Volume 28, Number 16 · October 22, 1981
In the Latino Americano Mirror
By Michael Wood
Macho Camacho's Beat
by Luis Rafael Sánchez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Pantheon, 213 pp., $10.95
The Emperor of the Amazon
by Márcio Souza, translated by Thomas Colchie
Avon, 190 pp., $2.75 (paper)
Burnt Water
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 231 pp., $11.95
On Heroes and Tombs
by Ernesto Sábato, translated by Helen R. Lane
Godine, 496 pp., $17.95
Latin America is many places. They are not separated by a common language, as is often said of England and the United States, they are divided by fiercely diverging political and economic practices, but haunted by parallel pasts and nostalgias, and by what at times seems to be a shared culture. The differences are enormous. Cuba is not Chile; Bolivia is not Puerto Rico. A character in Ernesto Sábato's On Heroes and Tombs sneers at a book entitled Latin America: One Country, and it is hard to quarrel with his scorn. One country: Buenos Aires is not even one city, it is, like New York, an unmelted pot of all sorts of nationalities. One hesitates to trust one's own experience very far. A long time spent in Mexico is just that: a long time spent in Mexico.
Review, 5669 words
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