SOURCE: “Serving Two Masters,” in Nation, Vol. 261, November 20, 1995, pp. 640–42.

In the following review, Stavans discusses The House on the Lagoon in the context of contemporary Puerto Rican literature, highlighting its less than enthusiastic reception by English-speaking readers.

There is a border in contemporary Puerto Rican letters that is at once mental abyss and tangible geographical gap between island and mainland, one that literature can map in astonishing detail. Remarkable books like La noche oscura del Nino Avilés, an intriguing, encyclopedic 1984 novel by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá about religious fanaticism, set in the eighteenth century in San Juan Bautista, remain unknown and untranslated this side of the water. And like Juliá's, plenty of original fiction goes unappreciated abroad. Similarly, the work of classic English-language Puerto Rican writers like Judith Ortíz-Cofer, Edward Rivera and Piri Thomas is underrepresented on their Caribbean island of origin. A dialogue of...