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Mexico's Former Future La silla del aguila (The Eagle's Chair) By Carlos Fuentes 412 pages, Mexico, D.F: Alfaguara, 2003 (in Spanish)
Born in Panama in 1928 the son of a Mexican diplomat, Carlos Fuentes is the father of the modern Mexican novel. Beginning with his 1958 work, La region mas transparente (Where the Air is Clear), and through his Terra Nostra in 1975, Fuentes's novels were integral to the so-called Latin Boom, the creative overflow that garnered global acclaim for Latin American literature during the latter half of the past century. A charismatic writer with an attractive, cosmopolitan personality, Fuentes gave Mexico a literary countenance through his insights on the myths surrounding his nation-mixed blood, chieftainships, and tension between the archaic and the modern-offering his views to the public in novels, short stories, and essays that exhibited all the triumphs of contemporary literature.
However, beginning in the 1970s, a dramatic distance has emerged between Fuentes and the most demanding Mexican readers. While Mexico was profoundly transformed in the years between the prodemocracy student movement of 1968 and the electoral defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 after more than 70 years in power, Fuentes remained faithful to a view of Mexican identity that, for those of his generation, had remained static, militantly so, for decades. This view reflects an unchanging set of everyday Mexican archetypes, once ontological and now almost folkloric: unpunctuality and filthiness among citizens, proverbially corrupt politicians, matriarchal rule within families, machismo, and the ancient disdain with which Mexicans supposedly regard their own lives, a disdain that has wrought so much anguish for the nation's chroniclers.
Convinced, as Honore de Balzac was, that literature must embody the private...