Unsurprisingly, a barrage of defenses and attacks ensued. Fuentes, I should add, is often at the center of these types of squabbles. Having been a friend and confidant of Octavio Paz's for years, Fuentes fought viciously with him after one of Paz's proteges, Enrique Krauze, published a scathing review of Fuentes in the monthly magazine Vuelta. Similarly, in the early days of Vicente Fox's presidency, Fuentes's novella ``Aura" was censored after a politico took it out of the public school curriculum for its alleged anti religious content. Thankful for the profit boost, Fuentes again made the headlines.
There is a confessed ghoulishness to these polemics. To some, like me, they are far more interesting than Fuentes's oeuvre. Indeed, his public persona, with self-esteem the size of an elephant, might well be his best creation. Take his relationship with critics . In a PBS documentary, he talked of chewing their bones, then throwing them out the window. Clearly, he prefers his own assessment of what he writes. In an interview with journalist Héctor Aguilar Camín, Fuentes described himself as a prophet, bragging that he foresaw the fall of Mexico's ruling party, PRI, long before it occurred. And when asked if he would ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Fuentes responded that he already had, since the award in 1982 to García Márquez was really an honor for their whole generation. Finally, he exalted ``The Eagle's Throne" as a masterpiece.
The fact that Fuentes's place in the Mexican literary canon is often debated isn't surprising. His output is at once prodigious and infuriatingly inconsistent. Maybe the problem is that his politics keep intruding. He writes fiction as if it were an op-ed piece.
