Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Fuentes, Carlos (Vol. 22) - Richard Gilman

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RICHARD GILMAN

Where the Air Is Clear [La región más transparente] is an attempt to extricate a living imagination from the entombed, self-devouring realities of Mexican consciousness, forever mourning its sundered past, incessantly projecting its possible future shapes, and torn between its ill-defined authenticity and the directing pressure of more advanced societies, much as the nineteenth-century Russian mind was caught between panslavism and the cultured West.

Neither a Turgenev nor a Dostoyevsky, Fuentes presses for a transcendence of the quarrel. He proceeds first by a series of bitter portraits of Mexican salon life, where writers, artists and journalists mingle with the nouveau riche and the museum pieces of the older aristocracy, in a brittle Walpurgis Nicht of sensuality, chic French phrases, complaints about boredom, gossip, jockeying for position and interminable discussions about what it means to be Mexican. As set-pieces they are among...

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1. Introduction
2. Richard Gilman
3. Anthony West
4. Saul Maloff
5. Helen R. Lane
6. A. Alvarez
7. Lanin A. Gyurko
8. Joseph Chrzanowski
9. A. John Skirius
10. Evan Connell
11. The Atlantic Monthly
12. Jonathan Penner
13. Michael Wood
14. Copyright

1. Carlos Fuentes