SOURCE: "Passion's Progress," in New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1991, p. 3.

In the following review, Echevarria provides a highly laudatory assessment of The Campaign, declaring it not only "Fuentes's best novel so far," but "also one of the best Latin American novels of the last 20 years."

Latin America's novelists have been obsessively drawn to their continent's history because it is a grand narrative, with a beginning portentous enough to satisfy yearnings for a sacred origin, yet historical in the sense of being human and secular. The conquistadors themselves, as well as the first historians of the New World, believed that the discovery of America by Columbus was the most significant event since the Crucifixion. It may very well have been the discovery, in fact, that created the modern feeling of being in history.

For this reason, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Homero Aridjis and Carlos Fuentes, among others...