Product Description
In this small, memorable meditation on Octavio Paz as a thinker and man of action, Ilan Stavans-described by the Washington Post as "one of our foremost cultural critics"-ponders the Nobel Prize laureate's intellectual courage against the ideological tapestry of his epoch and shows us what lessons can be learned from him. Stavans explores such topics as the crossroads where literature and politics meet, the place of criticism in society, and Mexico's difficult quest to come to terms with its own history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I disagree with the previous reader
Dr. Stavans has been compared to Mr. Octavio Paz. And for good reason: this is a short book, but it's powerful. It doesn't do what trashy academic books do all the time: the say absolutely nothing. Dr. Stavans offers a strong, critical portrait of the Nobel Prize winner, and some people in the establishment won't like that. He has the courage to say what others won't!

2 & a half stars
One of the saving graces of Stavans' profile-reflection of Paz is it's complete absence of a stultifying academic tone. This, unfortunately, is not enough to merit Stavans' book. In the first few pages he writes of Paz's poetic output, "I confess to having never much cared for his poetry...His poetry is too lose, too mystical for my taste." Stavans characterizes Paz's poetic oeuvre as "too close to Surrealism". These comments by Stavans displays a remarkably superficial reading of Paz's poems, to such a significant degree as to almost entirely discredit any of his observations on Paz's critical writings, which are in his words, "a better metronome for our times". Anyone who has given Paz's poems more in-depth attention than Stavans, will quickly come to the realization that in Paz's poems there is an audible critical voice, & in his prose there is often poetic passages.

In fact, in some works the two converge until they are indistinguishable, as in the case of "The Monkey Grammarian", which some critics consider his most unusual prose work, but his English translator, Eliot Weinberger considered an essentially poetic work. The only books of essays given significant attention to in Stavans' work are "The Labyrinth of Solitude" & "Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Faith", both of which he considered to be Paz's masterpieces. All other collections of essays are only briefly mentioned throughout.

Stavans' book also suffers from glaring inconsistencies, as in his passages on Paz's magazine, "Vuelta". Although he acknowledges the international contributors & scores of translations Paz's magazine provided its readership, Stavans writes, "To read its pages was to suppose that most people in Mexico, and for that matter in the whole southern hemisphere, were comfortably tolerant of diverse views, not much concerned with local politics, highly literate, and metaphysically driven, which was and is far from true in a nation where 75 percent of the population lives in poverty and 49 percent is still illiterate." A few pages later, Stavans tries to make a case that in his later years Paz had become a sort of reactionary, too close to the PRI government to be effective anymore, "His seventieth birthday, in 1984, and then again his eightieth were jointly celebrated with great fanfare by the ruling party and Televisa, with TV programs, conferences, and museum exhibits. Paz was seen by a large segment of Mexico's population as disconnected from the nation's new artistic, antiestablishment trends, as a close friend of the status quo, and as an ally of the United States, his magazine as a reactionary organ of Mexico's intellectual right." If we take Stavans' former statement about the presumptions of "Vuelta" which he claims cannot possibly be true, such as a highly literate population, how are we supposed to accept the latter about a large segment of Mexico being concerned with where Paz stood on the latest artistic developments & their views of his magazine?

Although this is for the most part an irritating read, with many inconsistencies strewn throughout, a few of Stavans' analysis of Paz's work is dead on. However, before reading this I would seek out Jason Wilson's infinitely superior study of Paz & his work, which is thankfully devoid of the envy & derogatory remarks that stain Stavans' book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The perfect reader
A great essay, or set of essays, on contemporary poetry and its paradoxes and dilemmas.
Paz is a remarkable reader, with a special and rare ability to create large frames of
understanding without loosing the sense of textual detail.
This is a book that should be read after knowing "Los hijos del limo", the great Paz's
essay about modernity and its collapse. ... Read more

Product Description
Este libro explora dos ambitos centrales de la obra de Octavio Paz: el de su poesia y su poetica, entendida esta ultima palabra como expresion de la otredad constitutiva del ser humano; y el de sus ideas sobre la politica, incluido el campo de sus intervenciones, muchas veces polemicas, en los debates ideologicos de Mexico. La singularidad del libro es la yuxtaposicion de estos dos ambitos (poetica y politica) que suelen separarse en los estudios acerca de Paz. ... Read more

Product Description
Este volumen reune las paginas mas representativas del pensamiento de Octavio Paz (1914-1998) en torno a la historia del pueblo mexicano. Tomadas de distintos libros publicados por su autor, estas reflexiones son testimonio de su rico y apasionado dialogo con el pasado de su tierra, en un afan por penetrar la compleja trama cultural e historica del presente mexicano. ... Read more

Product Description
When Octavio Paz died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was a surrealist disciple of Andre Breton, an admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional writer. European by inclination, he brought unanticipated tonalities into Spanish. ... Read more