Fuentes is the most ambitious and deliberate of Latin America's "new" novelists, and Terra Nostra is clearly an effort to produce a major work. Whether he has succeeded or not, only time can tell, though I fear that he has not. Fuentes's greatest flaw as a novelist, his intellectualism and hastily gathered erudition, is magnified in Terra Nostra, a huge and unreadable volume that endeavors to recover Mexico's (and by extension Latin America's) Hispanic past.

If readers of Fuentes's earlier novels could find in La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969) a compendium of his theoretical and literary biases, Terra Nostra comes with a companion volume all its own, Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura. This latter book concludes with a bibliography to cover both works, but the reader need not get that far to find that the volume is a combination of apology for and explanation of Terra...