Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination, and : Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (review)

Both of these books are generally well-written and interesting studies in the literature, politics, and history of Latin America. Though eclectic, they have a few unifying themes. Stavans is fascinated by borderlands of all kinds, from the contested territory between nations to the intersections between academic disciplines. A Mexican of Central European descent now teaching at Amherst College, Stavans is especially interested in the writings of people who live between two or more different cultures. Of greatest interest to historians are Stavans's explorations of the frontier between literature and history.

At their best, these books offer insightful new readings of the ways in which literature has shaped the history of Latin America, from the moment Columbus read Marco Polo to the years Gabriel García Márquez has spent as an informal advisor to Fidel Castro. Nevertheless, the essays that make up these books are uneven in quality and give annoyance as often as they give pleasure. Stavans is an intelligent and learned writer, but not a very careful one, and the many errors of fact and style found in these books combine with Stavans's rash judgments and careless analyses to distract the reader from their merits.

Art and Anger is a collection of essays mostly about literature and politics in Latin America. Some are intended to introduce lesser-known writers, such as Felipe Alfau, Ricardo Piglia, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique, to a North American audience. Others reassess the titans of Latin American letters, such as Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Recurring themes of these essays include translation, political mythology, sexual politics, and exile.

Stavans introduces several of these themes in the first essay, "Letter to a German Friend," in which Stavans reflects on his own family's history in Central Europe and the reverberations of the Holocaust in his life. By presenting these reflections as an elegantly written letter, Stavans announces his interest in the ways literature can spin meaning from the stuff of oppression and exile.

The subsequent essay explores the lives of Mario Vargas Llosa and Abimael Guzmán. Born in the same state in southern Peru, these two men followed opposed but parallel paths. One moved in the highest realms of cultural and political power, writing fine novels and running an ill-fated presidential campaign. The other scribbled fiery tracts and dragged his country into a quagmire of bloodshed as leader of the Shining Path guerilla army. Stavans weaves these two narratives together to form a portrait of a deeply divided Peru.

Other essays in the book are less well controlled. Stavans's essays on Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez rely more heavily on the rhetoric of praise and condemnation than on close reading and critical thought. In both essays, Stavans does sometimes show the subtlety his subjects deserve. His discussion of the influence of cinema on García Márquez's fiction offers some fascinating insights on the Colombian writer's penchant for vivid imagery and tightly controlled story lines. Stavans offers a similarly shrewd analysis of Paz's vast ego, exploring the ways in which Paz often confused the movements of his own troubled soul with the political upheavals of the world at large.

But in both these essays, empty praise and personal attacks distract from the main arguments. Stavans calls Paz a "renaissance homme de lettres" and a "cultural demigod" at one moment, then later accuses him of being a "dilettante" and a "marionette" of the PRI. In like fashion, Stavans opens the essay "The Master of Aracataca" by declaring that García Márquez "reinvented Latin America." But he...