Volume 48, Number 16 · October 18, 2001
Landscape Architect
By Paul Berman
Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
by Alma Guillermoprieto
Pantheon, 303 pp., $25.00
What phase of development has Latin America entered right now? What place does it occupy in 'the march of history,' with respect to the rest of the world? Octavio Paz puzzled over that question in an exquisitely writ-ten passage of his book on Sor Juana, the Baroque convent poet.[*] And he concluded that, for reasons peculiar to Hispanic life, no answer can be given. 'Our history has never been a march, in any of the accepted meanings or variations of that word: the straight line of the evolutionists, the zigzag of the dialecticians, the circle of the neo-Platonists.' The history has been, instead, 'a discontinuous process made of leaps and falls.'
Review, 4430 words
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