Tickets still available for Carlos Fuentes at UCLA Live on Saturday
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Carlos Fuentes has been publishing for 40 years; his book ‘The Old Gringo’ (originally ‘Gringo viejo’) was the first Mexican novel to top American bestseller lists. The 81-year-old author is making his first appearance at UCLA Live on Saturday night; tickets are still available (but not a lot -- 32, as of this writing).
Plans are for Fuentes to discuss his 2006 essay collection, ‘This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life,’ in which he talks sex, politics and literary influences. Among his literary heroes are Balzac, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Kafka and Cervantes. In an interview with publisher Dakley Archive, Fuentes said that ‘Don Quixote’ was ‘the founding novel of the modern world.’
I think ‘Don Quixote’ comes out of the medieval world, the world of chivalry he evokes and reads about and tries to enact, the world of the Middle Ages, which is basically a world of analogy, where everything has a meaning. All words have a precise meaning, a precise function, and all things have a precise place. This order is established by means of analogy on a scale that leads to God. Don Quixote goes out into a world where this is shattered; his search for analogy leads him into a world of proliferating differentiation. The wayside inns, the people he meets, Maritomes, the dukes, and, what is most important of all, the readers of ‘Don Quixote’ he encounters tell him, ‘Your world doesn’t exist anymore. Your world of unity and analogy is shattered. We offer you this world of infinite diversity.’ Don Quixote is a great hero of fiction and of philosophy ... because he will not give up the idea of unity in order to understand the world of diversity. Yet he must admit the world of diversity in order to admit himself, since he is only Don Quixote because he is read, and he is read by a multitude of readers, not by only one reader.
Perhaps he will also speak about his new book, available in Spanish as ‘Adán in Edén’ (‘Adam in Eden’). At the International Book Fair in Guadalajara in November, Feuntes was one of the major draws; he described his new novel as ‘a comedy with horror.’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
