![]() Own past and cease imitating English and French models. Even more puzzling is his repeated insistence that Hispanic countries should seek inspiration for their political institutions in their In fact, theseĪre the hoary cliches that play better in 19th-century French operas than in modern Latin America. For example, he makes a great deal about bullfights and gypsies as symbols of all Hispanic culture. His need to generalize and encapsulate inevitably distorts. Fuentes's narrative is equally felicitous. Who battled tirelessly to protect America's native populations. Of men like Francisco Pizarro but he also portrays vividly the heroism of figures like the early missionary priests and historians Bartolome de las Casas and Toribio de Benavente (always called Motolinia, a name the Indians gave him), Fuentes calls attention to the complexity of Hispanic culture and history. In a year when bashing Columbus and the Spanish conquest is becoming a popular parlor game among the politically correct and minimally informed, Mr. Although he devotes only a few paragraphs each to important figures like Alphonse the Wise, Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Juarez, what he loses in detail he often captures in essence. With his considerable gifts as a narrator, he captures much of the sweep and drama of Hispanic history and culture without bogging down Fuentes does manage to distill in so few pages is truly astounding. ![]() Given the size of such a project, it is no surprise that "The Buried Mirror" covers too much to doĪll of it well. History, with frequent digressions on a particular artist, political figure, novel or painting. Fuentes seeks to cover all of Spanish and Spanish-American Beginning with the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira in Spain and ending with contemporary street art in East Los Angeles, Mr. The range of the book is both its principal defect and its chief virtue. North Americans are his principal concern. Indeed, since his book is meant to complement, albeit not duplicate, a television series co-produced by the Discovery Channel and the BBC and also called "The Buried Mirror," it sometimes seems that Reminds "us" of insurance companies and Numantia - where the ancient Iberians resisted for decades the Roman conquest of Spain - becomes "a sort of Vietnam for Rome," he clearly hopes English-speaking AmericansĪre listening. Yet when he uses images in which Gibraltar Ostensibly he, like Mitre, addresses other Latin Americans. Of Spain's and Latin America's cultural history, a daunting task by any standard. As history it is anachronistic and occasionally unreliable as narrative and commentary it is forceful and beautifully written. The result of such concerns is an unusual book, both compelling and disturbing. This book, he tells us, is "dedicated to a search for the cultural continuity that can inform and transcend the economic and political disunity and fragmentation of the Hispanic Their forgotten, spiritually authentic history. Fuentes confesses the gravity of today's political and economicĬrisis in Latin America yet, like Mitre, he discounts such difficulties as a thing of the moment and claims a magnificent future to be had by unearthing the buried mirror of cultural identity that will reveal to Latin Americans "The Buried Mirror" by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes is a recent installment in this historiographical tradition. In theġ9th century, history was often written to undergird newly formed nations needing a sense of cultural and spiritual unity to justify their existence. Mitre, of course, was not the only historian of his century with such attitudes. The problems of the moment, his book held that Argentina was a spiritual unit with a glorious past that can instruct an equally glorious future. Yet Mitre denied even the possibility of permanent failure. Two opposing governments claimed to rule the country, and the threat of lasting fragmentation loomed at every juncture. Greatness came at a time of serious crisis. The glory of those men is the Argentine people's richest heritage rescuing their lives and qualities from obscurity is to gather and use that heritage, for our honor and our improvement." Mitre's affirmation of Argentina's IN 1856, Argentina's first great historian, Bartolome Mitre, published a collection of short biographies titled "Gallery of Argentine Celebrities." In the foreword he wrote: "Argentine history has been rich in noteworthy men. The New York Times: Book Review Search ArticleĪpril 26, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
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