Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

by Carlos Fuentes

Overview

Renowned as a novelist of unsurpassed invention, Carlos Fuentes here presents his second collection of stories to appear in English. Where his first, Burnt Water, published in 1980, had as its underlying theme Mexico City itself, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins extends its imaginative boundaries out to Savannah, to Cadiz, to Glasgow, to Seville and Madrid, both past and present. This new collection is more mysterious, more magical, too, than its predecessor, and in its five related stories Fuentes comes closer to the registers of language and feeling that he explored so memorably in Aura. It reveals Fuentes at the height of his powers--bold, erudite, enthralling.

In the title story, a man discovers his wife's secret complicity with the Russian actor who is their neighbor--a complicity that includes not just a previous life but possibly a previous death as well. He finds himself "a mediator . . . a point between one sorrow and the next, between one hope and the next, between two languages, two memories, two ages, and two deaths." In "La Desdichada," two students steal--and fall in love with--a store-window mannequin. In "The Prisoner of Las Lomas," a wealthy lawyer in possession of a powerful secret is held hostage by the past he has attempted to subvert and keep at bay. The celebrated bullfighter whose fame is the theme of "Viva Mi Fama" steps from the present into a past immortalized by Goya's portrait of the matador Pedro Romero; and the architects who are the "Reasonable People" of that story find themselves drawn into the irrational mysteries not only of religious fervor but of their famous mentor's identity--they discover "there are no empty houses," only a present fraught with the past.

Though each of these novella-length stories offers compelling evidence of Fuentes's talent for narrative free rein as well as for containment and closure, they are also brilliantly interwoven. Readers of his earlier work, especially of his acclaimed ribald epic, Christopher Unborn, will recognize with pleasure Fuentes's undiminished mastery of recurrent images and themes, and all readers will delight in the witty and evocative changes he rings on them. For those few readers who do not yet know the work of Mexico's foremost man of letters, these stories offer them the full gift of his imaginative resourcefulness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466840102
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/14/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
File size:	435 KB

About the Author

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor.

Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor.
Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

Editorial Reviews

After the exuberant, experimental fiction of recent years, Mexican novelist ( Terra Nostra ) and statesman Fuentes returns to the conventional literary themes and melancholic air of his earlier works, such as the gothic Aura . The title story here is narrated by an elderly American doctor who, while bemoaning his own mortality, learns in a Poe-like twist that he has been married to the ghost of a Russian emigre who died in the Spanish Civil War 49 years earlier. ``La Desdichada'' tells of two student roommates who half-jokingly ``adopt'' a lifelike store mannequin. As both become sexually involved with the mannequin, their true natures are revealed. ``The Prisoner of Las Lomas'' is a mischievous tale about a wealthy man imprisoned by his servants in his mansion, a state he soon comes to enjoy. ``Viva Mi Fama,'' the collection's most powerful story, contrasts the creative power of an aging Goya with the vitality of two of his models, an actress and a bullfighter, asking: Which is more real, the subject of a work of art or the work of art itself? ``Reasonable People'' again explores the theme of the doppleganger, focusing on twin architects, one of whom is seduced by a rather perverse reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. Fuentes's rich interior vision and lyrical controlled prose have been beautifully captured by the translator. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly