Customer Reviews

Terra Nostra (Mexican Literature Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Excerpts from Robert Coover's original review published in the New York Times November 7, 1976:

"Terra Nostra" is a colossal 350,000-word opus, a kind of panoramic Hispano-American creation myth, spanning 20 centuries (more, if you count the Greek and Egyptian mythologies that help to feed it) and embracing virtually the whole of European and American (especially Mexican) culture and civilization.

If "Terra Nostra" is a failure, it is a magnificent failure. Its conception is truly grand, its perceptions often unique, its energy compelling and the inventiveness and audacity of some of its narrative maneuvers absolutely breathtaking; the animated paintings, the talking mirrors, the time machines and metamorphosing mummies, the fusion of history, myth and fiction, the variations on themes and dreams, the interweaving or rich, violent, beautiful, grotesque, mysterious, even magical images--not without reason has this book been likened to a vast and intricate tapestry.

Achieved or not, there are too few writers around even willing to risk the impossible, and none I know of who so intimately activates the otherwise dead space between page and reader.

...Terra Nostra" is divided into three sections, translated in English as "The Old World" "The New World" and "The Next World." The first part is set in pre-Colombian Europe and describes the degenerate king of a dying Spanish Empire and his court. This section is loaded with as much intrigue and back stabbing as "I Claudius".

The second section, "The New World", is my favorite and can be read on its own. It has some of the most beautiful prose I have ever encountered. In it, the author describes the pilgrim's journey to the New World and his meetings with its people. The narrative has an immediacy that makes one feel that one has just stumbled upon a new world, with all of its dangers and mysteries.

In the last section, the pilgrim tells his story to the Spanish King, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If you like the magical realism genre so popular among South American novelists, you will love this book. If you are looking for plausible historical fiction, look elsewhere.

TERRA NOSTRA stands as Carlos Fuentes' most incredible achievement -- and as one of the great books of the 20th Century. The depths and heights of Man's history swirl around the reader as a controlled maelstrom -- grab a handle and hang on for dear life. In this masterpiece, Fuentes attempts nothing less than to transfer the last 500 years or so of the New World -- including its origins in the Old -- into words. Alternately achingly real and mind-bendingly surreal, the story unfolds almost as a jigsaw puzzle falling into place before the reader's eyes.

As cliched as it might sound, this is truly a work that MUST be experienced by any reader who recognizes the awesome power of language in the hands of a master craftsman -- there is nothing else like it in Western literature.

How sad that there are so few (3) reviews/readings of such an incredible work of art.

About halfway through this book I started to get the feeling that after reading Terra Nostra I could be content never to read another book again, as if it were the culmination of my lifetime of reading.

The absolutely gorgeous prose (could be the translator), is in the same vein as Nabokov and Pynchon, but not quite as complex. You'll run into sentences that go on for a page or more, but are not usually overly difficult to understand. This book also has the most vivid imagery I've ever read. I'd never felt more like I was there, in the book/story, than in Terra Nostra. I was completely taken away from my own world when I was reading (time just seemed to vanish from the clock), also like Pynchon but even more so in this regard.

Unfortunately, the book seems to fall apart over the last couple of hundred pages. It appears to meander about and ramble on while waiting to end. All the great prose and imagery are still there, as well as some important sections, but the "story" as a whole seems to get lost and confused.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." says Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. This book - amongst many other things - is an exhaustive, exhausting exploration of that nightmare which is history, truly. Thus, it consists not of the linear history - and is certainly NOT a linear narration - of the history one learns in schools or history books. It is history as a hallucinogenic nightmare swirling around the figure of "El Senor" or "Don Felipe" and his necrophilic obsession with his manes (L.), or beatified ancestors. Some reviewers, noting the similarities, have gone so far as to identify him as Phillip II. This presumes far too much and, one might say, is contrary to the whole notion of the landscape presented here, where characters exchange identities and sexes, are reincarnated in different eras, in which literary characters are living beings, almost all of whom are given alternative histories, and characters and settings that are real or imagined or dreamed are all conflated into a baroque phantasmagoria. At one point in the book, Brother Julián wishes to tell a character called the chronicler the following:

"Let others write the history of events that are apparent: the battles and the treaties, the hereditary conflicts, the amassing and dispersion of authority, the struggles among the estates, the territorial ambition that continues to link us to animality; you, the friend of fables, you must write the history of the passions, without which the history of money, labour, and power is incomprehensible."

This is at least part of what Fuentes tries to do in this unclassifiable work.

A great deal of the book is taken up by life-in-death, death-in life existential, theological questions of the most abstruse nature, which are intriguing and beguiling and, ultimately, unanswerable. Also, there is a great deal of sexual concourse described explicitly in all its various manifestations. Male and female genitalia, particularly the latter, are described in minute detail, often in bizarre circumstances evoking shock and, perhaps, if one dwells on them sufficiently, nausea. At times, this serves to highlight the Gnostic question of whether creation and matter are evil, or the question of overpopulation. But as often again it is simply there, as in a particularly harrowing nightmare.

I would be remiss not to mention the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, who renders the archaic Spanish into delightfully archaic English and preserves as many Spanish words that have filtered into English as possible. In doing so, she preserves the baroque literary stylism of the Spanish original marvellously. I haven't read the Spanish original but, well, there's an entire chapter justifying the baroque in literature towards the end of the work, placed there, it seems to me, for rather obvious reasons.

In the end, this is a book from which I'm glad to have awakened. No doubt its claims to high literature are of merit and consideration. And it is indeed a very powerful, exceedingly erudite work. But if, as the ancient Greeks and others since have maintained, the primary aim of a work of art is to please - be it on the highest plain, or the most tragic, cathartic sense - then this work, as the NYT reviewer puts it, is a "magnificent failure." After over a week of living in the nightmarish, hallucinatory, hypnagogic world that is Fuentes' book, it is hard to shake the deep feeling it induces that, as one character puts it:

"Reality is a sick dream."

Es una de las novelas más ambiciosas que se han escrito,podrían ser todas las novelas en Terra Nostra.La verdad pensaba que la iba a encontrar en muy mal estado por ser una edición ya muy vieja y agotada en México;pero me sorprendió mucho que el libro está en muy buen estado y tiene aún los datos de que perteneció a una biblioteca pública y no obstante está bien conservada.Era un libro que quería tener y fué muy gratificante el encontrarlo.Además diré que lo recibí en México mucho antes de la fecha estimada de entrega.Estoy muy satisfecho del servicio de Amazon.

Carlos Fuentes is undoubtedly one of the more important Spanish-language novelists of the second half of the 20th century. He pretty much set the tone for the Boom period with his "region mas transparente." He is fantastically erudite, which, I suppose is generally a complimentary thing to say about someone. However, his novels do attempt to organize and name the flow of (early modern european) history and as a result Fuentes' style of writing can easily be described as Baroque, and that is a term which I generally do not use as a compliment. Many critics and commentaries about this book describe it as an attempt to chronicle the birth, growth, passions and betrayals of a global civilization. I admire Fuentes' ambition, and perhaps in the mid-70s, when he wrote this book, modern literary novelists were still under the spell of Joyce's Ulysses, another shambling baroque monster of a novel. But this novel has not aged well, at all. It is, quite simply, too much. The Baroque style in general refers to an art of excess and deformity, anti-organic, surreal, all of which apply to this novel. Whether or not one appreciates this sort of literary effort is, of course, a matter of taste. Some people like Baroque art, architecture, literature. I do not. I find it rather contrary to daily life as it is lived by people in the Americas. In fact, I find that the baroque in general represents a false vision of life, and exemplifies Western civilization's obsession with knowing by dissection and vivisection rather than humble observation. As a result, Terra Nostra does not succeed as lasting literature because it does not bring us to a greater understanding of Mexico or Spain or the colonization of Latin America by the latter. It does not help us to gain insight into the people and their motivations, whether the Conquistadores, the creoles, or the Indigenous Americans.

I contrast this novel most recently to Roberto Bolano's 2666, which is perhaps an example of the Baroque novel done successfully, as it is a novel which succeeds in weaving multiple stories together in a way that does grant us insight into Latin American culture and history, and as a result, into the human condition. Terra Nostra does not succeed in doing this. Instead the reader is overwhelmed, or more likely, bored by the excessive and surreal writing found within.

The tides of literary fashion have washed over the majority of Mr. Fuentes efforts and moved on.