

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. He was 83. ...

Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love.

Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale about the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border, and it was made into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

In the tradition of Latin American writers, Mr. Fuentes was politically engaged, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada.

Mr. Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Mr. Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and skewered the administration of George W. Bush over its antiterrorism tactics and immigration policies, calling them unduly harsh.

I am very sorry that Fuentes is gone. He will be deeply missed.

And here's a wonderful, more detailed obituary from The LA Times

Homenaje a Cancun

Cancun, despite whatever anybody may have told you, is a literary destination after all. It has fewer bookstores per capita than even Las Vegas. But to its credit, there is a Mayan guy who wanders up and down the beach with a sandwich board. It says, "Beer 20 pesos, Used books 15 pesos, Villanelles 30 pesos, Sestinas 30 pesos." Is this some kind of joke, I wonder. Evidently not. I spent a grand total of US$6.50. I got a very cold Superior beer with a slice of lime, a used copy of Roberto Bolano's Night in Chile, and a sestina. The sestina was unusual and somewhat disappointing. It was mostly words in Mayan but rounded itself out by having the rhymes in Spanish. I was impressed. Others might not be. But seriously, what kind of sestina can you get anywhere else for US$3.00? Or more bluntly, how many rhymes can you get for US$3.00, forget about what language they might be in.

In his novel, Diana, which is not his best work by a long shot, Carlos Fuentes complains about the quality of paper in Mexico. It's cheap, but the pen goes through the page, and the pages disintegrate in the humidity. The pages don't smell good either. OK. He won the Cervantes prize so he knows about this. And he's Mexican. Fine. So I needed a notebook on June 7, 2007. In Super Mar Caribe, my favorite small mini mart, I found one. It is perfect. It has squares on every page and on the cover a picture of Tweety Bird kicking a soccer ball and the logo of the Mexican Football Team. It's about the run up to the 2006 World Cup, and it says, "Nos vamos al mundial!!" It was US$2.50. It says in small print on the back that it was made in Chile. There are dozens more of these on the shelf. There are enough to give every single writer in Quintana Roo a chance. A chance to wander the beaches of Cancun selling beer and haikus, fruit juice and essays, ice cream and used books.