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    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear"
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear"
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear"
    Ebook52 pages40 minutes

    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literature of Developing Nations for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literature of Developing Nations For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateNov 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535842877
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "Where the Air Is Clear" - Gale

      1

      Where the Air Is Clear

      Carlos Fuentes

      1958

      Introduction

      The publication of Carlos Fuentes’s debut novel in 1958 created much controversy with its critical and loosely Marxist look at the social strata and history of Mexico City. Where the Air Is Clear deals with the issues of Mexican identity and need for self-knowledge, and paints a society torn between its ancient mythology and the contemporary modernity, severely shattered on social, political, economic, and spiritual levels. The novel, often called one of the primary works of the magic realism tradition, also established Fuentes as Mexico’s leading contemporary novelist and one of the founders of El Boom in Latin American literature.

      The thorough blend of myth, history, and modernity in the novel, as in Fuentes’s other works, signifies the author’s search for the viable identity of his country which would encompass its ancient roots as well as its present society. The characters of Where the Air Is Clear present diverse personal experiences as affected by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. From Ixca Cienfuegos, a mysterious embodiment of the Aztec war god, to Federico Robles, a revolutionary turned business tycoon who rejects his Indian heritage, Fuentes examines Mexican history and society through his characters whose names and individual memories comprise the novel’s chapters. Vacillating perspectives and montage-like sections compose Fuentes’s experimental narrative style, giving it a surreal tone and enabling him to present the vast and self-contrasting spectrum of personal memoirs and lifestyles in Mexico City. The fragmentary nature of his fiction reflects the author’s vision of his country; Fuentes told John P. Dwyer in an interview, our political life is fragmented, our history shot through with failure, but our cultural tradition is rich, and I think the time is coming when we will have to look at our faces, our own past.

      Author Biography

      One of Mexico’s premier novelists and its foremost ‘ambassador without a portfolio’ (someone who utilizes his celebrity status to political ends), Fuentes has been a champion of goodwill for relations between the West and Latin America; good relations between the United States and Mexico has been a particular interest. This agenda shows in his fiction and intellectual enterprises.

      Like other prominent members of the intellectual elite in Latin America and key figures of El Boom, Fuentes comes from the ruling class. His father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, was a career diplomat stationed in Panama City in 1928 where his wife, Berta Macias Rivas, gave birth to Fuentes on November 11. Boettiger’s career moved the family to Brazil in the early 1930s and then to Washington, DC from 1934 to 1940. While in Brazil, Boettiger served as secretary to Alfonso Reyes—a famous writer himself. Reyes later mentored Fuentes. At elementary school in Washington, DC, Fuentes experienced the tensions existing between the U.S. and Mexico for the first time. The impression stayed with him and became a major theme of his fiction. The family’s next stop was Santiago, Chile, where Fuentes attended the Grange school with Jose Donoso, who later became a writer in his own right and who credits Fuentes with starting El Boom.

      Fuentes, after attending high school in Mexico City, stayed in his home country to attend the National University of Mexico. During his university

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