Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction by Naomi Lindstrom (review)

194Rocky Mountain Review initial chapter, sets the stage for the rest of his book. Lavater, the Neo-platonic visionary, is able to offer an alienated and isolated public a utopian solution , i.e. a powerful sense of cohesion and community not yet afforded by political and social reality. He is the charismatic leader or Kraftmensch who expresses the beliefs and aspirations of the people and who finds his reflection in such problematic literary figures as Werther, Faust, Götz, and Karl Moor. But what can explain the popularity of these impatient visionaries who, in the name of personal morality, trample on social conventions and are exonerated ? Why does the audience identify with such "immoral" characters for whom the end apparently justifies the means? The inordinate success of Die Räuber, for example, can be traced back, according to Leidner, to Schiller's ability to express the pent-up frustrations of the middle-class audience and with their deep-seated emotional and intellectual needs for a sense of national unity. In other words, authors such as Schiller, Goethe, and Klinger provide aesthetic anticipation, inspiration, and compensation for a nation state that would not become reality for another hundred years, whereas the modernistic plays of Lenz that are treated in the final chapter reflect the reality ofthe times without any attempts at embellishment. The constant in all these works, however, is a desire for nationhood. While one may disagree with Leidnei^s interpretation of the June 16, 1771, letter in Werther and with his ahistorical analogy between the medieval ministeriales and the eighteenth-century middle class, his general argumentation and insights into the meta-language of the texts and the functions of style in Lavater Eind Lenz are intellectually most stimulating. As an original and sophisticated piece of scholarship, this elegantly written book belongs in all academic libraries and will be of interest to teachers and anyone else specializing in the Sturm und Drang period. JOHN ALEXANDER Arizona State University NAOMI LINDSTROM. Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. 256 p. With the growing interest in Spanish American literature demonstrated by the English-speaking world, i.e., witness the recent spectacular success of the book Like Water For Chocolate (in addition to the film version), Naomi Lindstrom has written a timely and comprehensive study, covering major literary currents and fiction writers of this century, that will go far in providing non-Spanish speakers with a basic understanding of the subject. The main purpose of the book is to equip the non-speciEdist with the basics about Latin America's most significant writers—from turn-of-the century writers such as Rubén Darío and Leopoldo Lugones to the contemporary Book Reviews195 authors Rigoberta Menchu and Elena Poniatowska—as well as to spotlight certain writers who, according to Lindstrom, merit additional recognition. In that span of time, Lindstrom covers much territory, but, in the main, she focuses on the most undisputedly great writers of the times and chooses a particular work or two of each writer to explain their special narrative and thematic attributes. In keeping with the projected audience, Lindstrom mainly refers to works that have already been translated into English. Such a reliance on English translations fits perfectly within the scope of the study and corresponds to the welcomed importance Lindstrom gives to literary translation, without which her book would have reduced interest. In structuring her study, Naomi Lindstrom has set parameters other than those of a chronological, country by country, thematic focus. While the six chapters of the book are based on the major twenty-to-thirty-yeEtr periods that delineate significant changes in narrative theme and form, Lindstrom's study attempts to look at writers who fall into one of two camps, those writing from an estheticist vein of literary innovation and those who are mEiinly social realists. By the time Lindstrom reaches the last period, which she calls the Postboom and explains vis-à-vis other terms, i.e., Postmodernism, she has shown how a blending process has taken place and proves her hypothesis "that formally innovative fiction, even narratives with a strong mythic and fantastic strain, can serve as a medium of social...