Carlos Fuentes: 5 best novels

He was a renaissance man of astounding ambition, a Mexican ambassador, political provocateur, cultural commentator, social critic, historian, playwright, essayist, editor, and dashing ladies’ man, but most of all, the late Carlos Fuentes was a literary lion of towering intellect. As a literary intellectual who crossed cultures easily thanks to his ambassador-father and itinerant youth, Fuentes raised the profile of Spanish-language literature around the globe during the second half of the 20^th century. Throughout his decades-long literary career “the guerilla dandy,” so dubbed for the left-leaning Fuentes’s debonair style, produced more than 20 books, including novels, short story collections, essays, and commentaries. Here we remember five of his best.