Newsletter Special: Carlos Fuentes Tribute
David Shasha
Friends,
After hearing last night of the passing of the legendary Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes I felt moved to put together a special newsletter that would pay homage to his intimate connection to the rich tradition of Andalus/Sepharad.
Unknown to many readers, Fuentes was deeply intent on bringing to the fore the old Spanish civilization of Islamic Andalusia that is so often forgotten by the Spanish-speaking peoples.
In my “Sephardic Jewish Notes on Carlos Fuentes” I highlight his classic epic novel – in my view his most important work of fiction – Terra Nostra which aims to read Golden Age Spanish culture in light of the densely interconnected world of the Arab Mediterranean. The novel is a sprawling leviathan of a book that rewards the patient reader with a complex view of Spanish identity in the wake of the many brutalities engendered by the Reconquista, the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.
I have also collected a few on-line resources to provide access to Fuentes and his literary world.
Anthony DePalma gives us an obituary of Fuentes from The New York Times.
Alfred MacAdam and Charles Ruas conducted a fascinating and extensive interview with Fuentes for the Paris Review back in 1981 that presents the novelist in the depth and richness of his extraordinary literary talents. It is an intense and illuminating conversation that opens up for us the vast intellectual expanse that Fuentes’ literature presents to the conscientious reader.
We then go back to the novelist Robert Coover’s New York Times’ book review of Terra Nostra which allows us to see the importance of the book at the time it was first made available to English-speaking readers.
The special tribute ends with one of my favorite Fuentes moments, a lecture on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges delivered the year of the Borges Centennial celebration at New York’s 92nd St. Y. The lecture marked Fuentes’ connection not only to the literary universe of the great Borges, but reinforced the ties between the two men in the context of a Spanish civilization that drew from the old Andalusian culture and its Muslim and Jewish roots. As this old Andalusian culture continues to be forgotten - especially in the Sephardic Jewish community itself - it is a very worthwhile thing to return to the work of Carlos Fuentes in order to recapture the genius of that complex Mediterranean past.
David Shasha
A Few Sephardic Jewish Notes on Carlos Fuentes
By: David Shasha
Some Carlos Fuentes On-Line Resources
Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Novelist, Dies at 83
By: Anthony DePalma
Interview: Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction
By: Alfred MacAdam and Charles E. Ruas
Book Review: Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra
By: Robert Coover
Jorge Luis Borges at 100: A Lecture by Carlos Fuentes
By: Allen B. Ruch