Customer Reviews

Octavio Paz: A Meditation

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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.

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!