Issue date: 2/8/07 Section: Campus News

Media Credit: Tai Ho Shin Professor-at-large Carlos Fuentes spoke in Spanish on his novel, Latin American politics and globalization.

Carlos Fuentes, a major political novelist and a professor-at-large at Brown, spoke in Spanish about his internationally acclaimed novel "La Muerte de Artemio Cruz," Latin American governments and the effects of globalization on the region to a crowd gathered at Brown Hillel on Wednesday afternoon.

"I can talk about others a lot, but it is always hard to talk about one's own work," Fuentes confessed to the crowd. Yet the lecture seemed to cause him no trouble.

Fuentes was born in Panama City, a son of two Mexican parents who expected him to grow up knowing the history of their homeland. At 16 years old, he moved to Mexico City, which he still calls home. After graduating with degrees from the University of Mexico and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, he followed in his father's footsteps and became a diplomat for the Mexican government in 1965.

His political career sent him to France, London and Venice, while his literary contributions have provided him with teaching opportunities at institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge and Columbia universities and the University of Pennsylvania.

Fuentes began his lecture with a crash course on the history of the Mexican Revolution, the central event of his third novel, which in English is called "The Death of Artemio Cruz." He spoke about the motivations for the uprising and the changes instituted by principal Mexican figures like Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza.

"Perhaps one reason this novel was not immediately accepted in Mexico was because it did not follow in the usual legitimizing of these men as revolutionary 'heroes' as those before it had," Fuentes said.

He continued by explaining his reasons for writing a novel in the first, second and third persons.

"In writing a novel about the revolution, I knew that I was following an established literary tradition by men such as Mariano Azuela Gonzalez, Martin Luis Guzman and Rafael Munoz," Fuentes said, "but I felt that I needed to write it in a new, different way."

Fuentes said one instance in particular led him to use multiple tenses to tell the story of Artemio Cruz, who in the novel recounts his corrupt life while lying on his deathbed. The idea came to Fuentes after he spontaneously decided to swim in Holland on a cold November day when he was in the middle of revising the original manuscript.

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