Which Mexican author wrote the novella 'Aura'?

The Mexican author who wrote the novella “Aura” was Carlos Fuentes. Published in 1962, the short novel is one of Fuentes’s best-known works and an important text in the Latin American literary boom.

“Aura” follows Felipe Montero, a young historian who accepts a strange job editing the memoirs of a deceased general. He moves into a shadowy Mexico City house inhabited by the general’s widow, Consuelo, and her enigmatic young niece, Aura. The novel’s atmosphere blends psychological unease, fantasy, memory, and themes of aging and identity.

Fuentes gives the story an unusual formal design: it is narrated almost entirely in the second person, addressing Felipe as “you.” That technique draws the reader directly into his disorientation. The novel is often associated with magic realism, although its Gothic atmosphere and dreamlike transformations are equally central to its effect.

A common mix-up is confusing Fuentes with Octavio Paz, another major Mexican writer of the same generation. Fuentes also wrote “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” published in the same literary-boom era.