Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012

An aspiring writer in the 1940s, Carlos Fuentes was cautioned by his diplomat father to get a real job. Instead, Carlos threaded the needle: he satisficed padre by acquiring a law degree. Then he spent two decades as a Mexican diplomat, managing to resign twice for more or less the same reason: in 1968 he resigned as ambassador to England in protest over the Tlatelolco massacre; he re-entered service in 1975 before finally ending his diplomatic career by resigning as ambassador to France because the man who ordered the massacre was appointed ambassador to Spain.

Not only a critic of his longtime home, Fuentes also chided US immigration policy for its hypocrisy, saying: “They know they need migrant Mexican labor, without which their harvests, services and many aspects of life would go to ruin.” The day he died the Mexican paper Reforma published a Fuentes essay on France’s recent elections.

All the while, Fuentes never abandoned his true love, literature. His first novel, “Where the Air Is Clear,” published when Fuentes was 29 years old, helped spark the heyday of Latin American literature. Carlos Fuentes would enjoy five decades as a novelist.

With “The Old Gringo” (1985), a novel based on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce near the end of the Mexican Revolution, Fuentes became the first Mexican writer to have a bestselling book in the United States. It also inspired a movie starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, marking a highpoint in the writer’s popularity north of the border.

Every year it seems Fuentes was rumored to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize, though he never received it.  In truth, the sober observation of everyday life effusing Fuentes’s work pushed back against magical realism, the dominant literary tradition in Latin America and the school through which so many of the region’s writers have passed onto literary superstardom. He may have also been too prolific: the Nobel committee seems to favor authors with a manageable oeuvre, while Fuentes has over 30 titles to his name. (Poor Philip Roth.)

Carlos Fuentes died of apparent heart failure in Mexico City on Tuesday at age 83.