Carlos Fuentes

“I’m not only bellicose armour, I’m also a head bearing peace.”

Achilles or the Warrior and the Murderer is the unpublished novel which Carlos Fuentes was working on when he died, and is a personal, fascinating and enlightening tale about a controversial episode in Colombia’s contemporary history. Based on the life of Carlos Pizarro, one of the leaders of the M-19 guerrilla movement, the novelist gives shape to a charismatic character, full of light and darkness. An Achilles who, like a true Homeric hero, is compelled to act and finally confront a fate that had been patiently waiting for him.

Apart from the known facts, the inevitable drug traffickers, the guerrilla fighters who must keep shooting in order to negotiate peace, the lack of a national project, and an irrepressible willingness to fight, Carlos Fuentes creates for readers of this posthumous novel a character who is as much an epic figure as he is a complex, vulnerable individual full of love and hope.

“A novel that, despite being based on real events and a contemporary, historical character like Carlos Pizarro, stands out because of its rich use of language and narrative pace and because it is also a cruel, stark metaphor for Colombian society in recent years.” Diego Gándara, La Razón

“For Fuentes a novel was a genre which could recreate history and not only offer credible lessons, but also leaps of imagination.” Julio Ortega

“Carlos Fuentes didn’t want to submit this manuscript to his publishers until the oldest armed conflict of Latin America had been resolved. The publication of Achilles coincides with what seems to be the final negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrilla: the moment of truth, the end of unfinished business, the beginning of peace. This is the best moment to read Carlos Fuentes’s posthumous novel.” Silvia Lemus

“Fuentes must have asked himself whether he was entitled, as a Mexican, to write about Colombia, and to sing of the wrath of a Colombian Achilles. It’s an interesting question, coming from someone who had already explored the territory of Hispanic culture, the North American frontier, and life inside the womb. Fuentes’s works have left my generation this legacy: the Latin American novelist’s undeniable right to take on the entire world in their fiction; or better still, their obligation to disrespect borders” Juan Gabriel Vasquez