Mexican Novelist Carlos Fuentes -- RIP

Carlos Fuentes

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes died in Mexico City at age 83. The Washington Post offers a useful obit on this well-regarded writer.

His passing occurred just days after a rumor about Gabriel Garcia Marquez's death swept the world. As it turned out, the Nobel Prize-winning Marquez is still alive, while his Mexican literary peer has passed on.

While Fuentes is best known for his fiction writing, he was something of a polymath. He was equally at home in diplomatic circles as well as the theatre. He considered himself a "transopolitan," meaning he was comfortable in the refined worlds of high culture, high social class, and high income. However, unlike many of the New Age's transopolitans, Fuentes actually cared about social issues and the fate of humanity.

I once briefly saw Fuentes. He visited a New York bookstore where I worked after graduating from college. He had a distinguished air, without arrogance or demanding sense of entitlement.

The Paris Review's interview of Fuentes is a useful introduction to his personality and work.