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Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 289 Goytisolo, Medina argues, is aware of his incapacity to get rid of the haunting familiar ghosts, of his (and his generation) condemnation to deal with an arrested childhood; that is why he will turn his entire narrative project into a "childish perversion" of its very constitutive sacrificial logic. In analyzing Sauras and Chávarri's films, Medina's critical narrative finds the clearest instance of the fetishistic economy: the representation of the children toying with/acting out the imaginary death of the father. He will read those films as figurations of a parricide that can only supplement the historical fact that Franco died of a natural death. In reading those films, moreover, Medina brings together his two most sustained metaphors: theater and emptiness. Specially convincing is his use of the Benjaminian allegorical ruins in order to read Sauras CrÃ-a cuervos as a self-conscious exploration of the very limits of allegory as a means of political transparency. Also at the limits of the "family romance ," Medina will identify the poetry of Leopoldo MarÃ-a Panero as a textual body that ends up achieving "una emancipación furiosamente antiedÃ-pica" (24) by means of the most paradoxical of figurative alliances: the one with his Francoist father, the "national poet," Leopoldo Panero. The book closes with an extremely interesting epilogue where Alberto Medina puts to political use judge Garzon's intervention in New York University on the occasion of being invited by the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade on April 20,2000. Judge Garzón's legal actions against Chile's dictator , general Augusto Pinochet, have been mostly read as the ultimate example of the international consolidation of the Spanish transition to democracy . Medina sees it, however, as an extension or a supplement of the Spanish transition, a kind of exterior and a posteriori effort to cope with Spain's failure to bring Franco, his own dictator, to justice . In Medina's view, this "global justice," in the case of Spain and Pinochet, betrays rhe historical remnants of the colonial logic, which was a constitutive part of the European project of modernity and, in the Francoist model, constituted die backbone of Spain's neo-imperialistic nostalgia. In a peculiar philosophical twist, Medina links die abstract universality of the "categorical imperative," as described by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, with the Freudian reading that interprers Kant's universality as a displacement of the self and the inscription of a voluntary forgetfulness. In this way, Medina argues, Pinochet's trial becomes both an attempt to recover the Kantian foundational fiction and to displace Spain's own traumatic history onto someone else's historical trauma. It is in this neo-colonial and asymmetrical appropriation that Medina sees the perpetuation of the Other's possession of the Self, the "theater of possession" that his insightful analysis has so clearly described as the pervasive model of the Spanish transition. Jaume Marti-Oiivella University of New Hampshire En esto creo Seix Barrai, 2002 By Carlos Fuentes In the closing section of his new book, Carlos Fuentes recalls a chance encounter with Thomas Mann in Zurich in the summer of 1950. The great German author inspired considerable awe in the young Fuentes, not least for the "actividad incesante, como si la edad y la fatiga no contasen " in which Mann continued to engage well into his seventies. There is something similarly impressive about Fuentes's own productivity as he approaches his seventy-fifth birthday. The remarkable pace at which he has continued to publish new works over the last few years is no doubt part of an effort to remain in the public eye. In En esto creo, one observes considerable repackaging of previously published materials and frequent use of the technique of self-quotation. Yet Fuentes's own incessant activity is also the sign of an undiminished desire to continue exploring new literary ground. In En esto creo, the novelty resides mostly in the book's autobiographical dimension. En esto creo consists of forty-one short essays, with titles arranged in alphabetical order, from "Amistad" to "Zurich," in which Fuentes sets forth his credo as a person and...

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