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.
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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.
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Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude is a masterful dissection of the Mexican character. Its title contains one of the central motifs in Jorge Luis Borges' stories, and looks towards the familial and continental isolation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paz asserts that the mestizo Mexican character is formal, decorous, and self-lacerating, and marked by irreconcilable opposites: the European and the indio, the colonizer and the colonized, the conquistador Cortes and his Indian mistress Dona Malinche. The Mexican feels an intimacy with death, and lives for the explosion of the fiesta. In addition, Paz offers brilliant insights into the Chicano "pachuco and other extremes," North American culture and its abstract "world of machines."
