SOURCE: "Conversation with a Blue Novelist," in Review, No. 12, Fall, 1974, pp. 54-8.

In the following interview, Fuentes discusses his approach to writing, Latin American writers and literature, and his place in Latin American literature.

[Dwyer:] On what project are you working now?

[Fuentes:] It's an enormous novel, over seven hundred pages. I guess one might call it a Medusa of a thousand heads. I hope to be finishing it within a month.

Would you dare to telescope all those pages into a brief outline?

Look, I'll try. I guess that everyone, at least once, has asked himself what he would do if he had his life to live over. Well, what I do in this book is bring the question to the level of an entire civilization, the civilization of Spain and Latin America. What the novel essentially asks is what Spain and Spanish America would do if...