Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Books.

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Gutenberg?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I have the pleasure

of telling you that Carlos Fuentes is here with me in the studio to talk about his new book, Destiny and Desire.

This is the first of a two-part interview.

To talk to Carlos Fuentes is to speak with one of the most glorious and noble writers in the world.

I'm not going to speak myself. I'm going to let the novelist

and critic Paul West speak for me in this quote. Carlos Fuentes is a man of parts with many

roles. The versatility, which is the hallmark of his excellence, applies to him as a fiction writer too.

There is Flentes, the discrete implier, concerned with special and not always definable states of mind as in aura and distant relations.

There is Flaintes, the voluminous, wide-handed visionary, for whom nothing is too small, too big, to go into his homage to the planet, Terra Nostra.

There is a severely moving Fuentes of the death of Artemio Cruz, who masters the forlorn, the poignant, with impetuous vivacity.

There is the faintest whose work happens to be narrated by a fetus, and now, Michael Silverblatt speaking, there is the fointes of destiny and desire, a novel narrated by a severed head. In this way, the severed head is, well,

you know, a fortune teller. Magicians worked with brazen heads who told the truth,

but also we're dealing with the assassinations in Mexico, where, as in this novel, the

severed head says that he's the thousandth this month, the first in the last three and a half

hours.

He's floating in the Pacific, telling us his story before he drowns.

And what is he foretelling?

...