Novelist Carlos Fuentes has passed away. Mexican president Felipe Calderon shared the sad news on Twitter.

The great author had won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize and the Latin Literary Prize. In July, Dalkey Archive Press will publish his novel, Vlad. They also published his books Terra Nostra, Where the Air Is Clear, and Distant Relations. Here is an excerpt from his novel, Inez:

“We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death.”

For a long time this sentence had been going around and around in the aged maestro’s head. He did not dare write it down. He was afraid that consigning it to paper would make it real, with fateful consequences. He would have nothing more to say after that: the dead man does not know what death is, but neither do the living. For that reason the sentence that haunted him like a verbal ghost was both sufficient and insufficient. It said everything, but at the price of never saying anything again.

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