Synopsis
An exploration of Spanish culture in Spain and the Americas traces the social, political, and economic forces that created that culture, taking a fresh look at the events of 1492 and setting them in the context of Spain's own multicultural roots. Tour.
Reviews
Mexican novelist and statesman Fuentes believes that a common cultural heritage can help the countries of Latin America transcend disunity and fragmentation. In a splendidly illustrated survey, companion to a TV series, he perceptively explores Spanish America's love-hate relationship with Spain and its search for an identity in its multicultural roots. His guiding metaphor is the mirror--whether the glass found in Olmec tombs that guided the dead through the underworld, or Cervantes's Knight of the Mirror, who attempted to cure Don Quixote of madness. In the popular assemblies of medieval Spain's townships, Fuentes finds a model for democratic change in Latin American nations warped by oligarchy and U.S. imperialism. He paints a composite portrait of a dynamic culture through sophisticated meditations on Hernand Cortes's Machiavellian character, Spain's self-mutilating expulsion of its Jews, the pillage of Indian society, Goya and the Enlightenment, Bolivar's quest for self-rule, modern painting, and the Hispanic community in the U.S. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A companion volume to an upcoming Discovery/BBC TV series, this passionate meditation on Hispanic cultural identity from Fuentes (Constancia, 1990, etc.) unfolds with all the color, urgency, and perhaps inevitable superficiality of a popular documentary. Taking as his canvas no less than the entirety of Spanish and Spanish-American history, from the cave drawings at Altamira to the tortured political landscape of present-day Latin America, Fuentes builds his plea for Hispanic cultural continuity around a cluster of vigorously poetic images, largely concerned with the matter of ``inclusion.'' In the pre-Columbian age, for instance, Spain, Fuentes says, then quite literally ``the End of the World'' and marked by the successive influences of Iberian, Celtic, Roman, Visigothic, and Moorish traditions, found its unique identity through an often reluctant embrace of ``the Other.'' Transplanted to America, this rich blend expanded to encompass varied African and indigenous Indian accents. And yet today, fragmented and unstable, Latin America still lacks a ``necessary vision of cultural, economic, and political convergences.'' Although deeply personal and frequently stirring as polemic, the book offers no more than an outline as history, punctuated by proud intellectual trivia (Spain established Europe's earliest parliaments; Santo Domingo was home to the first university in the New World) and nicely formed, highly subjective musings on art and literature. More troubling is Fuentes's continual reliance on glib generalization and stereotype (e.g., that Mexican revolutionary leader Benito Ju rez ``was the very embodiment of Indian fatality, Roman legality, and Spanish stoicism''). Odd, too, is the simultaneously forward-looking and conservative exhortation--that Latin Americans must ``create [their] own models,'' yet that they must search for these within an ``authentically Iberian'' tradition--which seems as much a reflection of the central dilemma as a solution. Strictly an introduction to a complex subject, but, in its yearning and contradictions, an unusually revealing one. (Illustrations--160--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Fuentes has used the occasion of the quincentennial of Columbus's voyage to the New World to reflect on the Latin American experience in this tie-in to the BBC series of the same name to be aired on the Discovery Channel on April 19-23, 1992. The theme of his thoughtful essay is the accommodation of cultures--Spain unique in the Old World in bringing together Christians, Moors, and Jews and the New World intermingling the blood and cultures of Spaniards, Indians, and blacks. It is the unavoidable encounter with the Other that has shaped the New World experience: "When we exclude, we betray ourselves," counsels Fuentes. "When we include, we find ourselves." Spanish America's predicament is that it inherited from Spain neither institutions nor attitudes necessary for full partnership in the modern capitalist world. Latin America remains derivative in culture and economy. Every page in this lapidary essay offers profound insight into the Spanish American psyche. Fuentes concludes, "We have the right . . . to celebrate the great wealth, variety, and continuity of our culture. Indeed, as the quincentennial comes and goes, many throughout Latin America will ask themselves, 'Why have our artists and writers been so imaginative and our politicians so unimaginative?' " Highly recommended for a wide range of readers. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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