Writing wrongs

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'.

The title Happy Families is an ironic reference to the opening sentences of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'

Like Tolstoy, Fuentes has never won the Nobel Prize that many people believe is his due. He has the breathless energy and didactic tone of someone accustomed to holding forth on a podium. He divides the year between homes in London and Mexico City, where the custom of four-hour lunches and his vast social network leaves little time for writing.

In London, he has a relatively quiet life with his wife of 36 years, Mexican television presenter Sylvia Lemus. But he maintains an exacting travel schedule. Last November he returned to Mexico City for a 10-day conference to mark his 80th birthday. The month before, he was in Spain to collect the first International Don Quixote de la Mancha Prize, awarded to Fuentes for his career-long achievements. Fuentes re-reads Don Quixote every year and believes Cervantes is one of the few writers to create a compelling fictional character who is also a good person. 'My characters are rather nasty, most of them,' he says.

With a new 600-page novel, La Voluntad y la Fortuna (Will and Fortune), recently out in Spanish, the author of more than 30 books feels at the top of his game. Now at work on a novel about Columbian guerillas, he says: 'I have more energy than ever. I think death will finally slow me down forever, but before that I don't think I will.'

Born in Panama City, he spent most of his childhood in Washington, where his father was legal counsellor at the Mexican embassy. When Mexico nationalised its oil industry in 1938, Fuentes ceased to be popular at school and 'became the alien, the bad guy, the foreigner, the Mexican'.

US president Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with a policy of negotiation rather than confrontation, beginning what Fuentes still sees as a breakthrough in Mexican-American relations. As a child, he once shook hands with F.D.R. and jokes that he hasn't washed them since. 'Listen, Roosevelt came to power the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany and look at the difference - the social commitment of Roosevelt, his confidence that civil society could solve the problems of the United States.'

Aged 21 and studying international law in Switzerland, he saw author Thomas Mann dining in a restaurant. Fuentes, 'dumbstruck with admiration', didn't approach him, but resolved at that moment to become a writer. For income, he served in the Mexican foreign service throughout the 1950s and later spent four years as Mexico's ambassador to France. Yet he lacked the tact of a career diplomat.

Along with fellow 'boom' writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fuentes led a renaissance in Latin-American writing in the 1960s. He collaborated briefly with Garcia Marquez on film screenplays, but their literary eyes hindered their efforts: 'We spent a lot of time worrying about commas in the script.'

For many years the US barred him from entering the country because of his left-wing politics. Fuentes backed the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and was an early supporter of Fidel Castro's Cuba. His sympathy for Castro waned in 1965, however, when the Cuban authorities branded him and Pablo Neruda traitors for attending a PEN International ceremony in New York.

Feminist critics sometimes argue that his female characters are either Madonnas or whores, but Fuentes will not be drawn into feuding with his detractors. 'I don't read them, I don't answer them, I don't care about it,' he says.

Yet when Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz published a polemic against him by author Enrique Krauze in his literary journal Vuelta, Fuentes ended a friendship of nearly four decades. When Paz died in 1998, Fuentes didn't attend his funeral. 'I did not provoke that feud,' says Fuentes, 'therefore I had no reason to heal or unheal it.'

Krauze's essay became a New Republic cover story in 1988. Under the headline, 'Guerilla Dandy', Krauze said Fuentes was a foreigner in his own country: 'For Fuentes, Mexico is a script committed to memory, not an enigma or a problem, not anything really living, not a personal experience.'

In Myself with Others, his 1988 collection of autobiographical essays, Fuentes writes about his early decision to be 'a wanderer in search of perspective', knowing that 'no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language'.

His first marriage, to Mexican screen icon Rita Macedo, lasted 14 years, despite his affairs with the likes of Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau. The daughter he had with Macedo, Cecilia, is now his only surviving progeny. In 2005, Fuentes and Lemus lost their second child, Natasha, aged 30.

The Mexican media reported different versions of Natasha's death. One paper said she collapsed in Mexico City's infamous Tepito district, apparently from a drug overdose; another alleged that her body was found beneath an overpass.

Rumour also has it that she was kidnapped and stabbed to death by gang members. Pressed, Fuentes will say only, 'Tragedy', and then demands the next question.

Despite his silence about Natasha's death, Fuentes calls drug-related crime 'the paramount issue facing my country'. He hopes Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon will join forces to address it.

'The US has refused to commit to any responsibility. But Mexico would not export drugs if there weren't buyers in the US,' he says.

Asked how one survives the deaths of two children, he says: 'You don't. I have them with me when I write. They're present.'

Writer's notes

Name: Carlos Fuentes

Age: 80

Family: married to Sylvia Lemus, two deceased children, Natasha and Carlos. Daughter Cecilia from former marriage to the late film actress Rita Macedo

Lives: London and Mexico City

Genres: literary fiction; essays; political columns

Latest works: Happy Families (Random House; Bloomsbury); La Voluntad y la Fortuna (Will and Fortune; Alfaguara)

Current project: a novel, Determination and Destiny

Other books include: Where the Air is Clear (1958), The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985), Christopher Unborn (1987), Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1994), The Years With Laura Diaz (1999), Inez (2001), The Eagle's Throne (2002)

Other jobs: editor, diplomat, newspaper columnist, university professor

What the papers say about Happy Families: 'Too often, the construction of the plots and the rendering of the characters seem simply inattentive or lazy, and there are hints of the telenovela, though not, it would seem, deliberate ones.' - The New York Times 'Fuentes enjoys turning things inside out, finding out how things work from within and how their appearances delude us.' - The Guardian