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Linda Egan, Carlos Monsivais: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. xxvi + 276 pp.
Carlos Monsivais is the most prolific, demanding, exhilarating, and revealing chronicler of his native Mexico, and one of the shrewdest commentators on Latin America culture. Those are just some of the obvious challenges Linda Egan's illuminating Carlos Monsivais: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary 'Y Mexico had to confront. Her emphasis is on literariness and what she calls "the reality of the real" (97-99), and her book is not a patchwork of previously published and uncorrected articles gathered under a meaningless title. She is also very aware that Monsivais is frequently seen in light of Salvador Novo (174-75).
One of her subtexts is that such comparisons have more to do with faddish assumptions than with a real understanding of the author of Aires de familia (2000) and the mythical Las herencias ocultas del pen.samiento liberal del siglo XIX (2001). Monsivais has achieved a canonical status as an interpreter of society, literature, popular culture (frequently material), and politics. He has antecedents, but no real models or conceptual deities to speak of (see 112, 11618, et passim for Wolfe and Mailer), and he constantly creates texts that confront used thinking (Frank Kermode's term for cliches) directly. As a result, what is immediately apparent is Egan's ability to comprehend complementary textual spheres, greater contexts and linkages, and message's will-totruth in writings that are richly diverse. Thus her decision to concentrate on what her author publishes and compiles as cronicas.
Egan writes clearly, and with a cultured public in mind, albeit one unfettered by the excesses of solipsistic theorization (xvii-xix, xxi-xxiv, 80-81 et passim). She does create a theory, however, and it departs from the notion that generic impositions have only served to incite Monsivais into various displacements. Chief among those misassumptions is the mercurial "biography" behind the authors and ideas Monsivais chooses to discern, as well as the knee-jerk political identification based on biographical fallacies about authors. She argues vehemently that the essayist's sharpness and freedom are always present in his writing, compounded by a sui generic style that easily does away with expected formalities while remaining direct and linguistically inventive.
It is not surprising then that in the...