Aura: A Novel

by Carlos Fuentes, Lysander Kemp (Translator)

Overview

Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374511715
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/01/1986
Edition description:	Bilingual edition, In Spanish and English
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	198,925
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.56(h) x 0.43(d)

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 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

When you finish, you . . . have gone through a total experience, a beautiful horror story, a horrifying story of beauty, a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen, translated so agilely by Lysander Kemp that it seems to have been written in English.” —Newsweek

From the Publisher

First published in 1962 by Ediciones Era, this innovative novella confirmed Fuentes's skill as one of Mexico's principal "boom" narrators. He has received numerous literary honors, including the prestigious Cervantes (1987) and Principe de Asturias (1994) awards. Forty years after its first publication and after several successful works like La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, Punto de Lectura, 2001) and, most recently, En esto creo (I Believe in This, see pg. 56), Aura continues to be reprinted and translated. In this complex short story, Fuentes challenges the general notion of time through an innovative narrative technique that uses second-person narration in the present and future tenses, removing the boundaries between present, past, and future. Young historian Felipe Montero accepts a live-in position editing the memoirs of General Llorente, whose elderly widow, Consuelo, wants to publish before her death. Intoxicated by the airless atmosphere of the house, Felipe dreams of having sex and escaping with Consuelo's young beautiful niece, Aura. But as he reads the General's writings about Consuelo's infertility, her fantasy of having a child, and her obsession with youth, he discovers that Aura is actually a projection of the 109-year-old widow. One day, while he embraces her, Aura transforms into the decrepit woman. Felipe is immediately ensnared by his own desire and actions into the role of the General, coupled with Consuelo to give birth to "Aura," the epitome of youth and the illusion of life. With intense prose, Fuentes masterfully recreates the suffocating and dreamlike atmosphere of the house and mixes the fantastic and the tangible, keeping readers curious asthey attempt to distinguish between the two. Worthy of its 42 printings by Era, this Mexican classic is recommended for academic libraries and bookstores. Carmen Ospina, "Criticas" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Criticas