Arturo Fontaine Talavera

As a Director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Fontaine has defended it against criticism from the Right (including politicians from UDI, different journalists and El Mercurio) which considers it to be both divisive and biased. The museum, which remembers those victims who suffered the violations of their human rights under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet "doesn’t pretend to give a neutral or bland account. The facts are presented from the perspective of human rights and the democracy that protects them. The great lesson to be learned is what it means to lose that democracy… the causes don’t excuse the later horrors and cruelty that… systematically violated the life, body and dignity of so many people. The State therefore became the sacrificial priest," wrote Fontaine.

David Gallagher, in The Times Literary Supplement, maintained that Oír su voz was undoubtedly "the star among the new Chilean novels". "For a novelist with the talent of Fontaine, the social structure of Chile, with its mixture of 19th century hypocrisy and modern technology, has great literary potential." Continuing, Gallagher claims that reading Oír su voz will leave the reader "more alert when you’re taken to the Board Room. After a bit of haggling over the money on the table, you can smile when intellectuals discuss whether art is in the mind or to do with money."

The novel takes place in a social context marked by the tensions and fissures of a traditional and dependent society that is subjected to a process of a rapid and enforced globalization and capitalist transformation, a phenomenon in which are mixed together the search for the new and the impulse to conserve identities, the faith in progress and the mimicry with respect to the dominant classes in society, the ambition and the fear, the hope and the resentment. According to the critic Nicolas Salerno, it deals with "the problems and contradictions that are represented in this hybrid of modernity." For Maria Luisa Fischer, Oír su voz demands "a reader who doesn’t let himself get seduced by the reality which the world on the surface and the references seem to offer him or, to put it in another way, that he observes what happens above and below the surface: a reader who reads the novel in the way that Pelayo comments with his intellectual friends, as fiction and not as a chronicle… to sum up, a reader who is suspicious of the enchantments in the allusions and who knows how to observe the contradictions that are being debated on the surface of the world that is being represented."

"The first pages of La Vida Doble are so powerful, of such truly convulsive dramatic composition, that it seems almost impossible for the story to maintain the tension until the end. Nonetheless, the truth is that almost all the novel’s action scenes regain the electrifying atmosphere of the beginning, making the reader live through extraordinary suspense and emotion. . . . A novel that as a whole shows great ambition, a very serious documentary undertaking, and a great dexterity in structure and style. It should be read in one sitting, and one emerges from its pages quite shaken."

"Fontaine’s novel poses uneasy questions aimed at challenging the reader’s moral judgments. His way of creating suspense in describing the actions is itself morally challenging. In Lorena, Fontaine has created a forbidding character."

On May 10, 2013, after 31 years working in the institution, Fontaine was forced to resign by the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of CEP. Fontaine declared:

The media has interpreted Fontaine downfall as a sign of the present polarization in Chilean society. El Mostrador, La Segunda, La Tercera, The Clinic (newspaper) and CNN have suggested that Fontaine critical analysis of President's Piñera's Administration, his positive evaluation of Michelle Bachelet strategy to win the Presidential election in 2013 and, specially, his affinity with the students' protests triggered CEP's Board of Trustees decision.

La vida doble appeared in 2010, published by Tusquets in Spain and Argentina, and published in English by Yale University Press in 2013 in a translation by Megan McDowell. It is a novel based on a true story of a female guerilla captured by the secret police during the Pinochet era: she was savagely tortured and later converted into working as an agent for that intelligence service and for many years fought her ex comrades. More than a political novel, it plunges the psychological depths of treachery and resentment, commitment and motherhood. The main character tells her story to an unnamed, silent journalist who listens to her and hopes to report on the story. Carlos Fuentes wrote that this book "goes deeply into moral dilemmas and treachery…..nobody represents Chilean writing better today than Arturo Talavera Fontaine…and maybe nobody… better places the movement of the political and social reality of Chile within their own literary reality and the tensions, struggles, uncertainties loyalties and treacheries of a society in flux"". In her review of the book, Fietta Jarque in the Spanish daily paper El País, wrote that:

Fontaine returned to poetry with Mis ojos x tus ojos in 2007, a collection of brief love poems, several of which had appeared before in the magazine Letras Libres. The critic Grínor Rojo wrote:"How can one write love poetry in these sceptical times?...to look at someone’s eyes is not just to contemplate them but to go inside them…."Tus parpados visten y desvisten a tus ojos" and later on, commenting on another poem that says "insisto llorando y te obligo a abrirme en gajos/a beber tus labios me vas forzando sin querer" Rojo says: "This is the moment when the intensity of erotic ecstasy is substituted by boredom….a lovely book and much more profound than it would appear from a superficial reading". The poet Oscar Hahn commented: "I find it really unusual that the author who wrote those powerful and extensive novels Oir su voz and Cuando eramos inmortales should be the same one who composes these laconic, brief and almost silent verses". The poems speak about a story of love "which the reader has to put together in his imagination because the pieces that complete it are absent and this absence is also called silence. Not any silence but the one that hides itself among the folds of love and the gaps in the words. And this is what Arturo Fontaine expresses with impeccable intuition in Mis ojos x tus ojos". For the poet Diego Maquieira it is about "verses that are absolutely alive and uncontaminated, flashes of high definition, expressions of infinite tenderness…finally a book in which the striking beauty of Eros gives love the possibility of finding a home".

Mario Vargas Llosa stated that we are dealing with "an ambitious and profound novel which covers all the secrets of Chilean society,"(blurb written by Vargas Llosa on the cover of the reedition of Oír su voz by Alfaguara 2003) while the Chilean critic Camilo Marks commented that "for the first time, our insignificant, loved, hated, despised, praised and unbalanced Santiago has found its own voice."

His short stories have also been anthologized: "Honrrarás a tu padre" in 1998 and "Nuevos pecados capitales of Sergio Olguin" in 2001. He has also published essays on different themes in the magazine Estudios Públicos and his literary articles have appeared in Letras Libres, El Mercurio, Nexos, Página/12 and others. His conferences on Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa can be seen on video in YouTube.

His second novel, Cuando eramos inmortales (1998), is a Bildungsroman, in which the central figure, Emilio, instead of consolidating his personality in the world, starts living through a process of losing his convictions or, to put it another way, begins to lose his traditional spiritual home and has to try and live in the inclemency of modern times. The narrative is in the first and third person, in the present and the past, forms which go on inserting themselves fluidly and often in the same paragraph. This type of mobile camera suggests that there are moments in the story when the life of the child Emilio predominates and others when the reconstruction of the past made by the adult, who is not the child Emilio, does. They are the fractures that stay in the reconstruction of memory and which the shape of the writing shows. "With delicate determination, he manages to construct the act of remembering, capturing the precise instance in which one’s experience fixes itself in the memory", remarks the Argentine critic Sylvia Hopenhayn. "A beautiful novel, full of suggestions, and above all a really successful achievement" said Luis de la Peña in Babelia. At times Cuando eramos inmortales has a lyrical and impressionistic tone but this does not mean that it doesn't have a solid plot. "The most entertaining of all the novels published this year" according to the writer Antonio Skármeta. In the judgment of the novelist Alfredo Bryce Echenique it is " the fulfilled ambition of a great writer". For Jorge Edwards it is "an original novel, which has to be savoured and relished. The quality of writing is such that it’s almost better on a second reading". The philosopher and historian Víctor Farías commented along the same lines: "Fontaine has written one of the few Chilean novels in which the language of Castile has recovered its noble sound". The dramatist Marco Antonio de la Parra has defined "it as a beautiful novel about the pain of childhood". In spite of its intimate tone, the novel raises questions about the brazenness, dreams and contradictions of a traditional society on its way to modernization. In the cruelty and violence of the youngsters at the school, some observers have seen a foretaste and preparation for the political violence that characterized the Pinochet regime. Armando Uribe declared that Cuando éramos inmortales "reveals in a certain way the essence of those who give orders and those who take them. Inasmuch as there are writers capable of representing this (and the case among our novelists is almost unique), it means that they are truly great".

After the success of his novel, Fontaine surprised everyone with something totally different: poems along the lines of a negative mysticism, i.e. poems-prayers to a god that doesn't exist. "No podemos decir la palabra/por eso todas las demas". Tu nombre en vano, published in 1995, is a thoughtful book which explores religiousness from the point of view of its absence and is constructed in the tradition of the psalms and mystic poetry.

In 1992 Fontaine published his first novel Oír su voz which established him as one of the principal figures in the new Chilean writing. The novel was both a great critical and public success, staying for more than 30 weeks on the best sellers list. There were a few exceptions to this, such as a virulent article from Ignacio Valente, an Opus Dei priest, who objected to its "reality" and concluded that it was "a long novel born of frustration."

At the same time he worked as a teacher of Philosophy at the University of Chile, where he taught -and still teaches- a seminar on Aesthetics and as a teacher of Political Philosophy at the Institute of Political Science in the Catholic University (1990 – 2007).

Thirteen years after the publication of Nueva York, Fontaine published his second book of poetry: Poemas hablados in 1989. Poemas hablados is a collection where the monologues of different persons take precedence. Roberto Merino wrote: "Fontaine wants to restore the light, the shadow and the lost sense of intimacy, weaving together the most vulnerable elements into his text: memory and speech. The critic Carmen Foxley pointed out that "they are situations or scenarios through which a person passes, leaving there his footprints, eyes, hair slowly falling backwards, a blink and the disturbing and mortal effect of that interruption, which interrupts the apparent stillness and anachronistic recollection of the scene and makes everything apparently innocent seem suspicious." When the book appeared, Ignacio Aguero recorded a video which gives an idea of how these poems should be spoken, using the voices of the actress Schlomit Baytelman and the author, with a commentary by the poet Diego Maquieira.

In June 1988, the CEP published a poll (cited by The New York Times) showing a general repudiation of the Pinochet regime and predicting its defeat in upcoming elections, contradicting three other published polls that predicted the triumph of Pinochet.

With two master's degrees, an MA and an MPhil from the Philosophy department, Columbia University, Fontaine returned to Chile to teach at a newly founded university. However, shortly after his return, the university folded due to the changing funding environment in the government of Augusto Pinochet. Fontaine therefore found himself without a job and entered the Centro de Estudios Públicos (Centre for Public Studies) as a translator. Here he soon found himself heading the magazine Estudios Públicos, a quarterly publication dedicated to the Social Sciences and the Humanities. In 1983 he was named Director of the CEP, an independent and liberal institute.

In September of the same year Fontaine travelled to the United States to continue his post graduate studies in the Philosophy department at Columbia University, New York where he won the President's Fellowship scholarship and studied under Arthur Danto, among others. He attended several workshops in the writing division of Columbia University and was a student of Manuel Puig -the Argentinian novelist- Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Daniel Halpern, Frank MacShane, among others. In 1980 he was named Preceptor and taught the course known at Columbia as "Humanities" where students read a selection of fundamental literature texts.

Fontaine graduated with maximum honours at the beginning of 1977. He was awarded a degree in Philosophy and immediately afterwards was appointed as a teacher at his alma mater.

The poems collected together in Nueva York (1976) were well received by critics. Filebo wrote: " …his book is a little treatise… on the glitter and misery of this Babylon where, day after day the flower of a new Apocalypse bursts forth." Braulio Arenas affirmed that Fontaine "emerges with great force in Chilean poetry, with a youthful, wholesome and unforeseen energy.… [H]is New York stands out for its personal structure, a structure eternal and momentary, apocalyptic and serene, sinister and translucent.

Arturo Fontaine Talavera, (Santiago, 1952) is a novelist, poet and essayist, considered as one of the writers most representative of the Chilean "New Narrative" that surfaced in the 1990s.

Son of the poet Valentina Talavera Balmaceda (1928 -2011) and the lawyer and journalist Arturo Fontaine Aldunate, ex- Chilean Ambassador to Argentina, director of the El Mercurio newspaper and winner of the Premio Nacional for Journalism, Fontaine is the eldest of 6 children. He is married and separated from Mercedes Ducci with whom he has two children.