• Complain

Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Here you can read online Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Destiny and Desire
  • Author:
  • Genre:
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Destiny and Desire: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Destiny and Desire" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Winner of the Cervantes Prize Carlos Fuentes, one of the worlds most acclaimed authors, is at the height of his powers in this stunning new novel a magnificent epic of passion, magic, and desire in modern Mexico, a rich and remarkable tapestry set in a world where free will fights with the wishes of the gods. Josu Nadal has lost more than his innocence: He has been robbed of his life and his posthumous narration sets the tone for a brilliantly written novel that blends mysticism and realism. Josu tells of his fateful meeting as a skinny, awkward teen with Jeric, the vigorous boy who will become his twin, his best friend, and his shadow. Both orphans, the two young men intend to spend their lives in intellectual pursuit until they enter an adult landscape of sex, crime, and ambition that will test their pledge and alter their lives forever. Idealistic Josu goes to work for a high-tech visionary whose stunning assistant will introduce him to a life of desire; cynical Jeric is enlisted by the Mexican president in a scheme to sell happiness to the impoverished masses. On his journey into a web of illegality in which he will be estranged from Jeric, Josu is aided and impeded by a cast of unforgettable characters: a mad, imprisoned murderer with a warning of revenge, an elegant aviatrix and addict seeking to be saved, a prostitute shared by both men who may have murdered her way into a brilliant marriage, and the prophet Ezekiel himself. Mixing ancient mythologies with the sensuousness and avarice and need of the twenty-first century, Destiny and Desire is a monumental achievement from one of the masters of contemporary literature.

Carlos Fuentes: author's other books


Who wrote Destiny and Desire? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Destiny and Desire — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Destiny and Desire" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Carlos Fuentes Destiny and Desire English translation copyright 2011 by Edith - photo 1

Carlos Fuentes

Destiny and Desire

English translation copyright 2011 by Edith Grossman

For my children

Cecilia

Natacha

Carlos

Prelude

SEVERED HEAD

At night the sea and the sky are one and even the earth becomes confused with the dark immensity that envelops everything. There are no chinks. No breaks. No breaches. Night is the best representation of the infinitude of the universe. It makes us believe that nothing has a beginning and nothing has an end. Especially if (as is the case tonight) there are no stars.

The first lights appear and the separation begins. The ocean withdraws to its own geography, a veil of water that conceals deep-sea mountains, valleys, ravines. The ocean bottom is a chamber whose echoes never reach us, least of all me, during the small hours.

I know that day will destroy the illusion. And if dawn never breaks again, then what? Then Ill think the ocean has stolen my form.

The Pacific really is a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. Its softness is a thousand times greater than earths. But we hear only the echo, not the voice of the sea. If the sea were to shout, we would all be deaf. And if the sea were to stop, we would all be dead. There is no unmoving sea. Its perpetual motion gives oxygen to the world. If the sea doesnt move, we all suffocate. Not death by water but by asphyxiation.

Dawn breaks and daylight determines the seas color. The blue of the water is merely a dispersion of light. The color blue means that the solar sphere has conquered the clarity of the water, providing it with a covering that doesnt belong to it, that isnt its skin, if in fact the ocean also has skin What will the new day illuminate? Id like to give a very fast answer because Im losing the words to tell you, the survivors, this tale.

If the newborn sun and the dying night dont speak for me, Ill have no history. The history I want to tell all of you who still live. I believe the sea lives and that each wave that washes over my head feels the earth, touches my flesh, looks for my gaze and finds it, stupefied. Or rather bewildered. Incredulous.

I look without looking. Im afraid of being seen. Im not what you would call a pleasant sight. Im the thousandth severed head so far this year in Mexico. Im one of fifty decapitated heads this week, the seventh today, and the only one in the past three and a quarter hours.

The rising sun is reflected in my open eyes. My head has stopped bleeding. A thick liquid runs from the encephalic mass into the sand. My lids will never close again, as if my thoughts will continue to dampen the earth.

Here is my severed head, lost like a coconut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean along the Mexican coast of Guerrero.

My head torn away like the head of a dead fetus that has to lose it so the headless body can be born in spite of everything, quiver for a few moments, and die as well, drowned in blood, allowing the mother to be saved and to cry. After all, the efficacy of the guillotine was tested first by severing the heads of corpses, not kings.

My head was cut off by machete blows. My neck is a cloth that unravels into shreds. My eyes are two open beacons of astonishment until the next tide carries them out and the fish swim into my head through the sacrificial orifice and the gray matter spills in one piece onto the sand, like an overturned bowl of soup, lost in the earth, forever invisible unless a fee is paid by national and foreign tourists. Were in the tropics, damn it! Dont you know that, you people who are still alive or who believe you are living?

My brain stopped controlling the movements of a body it can no longer find. My head abandoned my body. Without a body, what good does it do to breathe, circulate, sleep? Even if these are the oldest areas inside my head, do new zones await me in the part of my brain I didnt use in life? I no longer have to control balance, posture, respiration, the rhythm of my heart. Am I entering an unknown reality, the one the unused portion of my brain will soon reveal to me?

Those who have been guillotined dont lose their head right away. They have a few seconds-perhaps minutes-to move their bulging eyes, ask themselves what happened, where am I, whats waiting for me, with a tongue that, separated from the body, does not stop moving, loquacious, idiotic, about to lose itself forever in the mystery of finding out what happened to my trunk instead of focusing urgently on the greatest duty of a severed head, which is to recreate the body in its mind and say: This is the head of Josu, the son of unknown parents, who is searching for his living body, the one he had in life, the one he felt night and day, the one that woke every morning with a lifes plan negated, of course it was! by the image in the first mirror of the day. I, Josu, whose only concern at this moment is not biting my tongue. Because although my head is severed, my tongue attempts to speak, freed at last, and succeeds only in biting itself, biting itself as one bites a sausage or a hamburger. Flesh we are and to flesh we return. Is that how it goes? Is that the prayer? My eyes without sockets look for the world.

I was a body. I had a body. Will I be a soul?

Part One. Castor and Pollux

Permit me to introduce myself Or rather introduce my body violently - photo 2

Permit me to introduce myself. Or rather: introduce my body, violently separated (you know this already) from my head. I speak of my body because Ive lost it and will not have another opportunity to introduce it to all of you, gentle readers, or to myself. In this way I can indicate, once and for all, that the following narration has been dictated by my head and only my head, since my detached body is nothing more than a memory: one that can be transmitted and left in the hands of the forewarned reader.

Forewarned indeed: The body is at least half of what we are. Still, we keep it hidden in a verbal closet. For the sake of modesty, we do not refer to its invaluable and indispensable functions. Forgive me: I will speak in detail about my body. Because if I dont, very soon my body will be nothing but an unburied corpse, a slaughtered fowl, an anonymous loin. And if you, being very well bred, dont want to know about my bodily intimacies, skip this chapter and begin your reading with the next one.

I am a twenty-seven-year-old man, one meter seventy-eight centimeters tall. Every morning I look at myself naked in my bathroom mirror and caress my cheeks in anticipation of the daily ceremony: Shave my beard and upper lip, provoke a strong response with Jean-Marie Farina cologne on my face, resign myself to combing black, thick, untamable hair. Close my eyes. Deny to my face and head the central role my death will be certain to give them. Concentrate instead on my body. The trunk that is going to be separated from my head. The body that occupies me from my neck to my extremities, covered in skin the color of pale cinnamon and tipped with nails that will continue to grow for hours and days after death, as if they wanted to scratch at the lid of the coffin and shout Im here, Im still alive, you made a mistake when you buried me.

This is a purely metaphysical consideration, as is terror in its passing and permanent forms. I ought to concentrate here and now on my skin: I ought to rescue my physical being in all its completeness before its too late. This is the organ of touch that covers my whole body and extends inside it with acts of anal mischief both modest and permissible if I compare them to the female genders major jokes, the incessant entering and leaving of foreign bodies (notoriously the males penis and sacredly the body of a child, while from my masculine wrappings only semen and urine come out in front and in back, just like

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Destiny and Desire»

Look at similar books to Destiny and Desire. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra
Terra Nostra
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign
The Campaign
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes - A Change of Skin
A Change of Skin
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families
Happy Families
Carlos Fuentes
No cover
No cover
Carlos Fuentes
No cover
No cover
Carlos Fuentes
No cover
No cover
Carlos Fuentes
Reviews about «Destiny and Desire»

Discussion, reviews of the book Destiny and Desire and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.