The Labyrinth of Solitude

by Octavio Paz

Paperback, 2008

Publication

Penguin Books, Limited (UK) (2008), 416 p.

Original publication date

1950

Description

As well as the nine essays on his country's psyche and history that make up 'The Labyrinth of Solitude', this highly acclaimed volume also includes 'The Other Mexico', Paz's heartfelt response to the government massacre of over three hundred students in Mexico City in 1968, and 'Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude', in which he discusses his famous work with Claude Fell. The two final essays contain further reflections on the Mexican government.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Kendall41
An insightful book; yet in spite of its apparent tangencies with Mexican character, how unique does it really make them? After all, we all use masks, few of us open ourselves to strangers, and no one willingly "se raja." Still Paz's Spanish prose is intoxicating.
LibraryThing member thorold
By far the best-known work by the Mexican Nobelist, a collection of essays that sets out to discover and explain Mexican identity. Paz starts out fairly tamely by exploring the inferiority complex Mexicans develop when living among their Northern neighbours, and the pachuco counterculture that was
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a reaction to that, then he moves on to the macho culture with its insistence on suppressing emotions ("the mask"), the key role of the fiesta as an outlet, and the significance of the Mexican national swearword, the universal verb chingar.

But the real substance of the collection seems to be in the set of essays where he takes us succinctly through the cultural history of Mexico from Cortés and Malinche to his own generation, via the major signposts of independence in the 1820s, reform in 1857, and the revolution of 1910. He talks about the collision and fusion of Aztec and Catholic ideas, the flowering of Mexican culture in the late-baroque period (with the emergence of remarkable figures like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), the way every liberal reform movement before the revolution ended up concentrating power and land in the hands of a new elite, but left peasants no better off than before, and the mid-20th century situation of Mexico as a postcolonial developing country struggling to get away from the standard problems of debt, foreign ownership and an economy based on agriculture and minerals that leaves it constantly vulnerable to market fluctuations.

Clear, concise exposition, in which Paz ties Mexican culture into what was going on in the rest of the world, whilst insisting on its special situation as one of the very few postcolonial countries where a complex and highly-organised pre-colonial administration collapsed suddenly and left the colonisers to take over and superimpose their own culture.
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Language

Original language

Spanish

ISBN

9780141188478

Physical description

416 p.; 0.04 inches

Other editions

Pages

416

Rating

½ (73 ratings; 3.8)
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