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Understanding Octavio Paz. By Jose Quiroga. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 194 pp.
Understanding Octavio Paz is part of the University of South Carolina Press series Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature (UMELL). The series itself is conceived as an introductory collection meant to guide advanced students and non-academics reading literature in translation. This group of intended readers should find Quiroga's book both compendious and insightful. He provides a clarifying interpretation of Paz's major works, and a wealth of background information on Paz's life and intellectual trajectory.
Understanding Octavio Paz contains eight chapters. Quiroga devotes more than half of the book to surveying three texts: Libertad bajo palabra, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and The Bow and the Lyre. In the remaining chapters, he reviews Children of the Mire, Days and Occasions, Salamander, "Solo for two voices," East Slope, Toward the Beginning, Blanco (to which he devotes all of chapter 6), Vuelta [Return], A Draft of Shadows, and A Tree Within. Quiroga's selection of texts is undoubtedly judicious as it provides the reader with a broad sense of Octavio Paz's oeuvre.
Each of the main chapters provides a general introduction to a distinctive period of Paz's work, followed by glosses of poems or chapters representative of the period under examination. Quiroga's detailed readings of individual poems are insightful and helpful, especially when he interprets them in the context of Paz's collected works, and of modern (Inter) American...