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    Aura: A Novel
    Aura: A Novel
    Aura: A Novel
    Ebook50 pages46 minutes

    Aura: A Novel

    By Carlos Fuentes

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This eBook edition of Carlos Fuentes' novel includes only the English translation by Lysander Kemp. The Spanish text is not included.

    Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMay 14, 2013
    ISBN9781466840041
    Aura: A Novel
    Author

    Carlos Fuentes

    Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor. Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

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    Reviews for Aura

    3.5/5

    243 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A novella with a second-person narrator; the experiment works.
    • 4/5
      it was good to read and it was cool too
    • 3/5
      I liked the book. I'm not particularly in love with it, it didn't particularly grip my soul and compel me to dwell on it for hours, but it was fine. And fast to read. And we'll see how much I still like it once semester is over...
    • 4/5
      From descriptions I'd read before starting this, I was expecting something in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But no, the aesthetic here is much closer to Poe or Baudelaire. I'd call this a classic horror tale, more than 'magical realism.'

      A young man, Felipe Montero, answers a help-wanted ad that seems tailor-made for him. It shouldn't be too difficult to prepare a widow's late husband's memoirs for a vanity publication, and the generous salary will allow him the leisure to pursue his own studies.

      Still, once he meets his prospective employer, the widow is so clearly eccentric that he hesitates... until he is introduced to her lovely niece, Aura. The presence of an alluring woman tilts the balance of his decision, and he agrees to live in their home until the job is completed.

      It's not giving anything away to hint that more weird and disturbing revelations are to come...

      The flow of the story is lovely, and while a reader might guess at part of the truth, the full finale is sure to come as a surprise.

      Excellent story - I do have to say, however, that the way expectations change over time is on full display here. 'Aura' was published as a 'novel' - today, it'd be classified as a short story; not even a novella.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Reality, dreams, doppelgängers, literature, love, and darkness.

      This tiny book has it all in spades.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I first read this book in college. It was in a Comparative Lit class on the Supernatural in fiction. We read a lot of great books. This was one of the best. I just reread it today for the first time since that class 10 years ago. A perfect, haunting novella to read during October. This story puts you right inside the surreal and horrifying situation Felipe Montero finds himself in when he answers an advertisement in the paper to write the memoirs of an old lady's deceased husband. She lives in a dark, dank home, alone with her young and beautiful "niece". He lives with them during this time and comes to discover a disturbing truth about who Aura really is. Read in Spanish gives it an even eerier feel. Not much is lost in the translation, however. A wonderfully creepy story.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Lovely literary horror about an old woman who isn't satisfied with living only her life. Reminds me of my maternal grandmother...
    • 5/5
      A beautiful, mesmerizing read. Carlos Fuentes' language is efficient, saying everything that needs to be said and suggesting all of the rest.
    • 4/5
      You could probably read this book in an hour. A bizarre love story told in second person. You/Felipe get hired to ghost-write the ending of a man's memoirs by the man's 109-year-old widow. Her house is almost completely pitch-black inside, and her niece, Aura, lives with her. You/Felipe (the protagonist) fall in love with Aura and from there things proceed to get weird.

    Book preview

    Aura - Carlos Fuentes

    1

    You’re reading the advertisement: an offer like this isn’t made every day. You read it and reread it. It seems to be addressed to you and nobody else. You don’t even notice when the ash from your cigarette falls into the cup of tea you ordered in this cheap, dirty café. You read it again. Wanted, young historian, conscientious, neat. Perfect knowledge colloquial French. Youth … knowledge of French, preferably after living in France for a while … Four thousand pesos a month, all meals, comfortable bedroom-study. All that’s missing is your name. The advertisement should have two more words, in bigger, blacker type: Felipe Montero. Wanted, Felipe Montero, formerly on scholarship at the Sorbonne, historian full of useless facts, accustomed to digging among yellowed documents, part-time teacher in private schools, nine hundred pesos a month. But if you read that, you’d be suspicious, and take it as a joke. "Address, Donceles 815." No telephone. Come in person.

    You leave a tip, reach for your brief case, get up. You wonder if another young historian, in the same situation you are, has seen the same advertisement, has got ahead of you and taken the job already. You walk down to the corner, trying to forget this idea. As you wait for the bus, you run over the dates you must have on the tip of your tongue so that your sleepy pupils will respect you. The bus is coming now, and you’re staring at the tips of your black shoes. You’ve got to be prepared. You put your hand in your pocket, search among the coins, and finally take out thirty centavos. You’ve got to be prepared. You grab the handrail—the bus slows down but doesn’t stop—and jump aboard. Then you shove your way forward, pay the driver the thirty centavos, squeeze yourself in among the passengers already standing in the aisle, hang onto the overhead rail, press your brief case tighter under your left arm, and automatically put your left hand over the back pocket where you keep your billfold.

    This day is just like any other day, and you don’t remember the advertisement until the next morning, when you sit down in the same café and order breakfast and open your newspaper. You come to the advertising section and there it is again: young historian. The job is still open. You reread the advertisement, lingering over the final words: four thousand pesos.

    It’s surprising to know that anyone lives on Donceles Street. You always thought that nobody lived in the old center of the city. You walk slowly, trying to pick out the number 815 in that conglomeration of old colonial mansions, all of them converted into repair shops, jewelry shops, shoe stores, drugstores. The numbers have been changed, painted over, confused. A 13 next to a 200. An old plaque reading 47 over a scrawl in blurred charcoal: Now 924. You look up at the second stories. Up there, everything is the same as it was. The jukeboxes don’t disturb them. The mercury streetlights don’t shine in. The cheap merchandise on sale along the street doesn’t have any effect on that upper level; on the baroque harmony of the carved stones; on the battered stone saints with pigeons clustering on their shoulders; on the latticed balconies, the copper gutters, the sandstone gargoyles; on the greenish curtains that darken the long windows; on that window from which someone draws back when you look at it. You gaze at the fanciful vines carved over the doorway, then lower your eyes to the peeling wall and

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