Picks of the Week
The Labyrinth of Solitude : The Other Mexico, Return to the Labrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Urgeby Octavio PazPaperback / Published 1985 Labyrinth of Solitude was the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for Octavio Paz. "Labyrinth," published in 1950, described Mexican history as a search "for our own selves, deformed or masked by strange institutions," Paz said. It was the effects of the blending of Spanish and Indian culture that he felt made Mexico what it is today. Our Price: $11.16 ~ Read more about this title... |
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El Laberinto de la Soledad/Postdata/Vuelta a El Laberinto de la Soledad/Labyrinth of Solitude/the Other Mexico/Return to the Labyrinth of Solitudeby Octavio PazPaperback Published 1995 Our Price: $12.76 ~
Published by New Directions Publication date: April 1991 List: $21.95 Our Price: $17.56 ~ |
Octavio Paz, who died this week at the age of 84, was born in Mexico City in 1914. His father was secretary to Emiliano Zapata, but when the peasant revolutionary was murdered in 1917, the family temporarily left Mexico for Los Angeles. After returning to Mexico, Paz published his first poem at the age of 16. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was impressed with his work, and suggested he go in 1937 to the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Valencia, Spain. Paz stayed in Spain for a while, and volunteered to fight against the rightist Franco's forces in the civil war there. Instead he was sent back to Mexico to publicize the Spanish Republican cause. He was recruited by a diplomat, who liked his writing, into the Mexican diplomatic corps, and saw service in France, Japan, and the U.S., eventually rising to become ambassador to India. He resigned that post as a protest against his government after the army massacred leftist students in Mexico City in 1968. But he had disagreements with the left, criticizing Fidel Castro of Cuba and the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. In 1982, Paz won the Miguel Cervantes Prize, Spain's most prestigious literary award. In 1987, he received the T.S. Eliot Award in Chicago. Three years later, Octavio Paz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature "for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity." |
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