SOURCE: "The Earth Moves," in New Statesman, July 26, 1996, p. 48.

[In the following review, Hopkinson traces the thematic origins of The Double Flame.]

It is tempting, hut incorrectly dismissive, to bunch this book [The Double Flame] with Carlos Fuentes' recent Diana. Both authors could be categorised as post-menopausal Mexican machos, attempting to make sense of all that youthful fervour and intensity. That one book is written as a novel and the other as essays detracts neither from the literary nor the emotional roots of each. Paz (who bears Fuentes' homage to "the greatest living Mexican writer" on his cover) queries in his preface when a book "begin[s] to be written".

He answers that each one is a life's work. Paz claims antecedents in the love poetry of his adolescence and in an essay on De Sade from the 1960s. At that time, when already in his fifties, he...