I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of

“I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.” Thus spoke Carlos Fuentes, one of the great voices of Latin American literature — a writer whose pen carved whole worlds from the unseen substance of the soul. In these words, Fuentes reveals the eternal hunger of the true artist: to move beyond mere reflection of reality into the boundless realm of imagination, where truth is not copied, but created. His declaration is not a rejection of life, but a deeper embrace of it — for to depict reality alone is to show only the surface of the sea, while to dive into imagination is to explore the depths where mystery, myth, and meaning dwell.

In his time, Fuentes stood among the great dreamers of the Latin American Boom — a generation of writers who refused to accept the world as it appeared. Alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, he sought not to record life like a journalist, but to reveal it as a poet. The world they wrote was not one of facts, but of truths: truths that could only be reached through fantasy, symbolism, and myth. In this, Fuentes claimed his lineage with the ancient storytellers, for he knew that the imagination was not a flight from reality, but a higher form of seeing it.

When Fuentes speaks of rejecting the “slice of life,” he speaks against the dull literalism that confines art to the everyday. The slice of life school, born from realism, sought to portray life exactly as it was — plain, unadorned, untransformed. But Fuentes, like the prophets and poets of old, knew that reality alone is not enough to awaken the spirit. The world is filled with images, but few see the invisible fire that burns beneath them. The writer’s task, he believed, is not to describe what is, but to imagine what could be — to reveal the secret architecture of human longing, the unseen forces that shape destiny.

Consider the way Franz Kafka used the imagination to show the alienation of modern life. In The Metamorphosis, a man wakes to find himself transformed into an insect — an image so strange it transcends reason, yet within that slice of imagination, we see the deeper truth of the human condition: the loneliness, the dehumanization, the quiet despair that haunts ordinary existence. This is what Fuentes sought — not a mirror, but a revelation. For the imagination, when used with courage and wisdom, becomes a divine instrument that exposes what the eye cannot see but the heart already knows.

In Fuentes’s own work, such as Aura and Terra Nostra, he fused history and dream, legend and flesh, until the boundaries between the real and the unreal dissolved. The past spoke through the present; ghosts conversed with the living; myth shaped men’s destinies. For him, imagination was not escape, but expansion — the widening of human vision to include not just the visible, but the eternal. Through imagination, he transformed Mexico’s history into a living myth, showing that every civilization, every human being, is sustained by the dreams that define them.

The ancients understood this power. When Homer sang of gods and heroes, he did not give his people a slice of life — he gave them a slice of the imagination, through which they could see the greatness and tragedy of their own existence. When Dante descended into hell and ascended into paradise, he was not chronicling experience, but exploring the soul. And when Fuentes spoke, he carried this same flame, teaching that without imagination, life itself becomes small, a repetition of the same gray day. But with imagination, the ordinary becomes radiant; the finite touches the infinite.

So let this be the teaching: do not be content with what is merely real. Seek what is true. The slice of life is food for the body, but the slice of the imagination nourishes the soul. When you read, read not just for recognition, but for revelation. When you write, create not as a recorder of facts, but as a conjurer of worlds. And when you live, live not by habit, but by vision — seeing in every moment the invisible threads of wonder that hold the world together.

For as Fuentes reminds us, it is not the duty of art to imitate life, but to illuminate it. The imagination is the bridge between what is and what could be — between the human and the divine. Guard it. Feed it. Let it guide your vision. For in the end, it is not reality that saves us, but the imagination that dares to transform it into beauty, meaning, and light.