Mexico Writer and Intellectual Carlos Fuentes died today

Carlos Fuentes died today in Mexico City. He shared with Octavio Paz the distinction of being one of Mexico's two greatest writers and intellectuals. Reed and I feel his death in a personal way, as we have relied on his works to gain understanding of Mexico, her people and culture.  

In our Spanish class, we read and discussed the monumental history Fuentes wrote to mark the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Our teacher had a video produced to accompany the book, "El Espejo Interrado" (The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World). I have a vivid memory of Carlos Fuentes, with superb posture and athletic grace, walking us viewers through the magnificent architecture that is the Alhambra in Granada, Spain--last Moorish holdout before they were driven off the Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish.    

And, of course, there is "Aura", whose magical realism took my breath away...and others. So it seems fitting to publish this piece by the Spanish newspaper El País, which features reflections of Fuentes' friends and colleagues.     

Milenio: Mexico City • Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa, said today that Mexico's Carlos Fuentes was "a universal man", connoisseur of many languages ​​and literatures, who lived committed to all the major political and cultural problems of his time.

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)

In a short note published by the online edition of the Spanish newspaper El País, the Peruvian writer said that the death of Fuentes on Tuesday has given him much pain, because "with him disappears a writer whose work and whose presence has left a deep mark."

The Nobel laureate stressed that the stories, novels and essays of Fuentes, who was born in Panamá in 1928, are inspired principally by the history and problems of Mexico:

"But he was a universal man, who knew many literatures, in many languages, and who lived in a committed way all great political and cultural problems of his time," added Vargas Llosa.

Moreover, Vargas Llosa maintained that Fuentes was always a great promoter of culture and worked tirelessly to bring together writers and readers of Spanish language on both sides of the Atlantic.

Vargas Llosa called him "a hard worker, disciplined and enthusiastic, and at the same time a great traveler, with a universal curiosity." He stressed that Fuentes was a person who was interested in all manifestations of the cultural and political life and who, above all, wrote a brilliant and especially good prose.

"Not only his friends, but also his many readers will miss him," he explained.

The director of the Cervantes Institute, Victor García de la Concha, emphasized how Fuentes always defended Spanish as the language of the territory of La Mancha, an expression of La Mancha that has remained as one of the great statements of Spanish culture.

"Furthermore, Fuentes was also one of the great defenders of the Panhispanic language policy of the Academies. It affects me emotionally to remember his defense of the Spanish language as a unifying factor for a whole diverse cultural community," he told El País newspaper.

For his part, the writer Juan Goytisolo says he is deeply affected by Fuentes' death, "in the fullness of his gifts." The news makes it impossible for him to summarize the sixty years of friendship that united them.

"I have followed with attention all his work, and I have written essays on a dozen of his books, especially on 'Terra Nostra'. For me, it is his masterpiece and one of the best novels of all time in the Spanish language," he told El País.

For the Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon, America loses with Fuentes a great intellectual, a creator whose imagination unveiled places and thoughts, and that "the world chose as a model of its reflections." Spanish original