Carlos Fuentes' … ambiguous [and] wide-ranging historical panegyric, Terra Nostra, is an [easy] read but … inconclusive. There is the Old World (Spain), the New World (Mexico) and the Next World (Revolutionary). All are drawn with poetic license and give no clues to the mechanics of power politics.

History for Fuentes is not linear but circular. He ruminates at length on the mystic number three: father, son and spirit; mother, father, child; white race, black and red; fire, water, air; Moses, Christ, Apocalypse—the third element required to bring unity to the duality of thought and matter. Like the eternal triumvirate, the book is divided into three parts: Past, Present and Future, separated into segments yet melded into one….

Fuentes' characters—incarnated in each of his three worlds with identical names but (presumably) different identities—long for a world free of servitude, illness, sin, and God. They do not really...