Carlos Fuentes, novelist, essayist, ex-diplomat and Mexico's roving international mouthpiece, is many things - including, he says, an exorcist. His novels conjure nightmarish scenarios to ward off imminent dangers.
'I try to do the witch-doctor thing of, 'If I mention this, it won't happen',' he says. Yet time and again his exorcisms become prophecies.
In his 1999 novel The Years with Laura Diaz, Fuentes wrote about a young writer's death, hoping to prevent his haemophiliac son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, from dying. The younger Carlos, an emerging poet, filmmaker, painter and photographer, succumbed later that year, aged 25. 'He knew he would die young, therefore he created a lot,' Fuentes says.
In his 1987 novel, Christopher Unborn, Fuentes invoked Mexico in the near future, disfigured by severe pollution, crime and corruption. He hoped time would prove him wrong, but his vision was accurate.
With the ascent of the US Republican Party's Sarah Palin, Fuentes feared becoming an unwitting prophet again - his 2002 novel, The Eagle's Throne, was set in 2020, when Condoleezza Rice is the first female president of the US. 'Condoleezza Rice is a genius compared to Sarah Palin,' he says.
The 16 interlocking short stories of his latest book available in English, Happy Families, are political 'in the Greek sense of the word because they happen in the city, in the polis', he says. The stories are united by Greek chorus-like interludes that recall the incantatory prose of William Faulkner. To Fuentes, Faulkner was 'the most Latin-American writer of the United States - a very baroque writer, very close to our own style'.