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.
Many members of the opposition found a place there where they could put forward their points of view via articles in Estudios Publicos and in numerous and popular seminars which were organized to discuss public affairs.
"[1] Together with other Centres for Studies such as CIEPLAN, CED, FLACSO and SUR, the CEP played a role in ending the dictatorship and the transition period contributing in the construction of an intellectual and politically calm climate, pragmatic, academically rigorous, and favourable to a peaceful and definitive establishment of democracy.
[3] Of particular importance were its studies and proposals on subjects such as education, the environment, the reform of public administration, financing in politics, social and urban policies for Santiago, indigenous peoples and regulating telecommunications.
In the words of Mario Vargas Llosa: "Arturo Fontaine made of the CEP... an institution of high culture in which liberal theories inspired analysis, propositions (and) at the same time there were debates and meetings of intellectuals... of the most different persuasions...
He created the most objective and reliable polls in Chile according to politicians of the whole political spectrum" [5] 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.
[7] In fact, his responsibility as a member of the board of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, his novel La vida doble, based on the real story of a leftwing woman trained for the urban guerrilla warfare who was tortured and became a ferocious agent of the dictatorship, the seminars organized by CEP in which several experts questioned the credibility of the figures given by the government about poverty ( Casen poll) and then reached the news even outside Chile (The New York Times, The Economist, the Financial Times covered this story known as "Casengate"),[8] and, in particular, Fontaine's poignant essays against for-profit universities[9] which have influenced the students and are quoted often by the leaders of the students' movement explain CEP's board decision to fire Fontaine.
CEP's board, composed mainly by now ready to use the academic prestige of the institution to defend without nuances the existing economic model in Chile.
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 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.
[10] From an early age Fontaine stood out for his inclination towards letters and at fourteen he won his first prize, the Alsino, awarded by the organization IBBY, whose jury was presided over by Marcela Paz.
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.
"[16] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
"[This quote needs a citation] 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.
"[17] 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.
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.
"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.
[26] 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".
[31] 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".
[32] 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".
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.
[38] Masilover Rodenas in the daily paper La Vanguardia from Barcelona commented that "we are playing here with a confusion of genres (historical and fictitious)….people with various identities, capable of possessing but very rarely of giving.
Everything is unmasked by the words of Lorena or Irene….La vida doble confirms Arturo Fontaine as one of the writers who best incorporates into his work the recent current of actual realism.
Fontaine has given life to various political conflicts so as to convert them into powerful moral dilemmas dealing with heroism, treachery and the surrendering of ideals to a world that has none".
[39] In Ana Josefa Silva's opinion, the novel "has managed to convey, like nothing before – neither in the cinema, nor literature nor even in the theatre – our complex and difficult recent history in a lucid, convincing and intimate way".
But it does so in an original manner..." And Will Corral in World Literature Today writes: "[A] masterpiece...(A) lucid and moving novel... Fontaine's eloquent and coherent achievement... surpasses his national and Latin American cohort...Peerless as testimony, infinitely, memorable as a reassessment of memory's role in narrative, La Vida doble is a model and in myriad ways a closing statement for authenticating historical periods.
"[45]Mario Vargas Llosa Writes: "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.