Terra Nostra

One of the few novels of its length that should have been longer than it is. Inherently, it is far from a perfect work – the dealing of racial and gender politics is often maladroit, for example – but it's hard to fault the ambition behind it. The real issue with that ambition is that Fuentes seems to be rushing in the last two hundred pages or so to wrap everything together when, I think, it could have instead used a further dive into what he had already set up. He almost seems scared by what he has constructed, rushing to rearrange it in more familiar garb. This is presumably what Coover was picking up on when they called it "a magnificent failure."

However, this aspect of what fails might well be what makes it so compelling. It is show more a massive mythohistoric confabulation on what the real inheritance of Hispanic culture (in the broadest sense) entails. Could such an undertaking ever really succeed? It's interesting the ways certain parts run up against the work Juan Goytisolo was writing just before. But we have something else entirely here, a truly deep investigation of what the cultural inheritance in which the book operates entails: not just a critique, but an immanent critique felt deep in the author's bones.

So why 4.5 stars? The work itself, despite the flaws, is indeed incredibly admirable. And I really can't think of another work like it. At the end of the day, the best works of literature might be failures just like this one: books that show us the very boundaries it is not quite ready to leap beyond.

In sum, it is definitely still worth a read and, for me, the version we have is certainly an amazing accomplishment. But at the end I do wonder what could have been if there were a few hundred page – or more! – in addition. show less

A Möbius striptease.
Time is a permeable membrane.
Cervantes and Caesar, Bosch and Quetzalcoatl.
Historical figures rise, maggot-ridden from their tombs to conquer, make love, philosophize and dissolve in the polychromatic strobe of dreams. These fantasies fuse with antiquity, birthed from moldered tomes, exhausting the faiths of pious men, eviscerating kings, and bleeding across timelines.

The symbolic journey of this novel is an intense, dense, immense expedition through Old Spain, New Spain, and lands beyond, fraught with wordplay, wigwams, and wampeters. The repetitions, revolutions, and rhythms blossom in the final pages, recalling the mythological wheel of time, the mechanics of Fate, God playing 'ghost in the machine,' and show more ouroboroses in a boudoir. As Kundera explains in his afterword, the novel spreads its wings to encompass interior and exterior worlds, landscapes of the mind and the abyss of the heart.

A novel of conquest, submission, doom, and the many frightened cries of the powerless souls lost in the continuous apocalypse of the past. The past rests on our shoulders, like a prolapsed soul, weighty, invasive, and recurrent.

The Nature of existence, echoing the edenic ambitions human beings inherit from the great puppeteer in the cosmic theater. A bold deathly pale specter hovering over Mexican literature, this monolithic masterpiece bends your ear gently, only to scream its nightmarish hymn into the echo chamber of your brain.

An unforgettable, Joycean whirlpool of perennial, Imperialist themes, set to a constant boil until the precipitate becomes a Kraken with its myriad limbs straddling the limits of temporal awareness and physical sensation. show less

A vast, hugely ambitious novel aiming at nothing less than the unification of the myth systems of Europe and the Americas. Time, as we typically think of it, is meaningless in Terra Nostra. Layer upon layer of history, image, symbol, and allusion make the experience of reading the book more like losing oneself in a complex painting. The eye barely knows where to fall next, and this makes it delightful and fascinating for readers who crave difficult, astonishing books. It's also one of the most delightfully anti-Christian books I've ever read, which is just a wonderful added bonus.

This massive meditation on the Conquest and its effect on imaginations, moralities and all related matters pertaining to worlds both New and Old hit me like a cinder block. I recall going to Day's Espresso at the time, such a locale offered magnificent lattes, they made me fat. I didn't care. I loved this book. There is a well of intertextuality within which is nerdy yet effective.

This massive, 778-page novel is unlike anything else I have ever read. Over the past six weeks or so, there were times when I despaired of understanding what was going on, but I persevered because of my admiration for Fuentes' ambition. I started it originally for the May Reading Globally theme read on Mexico, as it is considered one of the masterpieces of modern Mexican fiction.

Terra Nostra translates as Our Earth. In this book, Fuentes creates a world -- or worlds -- that he peoples with characters based on historical and literary figures, characters derived from mythical and mystical traditions, and characters that spring forth from his own remarkable imagination. Then some of these characters seem to be other characters, or show more reincarnated in some way in other characters, and the timeline of history is fluid, to say the least. It is often unclear, even within a chapter or section, who is who and who is talking. And mixed in with all of this is symbolism galore, much of which probably went right by me, at least as far as understanding what it was about: numbers, especially the power of the number 3, but also 33 1/2, 5, and 20; crosses on the back and six toes on each feet; pyramids that go up and stairs that go down, Catholic beliefs in contrast to "heretical" Christian beliefs, dreams vs. reality etc., etc.

So what is the book about? The first part (The Old World) nominally tells the tale of Felipe, the Senor, based on Phillip II of Spain, the builder of the Escorial, his increasing fanaticism and longing for death, and his interactions with his bizarre family and the schemers of the court -- with the action set in motion by the mysterious arrival of three identical strangers with the said crosses on their backs and six toes on each foot. The second part (The New World) takes us to pre-European contact Mexico, but still involves some of the same characters. The third part (The Next World, which the NY Times review said should have been The Other World) mixes all of this together, along with trips to an even earlier past as well. The end takes us to a vision of the end of the world at the end of the 20th century (the book was written in 1975.)

But that's just the plot. As far as I can tell, what the book is really about is the circularity of history, the repetition of events and people, and the way the church, meaning the rigid Catholic church of 16th century Spain, imprisons us. The writing is lyrical, at times hallucinatory. And in the end, we wonder, was it all a dream? show less

This is an extended dream, more or less working on a biography of Charles V of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor. We meet his master huntsman, and enabler, Guzman, and Tiberius, the roman emperor, Elizabeth I of England, somehow married into the Spanish Royal family, and many or conflated portraits, combining the entire sixteenth century. But it never grabs me with the immediacy of "The Old Gringo". Readable, and full of "Look! there's X!" moments.

A huge, difficult (possibly due to its translation) novel that rises to the level of literature. Well worth the effort of hefting it.