The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Ed., Ban Stavans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Although the Latin American novel has achieved international fame, the Latin American is largely unknown outside of the Spanish-speaking world The essay is a product of critical thinking, and Europeans and North Americans do not associate Hispanic cultures with inquiry and analysis, claims Ilan Stavans in his introductory essay. Indeed, in Latin America critical thinking is often "forced to the fringes," he writes, and those who engage in it "are by definition outcasts" because they advocate change; they challenge the status quo. And yet, the essay has occupied a significant position in Latin American letters precisely because it is an instrument with which to examine society. The essay scrutinizes, abstracts, and diagnoses--functions particularly important in a hemisphere racked with social and political problems. Latin America has in fact produced some first-rate essayists, and Stavans attempts to smash the myth that Latins are not "cerebral" by providing English translations of nearly eighty essays by some of Latin America's finest writers.

The book is framed by two of Stavans's own essays. He is at his best when analyzing broad concepts such as the essence of language, the feasibility of translating cultural concepts from one tongue to another, or the effects of technology on the art of the essay, and at his worst when spouting history. For example, in his introduction, he claims that the essay did not flourish in Spain until the Generation of '98, apparently unaware of the tremendous importance of the genre in the eighteenth and particularly nineteenth centuries, when the rise of the newspaper fostered its development. Essayists such as Larra, Sanz del Rio, Arenal, Giner de los Rios, Menendez y Pelayo, and Clarin--to name only a few--contributed significantly to the social, political, philosophical, and literary debates that impassioned nineteenth-century Spanish readers. He also perpetuates the myth that the criollos (Spaniards born in the New World) who took...