Terra Nostra big grey dalkey archive paperback by Carlos Fuentes, bedside.

az- Terra Nostra (Latin American Literature Series): Carlos Fuentes,Jorge Volpi: Books:
Excerpts from Robert Coover's original review published in the New York Times November 7, 1976:
Terra Nostra' is a colossal 350,000-word opus, a kind of panoramic Hispano-American creation myth, spanning 20 centuries (more, if you count the Greek and Egyptian mythologies that help to feed it) and embracing virtually the whole of European and American (especially Mexican) culture and civilization.
If 'Terra Nostra' is a failure, it is a magnificent failure. Its conception is truly grand, its perceptions often unique, its energy compelling and the inventiveness and audacity of some of its narrative maneuvers absolutely breathtaking: the animated paintings, the talking mirrors, the time machines and metamorphosing mummies, the fusion of history, myth and fiction, the variations on themes and dreams..

Richard Ford:" For many, many writers of my generation, Carlos Fuentes was a master. We studied, pored over, all but traced his novels."

M Kerrigan TLS: What strikes the reader first in Fuentes's work may be his erudition and intellectual rigor Calasso but what remains in mind is his sympathy.

az cust list: " "A 'big book' nothing is left uncovered in the discovery of new worlds"


Introduction by Jorge Volpi:

Fuentes's real name could be Legion. My name is Legion. (oh no I am not a complicated person. I am just many different simple people. -Nicole in TenderistheNight)

From classical antiquity to the end of the 19th C no one doubted hrrm that the only way to tell a story - to explain it, to memorize it keepsake, to take it apart - was through careful succession of instants. plot shld seem natural and ordered. unfortunately hrm this delicate artifice had nothing to do with reality.
nothing to do with. no one doubted. c'mon. I don't trust you when you say things like that. I don't think that's true. say true things.
Evth occurs simultaneously without humans being able to contemplate (for example) what is happening in other parts of the world; our experience is inevitably fragmented and therefore profoundly disheartening. I dunno. disheartened bcs I do not see everything at once? (now see darkly, as through a looking glass (?) but then shall see clearly).
We will never be able to know evth but are condemned hrm to this frustrating partiality that separates us from the gods: only they enjoy the gift that mortals are denied and that we are barely able to imagine: simultaneity.
Starting in 20th century, a few writers understood that the novel was one of the few human inventions what are the others? other art forms? that could bring us closer to this sort of divinity. in some ways, history of the novel is the history of this fight against linear time.
boy I did not know until transcribing how little I like this.

Terra Nostra extends this challenge: whoever traverses it pages becomes, at least for a few hours, a real god -perhaps a mad god- able to observe at once modern Paris and 18thC Spain, prehispanic Mexico and the Golden Age of Europe.
---Calasso like. and as Talleyrand centers Ruins of Kasch..
Philip the 2nd is main character of Terra Nostra. Absurd, angry, grown old, his specter inhabits the rotten Escorial and from there he directs not only an Empire where the sun never sets but also the destinies of his subjects including his readers.
Fuentes did not intend to write a novel but rather all novels. eh. no. he does not write all novels. he is not the million monkeys typing forever. I am not being literal in order to be ornery. I'm not. I really don't like it, this saying things that do not mean. you mean something. so say that, so I can consider it. he intends to write something that refers to all manner of things, that encompasses multitudes. is many different people. is Legion.
The world of Terra Nostra esp in 1st part is a world of specters .. undefinable characters, in opacity.. The second part of Terra Nostra tells of the creation -- more than the discovery or conquest ok that is int -- of new world, this other possible world th exists btw myths and unknowing. America is the perfect metaphor for Terra Nostra (and not the other way around ok maybe int) it is the place or rather non-place, utopia, where dreams & nightmares converge.
That is why in the third part of this infinite book the old and new world not only clash and meet not only discover each other and battle each other but also reinstate a lost order, finally unifying those two halves of history, two partial histories. In this restoration of utopia, the Roman, Moor, Jew, Spanish, and Indian worlds finally reach a perverse harmony, that of creation.
uses a lot of words I tend to suspect, dislike: perverse utopia harony dreams nightmares converge shrouded infinite. what do these words have in common that alerts distrust? common grandiose? hmm that does not name it.

One of the keys to the composition of the novel -and the vision of the world it offers - can be found in chapter entitles The Number Three which makes reference not only to the parts of Terra Nostra but also to the obsessive recurrence of this number in the book's plot:

One is the key of everything. Two is the denial of one. Three is the synthesis of one and two. contains both, balances both. announces the plurality that follows. is the complete number. the crown of priniciple and the middle. the reunion of the three times. past, present, and future. Everything ends. Everything begins anew.

ok. ok. yes, One. all is One. yes, Two total denial, it doesn't matter, Bartleby, I get stuck here. though also Two is the unloneliest number, sometimes, but that's another story? Three is where want to be, trinity, a family, genesis, bearing fruit. and just recalling Euclid, thinking about number, to say One is a big deal. to say Two also. though really to say One to have a number was to get ready to say two so. One the key of everything is not a number. and yes three a kind of perfection, triangles and circles.
it's all perfect there. except - incommensurability - so crazy! the world does not divided into portions that measure each other. there is number and then there is stuff. mind and matter. logos and the receptacle, remembering Timeaus.

Terra Nostra then is not a simple novel. It is a malfunctioning time tunnel eh, the entrance to a labyrinth of mirrors eh, a hell or purgatory in which all memories and echoes intermingle ... eh eh eh

memories and echoes, though, I do love (or not - make me sad - what is that?). when ~ honest.
associations reminding = all poetry is - Wendell Berry.