LONDON — If love and hate are two sides of the same coin, as it is often said, then power and sadness are two sides of a lesser coin.

        “Here is the thing I am proudest of,” Carlos Fuentes says, picking a small white book from a pile of books bigger than the coffee table in his flat. It is La Palabra Sobrevive (“The Word Survives”), written by his son, Carlos Fuentes Lemus, who died last year at 25 in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

        Carlos Jr. was a hemophiliac, and the self-portrait on the cover of this book of poems is a pencil drawing with large red blotches over the eyes and throat.

        He lived in Cambridge, Mass., London and Mexico during his short life. He was an artist in many mediums: painting, photography and poetry.

        Mr. Fuentes senior, 72, who speaks today at Miami University, is a big, straight-spined, handsome man whose carriage evokes both cultures in his family: German and Mexican. He commands a power in literary and political circles that is almost a birthright.

        His friends are people such as Ethel Kennedy and William Styron. His mother went into labor with him while watching a silent-screen version of La Boheme with Lillian Gish in a movie house. His father was a Mexican diplomat.

        Mr. Fuentes spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., then in Chile. The family returned to Mexico when he was 15.

        He studied law, became Mexico's ambassador to France in the mid-1970s, then taught at Harvard. He now spends half of the year in Mexico City and half in London, where I visited him in his fifth-floor, light-filled Kensington flat.

        The writer claims that grandmothers are the best source for all stories. His new novel is The Years With Laura Diaz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), published in English this month with translation by Alfred Mac Adam.

        The story is based on the life of his paternal grandmother, Emilia Rivas Gil de Macias, from Sonora, Mexico. But it also draws heavily on the life of his uncle, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger.

        Uncle Carlos was a poet and a rebel who wrote for a magazine called Bohemian Muse. He died of typhoid fever at the age of 21.

        The characters in the novel are drawn from Mr. Fuentes' family constellation, but the breath of the story, its spine of sadness, lies in the death of the young revolutionary uncle. It is his death that inspires the will and idealism of his young half-sister, Laura Diaz, who grows up to be a politically active artist.

        “The biggest challenge,” Mr. Mac Adam says, “was finding a female voice. Carlos rarely has female narrators. This book brings us back to the glory days of Artemio Cruz.

        “If Cruz embodied post-revolutionary Mexico, Laura Diaz embodies the new Mexico. She loses everything and gains integrity.”

        Mr. Fuentes has written 19 books, contributed to countless volumes on the history of Latin America and Spanish literature.

        “We are often told,” he says of the gang of four, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Octavio Paz and himself, “"you guys write history with a capital H.'”

        These days, he says, he is interested in history with a small h.

        In many of his books, men hold the power in the world, and women hold its sadness. But in private, at home, men carry the sadness and women hold the power.

        There is a phrase in The Years with Laura Diaz that reads like a haiku. It describes the relationship between men and women in the world of the novel: “The man stared at the woman. The woman stared at the sky.”

        Mr. Fuentes and his wife, Sylvia, have lived in their London apartment for part of each year since 1990. She has a television show in Mexico for which she interviews artists, writers and other cultural figures.

        “One day,” Mr. Fuentes says proudly, “she interviewed Seamus Heaney and Neil Jordan on the same day.”

        The room we sit in is filled with paintings and family photos (Mr. Fuentes also has a 25-year-old daughter, Natasha). But it is not possible to ignore in particular a photograph of fine-featured Carlos Jr. that holds pride of place over books and art.

        “There are moments in your life when you want to exorcise something, reach some kind of understanding,” he says of the impulse to write a book. “Sometimes it is a death. I lost,” Mr. Fuentes sighs, “a young son full of promise.”

        “Will is essential,” he adds, drawing himself up again. “Without will, you cannot shape your world. Without will, you are a vegetable.

        “Memory is also essential, the habit of memory.”

        He talks about friendship, and about Mr. Styron, who is suffering again from the depression he described so beautifully in his book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. It is as if Mr. Fuentes has given his face permission to fall. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do, except let them know you care about them.”

IF YOU GO

               • What: Carlos Fuentes speaks on “U.S. and Latin America: Sharing a Continent.”

        • When: 8 p.m. today.

        • Where: Hall Auditorium, Miami University, Oxford.

        • Cost: Free tickets available beginning 7 p.m. at Hall Auditorium box office. (513) 529-1809; www.muohio.edu/lecture.
       

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