Reading Destiny and Desire means entering a world that straddles
the real and the imaginary, where time and place are fluid and
truth is malleable. Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s most
internationally renowned living writer, is a member of the aging
generation of Latin American authors who burst on the world
literary stage in the 1960s and ’70s with their brand of magical
realism. Over time, that once-startling narrative technique has
become commonplace even in mainstream fiction, but Fuentes
remains a stalwart practitioner of its purest form. His
challenging novels are not for the fainthearted.  Consider, for
instance, that Destiny and Desire is narrated by the decapitated
head of one of its central characters. The severed head belongs
to Josué Nadal, a young man of indeterminate birth. At Catholic
boarding school, Josué meets his blood brother, Jericó—much is
made of the Biblical correlation of their names—and the two boys
come of age as intellectual and emotional soul mates who share
everything from philo