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“... In the autumn of 1967 in London, I coincided with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America ...”

“... Carlos Fuentes is one of those unusual novelists who would make the International Who’s Who even if he had never written a novel. As a public man, Fuentes’s career has been directed to Mexico’s uneasy relationship with the outside world – he was Mexican Ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977 ...”

“... Playboy Centerfold Contest is being held in Chicago – perhaps the one cheerful prophecy that Carlos Fuentes has to offer. Meanwhile, Chile is struck by a catastrophic earthquake, so that the whole country together with General Pinochet (who is still its leader) dissolves like a sugar lump into the sea. Nobody would choose to be born into a world ...”

“... it in the course of a very short visit to Dartmouth; my immediate predecessor, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, for the best part of a year. I was originally invited only for the autumn term of 1982, but the invitation was extended to the winter term of 1983. We returned to London for the month of December 1982 and spent January to March back in ...”

“... none of them is sufficient in itself. The scene is strange with the strangeness characteristic of Fuentes’s writing. The garage is not quite a real place, and these characters are not fleshed out and made believable according to realist conventions. But the treatment isn’t parable-like either, it doesn’t aim for the pared-down illustrative clarity of a ...”

“... But fantasy, in Barth and others who have revived it recently, is not a substitute for life. In Carlos Fuentes it seems nothing but a substitute. His model is literature – and of the most depressing, fin-de-siècle kind. Distant Relations asks to be admired for the quality of its settings (Toltec ruins in Mexico, Gabriel’s pavillon on the Place de ...”

“... The Chase, published in Spanish in 1956 and now translated, is elaborately hailed on the back by Carlos Fuentes as the work of the inventor of ‘magical realism’, ‘our father’. It certainly has, like Fuentes’s own 1965 Aura, a seriously ‘literary side’. Its highly-worked, modernistic formal experiments ...”

“... literature will be great because it’s literature, not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th ...”

“... and failures of conviction, that are subtly unfamiliar to the rest of the Western world. Carlos Fuentes, still only 53, has written film-scripts for Buñuel, besides a large body of fiction and essays. To the outside world he is the outstanding figure in contemporary Mexican letters, a bitter critic and interpreter of the history and fate of his ...”

“... of the Patriarch is no doubt the most famous instance. When it was learned that the remains of Carlos Fuentes, who died last month, were to be taken to Montparnasse Cemetery, observers were not slow to note that Porfirio Díaz, the last Mexican despot – well, the last pre-revolutionary despot – is also buried there. The joke was not on ...”

“... do well to refurbish. In LRB at the end of May, Graham Hough, reviewing Burnt Water by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes,2 complained that, whereas ‘the novel today is virtually an international form,’ so that Tolstoy is still Tolstoy though ‘an English writer to the English, a German to the Germans, French to the French’, yet the Latin American novel ...”

“... be honest about his doubts and fears, tender and lyrical about his dreams. As the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes puts it in his introduction, ‘there is something both Quixote and Crusoe in him, for he imagines a world and also builds it.’ Lucky is the revolutionary who survives to the moment of triumph, as Cabezas did. The knowledge that his side ...”

“... century and thoroughly renewed the dying art of the novel: Terra Nostra (1976), by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, is another great example. Some have called this development ‘magic realism’. I prefer to call it palimpsest history. First I want to distinguish between various kinds of fictional histories: 1. the realistic historical novel, about which ...”

“... who criticised him. He didn’t like to hear his supporters disagree with him on anything.’ Carlos Fuentes, the country’s most famous novelist, was another early supporter who quickly distanced himself. Writing in Le Monde in October, Fuentes warned that López Obrador’s actions after the elections were a ...”

“... for administrative offices. Not until the later 18th century, when the ‘enlightened’ Borbon Carlos III, strapped for cash, turned on successive sectors of the Church, did true private property in land become the norm. The second basic factor shaping Spanish creoledom was that its most important early centres were in today’s Mexico, Ecuador and ...”