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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe

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Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate, poet and one of the best writers of essays in the Spanish language, can give people seriously interested in learning about Sor Juana invaluable information in this beautifully researched book. Everything that is really known about her biography (not anachronistic twentieth-century storytelling and fantasy) is here; and, very importantly, authoritative background information on Colonial Mexican history and culture, social organization, religious practices and norms, and reading materials and habits. Sor Juana is a complex woman, a great reader and thinker that has to be understood in context. This book provides this, and also a sensitive and informed reading of her work. It is also a very good read. Modern-day fictional accounts are deceptive and will short-change you. Don't fall for them. This book is the real thing.

Several years ago, the great Peruvian novelist, critic, and sometime Presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa entitled a colelction of his essays from the 1990s "El Lenguaje de la Pasion," the title he had given to an essay that he wrote on the occasion of the death of Octavio Paz. Paz, who wrote the book in question here--Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz--was perhaps Mexico's preeminent man of letters during the twentieth century, a writer who well deserved the Nobel Prize he won in 1990.

This book on Juana Ines de la Cruz is his best book of prose, in which he unites his sensitivity as a writer of poetry with his deep love for Mexico and his interest in its past. Add to this his genuine insightfulness as a critic--and one who can speak to an average educated adult, not one who speaks only to the specialist--and one has an important, vibrant book, not just about poetry, nor yet about Sor JuanaSor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, but about literature, art, and life in general.

This text is in Spanish, but Paz' Spanish is so clear that it is readily comprehensible even to the non-specialist. Just keep a dictionary at hand: you'll need to consult it only once or twice a page so transparent is Paz' prose. In the end, though I have read quite a bit of literary criticism, I would have to say that this is one of the four or five best books of criticism I have read, not least because it ranges widely beyond its subject and connects what is often the arcana of literary study to life in general. It is a wise, deeply learned book which wears its learning lightly and, as Vargas Llosa suggests, speaks with passion about life in general.

I'm not a particular fan of history or biography but couldn't put this book down. For all the information it offers the reader it's an incredibly un-dull read. It paints such a vivid picture of her life that I felt like I was there. Details were always fascinating, never tedious.

It's not easy to write a biography keeping ideological distance from the Biographed. But Octavio Paz, one of the most sparking writer and thinker of the 20th century, surpassed that classic absence of impartiality with this classic Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose life and work raises the weight curtain that helps the reader to understand the entanglements of the closed aristocracy of the Nueva España of the end of the 17th century. The life of Sor Inés is a hypnotical succession of enigmas, intrigues and ambiguities. Besides, she was a forerunner of the feminist conquests who started in the 19th century. Paz worked for four decades until the conclusion of this astonishing book. If he had nothing wrote, scarcely this work would be enough for him to be considered a truly literary and superb genius.
J.C.Ismael

I ordered this book for an award for a student. It was listed as a new book, but upon arrival, the cover of the book looked worn and dirty. Very disappointed.