Octavio Paz en su siglo

horrible but allowing us to feel the inner tsunamis of trauma. Other erudite essays engage Joan Didion , T. S. Eliot, and Robert Rauschenberg in a wide-ranging discussion of collage to demonstrate new modes of cultural production and signification. Hart Crane’s horrifying manic-depressive cycles and Theodore Roethke’s dark side (where traumatic dimensions of personal experiences result in dramatic rhythm and aural kinetics) are presented as evidence of a new confessional orientation, with shifting assumptions about history, identity, and aesthetics. Balakian’s cosmopolitan vision and sensibility are also strikingly felt in his essays on Elia Kazan and Bob Dylan, with the author showing connections yet again among seemingly disparate genres and their unique embodiments of the zeitgeist. His book manifests sophisticated literary skill in exposing radiance in the shadow side of history. Keith Garebian Mississauga, Ontario Christopher Domínguez Michael. Octavio Paz en su siglo. Mexico City. Aguilar. 2014. 651 pages. This magisterial biography—already published in an abridged French version with an English one forthcoming—is the painstaking work of an eminent critic of Mexican literature and culture and has engendered an extensive, admiring reception. Domínguez Michael knew Paz better than any of Paz’s contemporaries and close circle (of which he was a member) and, by acknowledging the resultant complexities, produces an interpretation, not an accumulation of facts. This is a challenge, since as a poet Paz pursued experience where it was most intense and, as an influential public intellectual, broke the monotony of an indecorous age. Domínguez Michael eradicates irreversibly the colonized view that there are no Spanish-language literary biographies akin to English-language ones, a view he corrected with Vida de Fray Servando (2004). This is obvious in terms of psychological appraisals, as in the arc from the third to the twelfth chapter regarding Paz’s problematic relationship with his first wife, Elena Garro, and their daughter. If Paz is feasibly more revered as an essayist and “conservative” intellectual, the fourth and fifth chapters convincingly analyze his progressive commitment and eventual disappointment. Is there a problem with recounting how and why he wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude, founded Vuelta, etc.? None. And asking biographers not to do their homework and be “original” with facts and biographemes is disingenuous. Domínguez Michael also solves a frequent complaint about Paz’s complete works by referring to his correspondence and objectively evaluates the role of poetry for a fuller understanding of Paz, masterfully correcting the abundant but poorly informed criticism. Similarly, in chapters 9–11 (which contain a subtle study of Paz’s biography of Sor Juana), he avoids adding to the speculation about the reasons for Paz’s distancing from longtime friends, Carlos Fuentes among them. When he doggedly reconstructs moments of crisis that have not left major traces in Paz’s works, as he does in chapters 8–9, Domínguez Michael makes the silence that surrounds them speak with intensity. Time and time again he concentrates on some unknown moments of Paz’s life, making biography and history cross in novel and emotive ways, a conjunction found in the best biographies. The last chapter, suggestively titled “Family Dramas ,” is more an analysis of the dysfunctional families that inform the Western world. Judicious but bold, Domínguez Michael infuses passion in every page about one of the finest intellectuals of the twentieth century, and to deconstruct his Jean-Philippe Toussaint Urgency and Patience Edward Gauvin, tr. Dalkey Archive Jean-Philippe Toussaint shares his recommendations for the art of writing a novel in several short essays based on his experience as an author and a reader. Beginning with the very day he decided to become a writer, these essays do not contain simple clerical instruction, but he imbues them with his humor, evocative imagery, and imaginative perspective so that his vision of artistic development almost becomes a narrative itself. Thórbergur Thórdarson Of Icelandic Nobles and Idiot Savants Hallberg Hallmundsson & Julian Meldon D’Arcy, tr. Brú The quirks and humor of Thórbergur Thórdarson, who wrote in many genres, thread together this selection of diverse works compiled by two translators at different times and from different backgrounds yet both great admirers...

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