Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Roberto GonzÁlez Echev ArrÍa

Critical Essay by Roberto GonzÁlez Echev ArrÍa

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 Nostra. As...
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