The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

We don't usually hear literature and national politics spoken of in the same breath these days, but in the case of Carlos Fuentes the two often go naturally together. Ever since his debut as a novelist in the late 1950s, the prolific Mexican writer has attempted the Joycean feat of trying to put into prose, mostly novels and stories, the great uncreated conscience of his nation.
His latest effort in this regard came out four years ago in Mexico, and that book, translated as "The Eagle's Throne," has just been published in English. The bird of the title is part of the Mexican national emblem, and the seat in question is the presidency. Just recently a friend of mine, fresh from working in the Chilean presidential election campaign, told me that Michelle Bachelet, who was sworn in as Chile's president in March, had received from friends a number of copies of Fuentes' new book.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Sex, politics, Mexico and the enigmas of identity are the themes that have preoccupied — even, at times, obsessed — Carlos Fuentes for his entire writing life, and he brings them together once again, in full regalia, in his smashing new novel, "The Eagle's Throne." Here, though, they feel less like obsessions than like old friends, the trusted longtime companions of the novelist's working days. By now, they're so familiar to Fuentes, and to one another, that they mingle freely, casually, almost flirtatiously. Fuentes has gathered them all in one place many times before, usually for grave, summit-level meetings in ambitious novels like "The Death of Artemio Cruz," "The Old Gringo" and "The Years With Laura Díaz." This is the first time he's thrown them a party.

Which is not to say that "The Eagle's Throne" is unambitious. Fuentes doesn't put finger to keyboard without having at least one fairly large idea to get off his chest, and over the years he has managed to store up more than a couple of big ones about the subject he addresses here: the exercise of practical politics.


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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes has looked into the future of Mexico and seen a maelstrom of secrets that pulls in the entire political elite. Then, as if this apocalyptic vision weren't dark enough, he's found there can be no escape, no end to intrigue, plotting or murder for the crass and conniving bunch of Machiavellians reaching for the prized spot: "The Eagle's Throne."

Here, then, is a novel of pure (at its worst) politics, Fuentes readily agreed in a recent interview, but despite the steady march in his writing toward hard-hitting political realism he denies that he's calling for reform in Mexico or anywhere else. "I'm writing fiction, with all the freedom on the world," he said. "I'm not preaching to anybody, saying do this or do that. People can draw conclusions, moral or political, from reading the novel, but it is not my purpose to put on a Hyde Park speech." Instead, he wants the reader to sit back and enjoy the crazy roller-coaster ride that the Mexican presidency has in store for all those who get on and expect to survive.

The Eagle's Throne is the summit of power in Mexico. It's January 2020, Washington is angry with Mexico for demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Colombia and for backing the high oil prices set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and so with the flip of a switch, off goes the telecommunications network of its southern neighbor. The president of Mexico, Lorenzo Terán, three years into his reign, has suddenly sent Mexico down a path of resistance to the dictates of the United States.

Fuentes, the ever-sharper social critic, arrives naturally at the "The Eagle's Throne" to claim that politics is no less than the "public expression of private passions," as two of his sleep-your-way- to-power female politicos separately intone. And things private get quickly heated in this novel, once the power is off, as one of these kingmakers, María Rosario Galván, offers not only her connections but her desirable body as the ultimate prize to the young bureaucrat Nicolás Valdivia if he successfully makes the climb to the presidency with her help. But lies and secrets are the money of her trade, and she has no intention of seeing on the throne anyone other than her longtime friend and ex- lover, Bernal Herrera, the interior secretary, with whom she has had a child with Down's syndrome who is conveniently stored in a state institution.

From "The Crystal Frontier" (1997), which revealed the dark underside of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, to "Contra Bush" (2004), searing essays on the current U.S. administration, and another tome of essays about his views, "This I Believe" (2005), Fuentes has been landing his pen ever harder. His many other novels, including "The Old Gringo," "The Death of Artemio Cruz" and "The Years With Laura Díaz," have never shied from the base factor that guides all strivings: politics.

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Carlos Fuentes, Carmen Posadas, Rafael Reig and Jorge Franco at the Hay Festival

Carlos Fuentes, the acclaimed Mexican novelist and essayist, will be appearing at the Hay festival, heading up a line-up of treats for fans of Spanish-language literature. The former diplomat who spearheaded the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s will be talking about his latest book, The Eagle's Throne.
Fuentes is just one of a number of writers and thinkers who will be giving Hay a uniquely Spanish-speaking flavour this year. The festival will also welcome three writers at the forefront of the new wave of Spanish language fiction: Carmen Posadas, Rafael Reig and Jorge Franco. Introduced by the cultural editor of El Pais, they will discuss crime writing. Uruguayan-born Posadas is the author of Little Indiscretions, which has been described as Almodovar's take on Agatha Christie, Spaniard Reig's Blood on the Saddle is a crime fantasy set in Madrid and Colombian Franco is the author of a bestselling thriller, Rosario Tijeras.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

In Carlos Fuentes' new novel, The Eagle's Throne, it is the year 2020. America has knocked out all of Mexico's communications—there are no phones, fax, or e-mail. Washington made its move in a fit of pique over Mexico's refusal to lower oil prices and its demand that the United States end its military occupation of Colombia. This is the context for a story about presidential succession—a potentially timely subject, as Mexicans will elect a new president in July.

This is a juicy setup for Fuentes, a chance for that sophisticated, passionate novel of the paso doble between the United States and Mexico that he was born to write. Fuentes, Mexico's most prominent novelist, is also an essayist, dramatist, professor, and former student of international law. The son of a diplomat, he was raised partly in Washington and served as Mexican ambassador to Paris. He is a longtime, if not particularly original, critic of American ideas and influence, and in 2004 he published a book of essays called Contra Bush, which is just what you think it is. Always a more interesting novelist than essayist, Fuentes could have used the situation he has imagined in The Eagle's Throne to probe the love/hate relationship Mexicans have with the United States. Or, well-known proponent of Mexico's democratization that he is, he could have explored Mexico's second modern transformation as he dramatized the workings of presidential politics. In his best novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, written in 1962, Fuentes portrayed the gradual corruption of Mexico's revolution a century ago. Today, Mexico's emergence from 71 years of dictatorship—democratic, but hobbled by the habits of old—again offer him a rich subject.

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Interview with Carlos Fuentes

In the new political novel by preeminent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican bishop counsels a general to forgive his enemies. "I can't," the general replies. "I haven't got any left. I've killed them all."

On the eve of Mexico's July presidential elections, Fuentes is treating U.S. readers to his fictional sendup of Mexico's baroque political baggage, from the historic mestizo nation that arose from the Mexican Revolution to the murders and political intrigues that marked the end of the seven-decade rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. "The Eagle's Throne" opens in the year 2020, and U.S. President Condoleezza Rice's administration has shut down Mexican satellite communications in reprisal for Mexico's rising oil prices and its opposition to U.S. troops in Colombia.

"This is a satire. Satire knows no pity," Fuentes said last week, sitting under a window that spills soft morning light on his silver temples and aquiline features, and rolling up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt. "It is a book that seeks not to prophesize, but to exorcise. I hope that 'The Eagle's Throne' doesn't happen. But I fear it will be a prophecy, because exorcism can become prophecy."

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The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Had they been contemporaries, Carlos Fuentes and Ambrose Bierce would have revelled in each other’s company.

Bierce was the satirist nonpareil and “laughing devil” of the San Francisco newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1913, aged 71, he rode down into Mexico to witness -- or perhaps even join in -- the revolution that was playing out there. Bierce disappeared, but he has not been forgotten.

For one thing, there is Fuentes’s popular novel, The Old Gringo, a myth-making tribute to Bierce. For another, there is Bierce’s great legacy, The Devil’s Dictionary (issued also in amplified form as The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary).

Bierce’s caustic dictionary entry for politics could well serve as the epigraph for Fuentes’s latest novel, The Eagle’s Throne: “Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

Fuentes here ploughs new ground, as well as returning to familiar fields.

The Eagle’s Throne revives the epistolary novel while taking as subject the endless, abject manoeuvres and manipulations that characterise the politicking classes. In the Fuentes oeuvre, it is arguably the work most directly engaged with the moral compromises of Mexican politics and society since his first two novels, Where the Air is Clear (1960) and The Good Conscience (1961).

Indeed, it is tempting to view The Eagle’s Throne as the last in a triptych. Fuentes attempted to define national identity in philosophical and psychological terms in Where the Air is Clear, then moved on in The Good Conscience to the painful realities inherent in changing society from agrarian to urban, peasant to middle class. These were reflections of Mexican life; so too is The Eagle’s Throne, but it has another, prospective function: it is, as Fuentes himself has been careful to emphasise, in the manner of a prophecy.

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The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes

Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of futuristic fiction. Most such fiction - E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice - describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time it was written. But in The Eagle's Throne, the fact Condoleezza Rice is the first black female US president is about all that differentiates Carlos Fuentes's satirical vision of the political future from today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge that he was pillorying real people? The foundation on which Fuentes has erected his elaborate if sometimes unconvincing plot is that the Mexican president has incensed the US by hoisting oil prices and demanding that the superpower cease to meddle in the affairs of Colombia. In retaliation the US, which controls Mexico's satellite systems, immediately cuts off its phones, faxes and email. This allows Fuentes to tell his story entirely through letters.

All the letters are stylistically and intellectually brilliant. Not one is without its arresting aphorisms: "What is melodrama but comedy without the humour?"; "Politics is the art of swallowing frogs without flinching"; "It takes much more imagination to be ex-president than to be president".

Each letter glitters with brutally vivid similes and metaphors. The problem is, all these letters seem to be written by the same person: Fuentes. When, in his latest novel Kept, D.J. Taylor produces pastiches of two great Victorian writers, one can immediately distinguish that one is William Makepeace Thackeray and the other George Eliot. But if the letters in Fuentes's novel were not preceded by the names of their authors, one would be hard-pressed to decide who wrote what. Sadly, he cannot do voices.

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Guide to the Latin American Boom by Alexander Coleman

"Boom" is a term that should have died long ago, because it is such an ugly word. But the word has kept bouncing around in critical journals, mostly because of the jealous detractors who have kept it going. But there are a few things about the Boom that can be said with some accuracy and equanimity. The authors involved are resolutely engaged in a transfiguration of Latin American reality, from localism to a kind of heightened, imaginative view of what is real—a universality gained by the most intense and luminous kind of locality. That is what Garcia Marquez, Rulfo, Donoso, and Fuentes have done, among others. These are the eternal lessons of authors as disparate as Jane Austen, Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. The boom novel is never reportage, it is never blatant political protest, it is never "responsible," in the suffocating sense. And too, the Boom announced a cultural hegemony and unity out of disparity that would have been unthinkable some twenty or thirty years ago. Some elements that aided in this newly forged continental consciousness are such disparate facts and events as the cultural impulse given to Latin America by the Cuban Revolution, and in particular the Review of the House of the Americas, the most distinguished cultural organ of the Castro revolution; the existence of the distinguished Ford Foundation-financed literary review Mundo Nuevo, which, although it only lasted some two years under the formidable editorship of Emir Rodriguez Monegal, managed to introduce most of the authors of the new wave, those of whom we are now speaking. And of course it is significant that Borges enjoyed a retainer from The New Yorker, and that the same magazine, under the aegis of William Shawn and Alastair Reid, has begun a comprehensive search for new texts from Latin America, to be translated expressly for the magazine. And no one is surprised when a Cortazar short story is transformed into a film by Antonioni (Blow-up), or short stories by Borges undergo brilliant radical surgery by such filmmakers as Bertolucci (The Spider's Stratagem) or Nichohs Roeg (Performance). These are details, of course, but these details are indicative of a change of atmosphere, and that is everything. Nothing like this would have occurred in the forties or the early fifties. Latin American literature has gained an enormous readership just in the past twenty years.

The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a breezy exercise in literary parricide—the old boys are ejected from the pantheon, the local gods are outraged, the whippersnappers take over, a whole new profile for Latin American culture gradually takes form. Jose Donoso is not only a witness to it, he is a fundamental part of this literary process. His memoir should not be missed by anyone who cares about literature. It is a unique and discerning document, done with equal amounts of black bile and good humor. Thankfully, he has been eloquently served by his nimble translator, Gregory Kolovakos. By the way, for those interested in a lucid overview of the whole movement, with an abundance of useful factual material, I recommend Emir Rodriguez Monegal's El Boom de la Novela Latinoamericana (Caracus: Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 1972).

The author adds also a short list of books including:

Ficciones, Personal Anthology and El Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Three Trapped Tigers by Gillermo Cabrera Infante, Explosion in a Cathedral, The Lost Steps and Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier, The Winners, Hopscotch and Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, Coronation, This Sunday and The Obscene Bird of the Night by José Donoso, Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Change of Skin and Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, No One Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, The Third Bank of the River and The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair by Manuel Puig, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, From Cuba With a Song and Cobra by Severo Sarduy, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa.

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Inez by Carlos Fuentes

Think of a spider spinning webs, one after another. Each web is constructed on the same basic, instinctive pattern, but each is unique, adapted to a particular niche in the physical world. The spider is "doing the same thing but never repeating." That is a metaphor (one of many) tossed off casually by Carlos Fuentes, one of the master craftsmen of fiction in our time. It describes the aversion to "predictable behavior" of his protagonist, an orchestra conductor named Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, who is 93 years old and reminiscing about a lost love when this novel opens in 1999. Gabriel refuses to allow recordings of his work, audio or video, because he hates exact replays -- a paradoxical attitude in a man whose career is built on the repetition of a limited number of musical works. Gabriel believes that music truly exists only when it is happening, as an immediate, spontaneous communication between musicians and listeners.

The spiderweb image also describes a basic structural principle of the novel. Inez constructs a sequence of situations that echo one another hauntingly but never exactly repeat. The primary narrative subject is the stormy, on-again-off-again relationship between Gabriel and Inez Prada (née Rosenzweig), a singer of extraordinary vocal power whom he attempts to seduce, with varying degrees of success, at widely separated intervals -- in 1940, 1949 and 1967. As happens often in Latin American fiction, the border between reality and fantasy is sometimes blurred. After the 1967 encounter, at London's Covent Garden, Inez disappears. In 1999, talking to her ghost (or her memory), Gabriel thinks she may have gone off to a "different life," dwelling in the dream of a primitive world she has been imagining at intervals throughout the novel. Perhaps she is with a boyhood friend of his who disappeared long ago and who may be a figment of his imagination.

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The Years with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes

Review of Carlos Fuentes's Los Años Con Laura Díaz (The Years with Laura Díaz)

I've been trying to figure out what makes a novel "great." One of the criteria, I think, is easily identified: A great novel forces us to rethink history as more than just a long story told to younger and shorter people. But when a novelist knows this too well, and rethinks history for us programmatically -- as though there were a checklist lurking beneath the story -- the results can be mind-dulling: greatness contrived.

Such is the case with Carlos Fuentes' "The Years With Laura Díaz," a sweeping historical saga that falls prey to its ambitions. Laura Díaz is the novel's main character, protagonist, heroine and measure of Mexican identity. From her early years in Catemaco to her adolescence in Veracruz, and then throughout her adult life in Mexico City, Díaz's biography serves as a kind of screen upon which Fuentes projects his version of the Mexican past. She comes into glancing contact with all sorts of 20th century luminaries -- in her case Latin American and Mexican celebrities such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo -- along with numerous bit players. The historical figures Díaz comes to know best are mostly minor political radicals, but their proximity to power allows Fuentes to explore the Mexican past through its revolutions, from the workers' revolts to the coups and crackdowns. Ultimately, the stories of these revolutions (as seen by Díaz) constitute a critique of the left: The novel presents revolution as an essential instrument of progress, despite its leaders' failures to imagine their country's future. And yes, here we see Fuentes' slip showing.


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