The Labyrinth of Solitude
by Octavio Paz
Mexico trying to explain itself to itself.
For you if
you want to understand Mexican identity from the inside — the masks, the fiesta, the wound that won't close
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Paz wrote this in 1950 and it remains the most penetrating dispatch from inside the Mexican psyche ever written. What does it mean to be Mexican? Where does the solitude come from? What is the fiesta actually hiding? He answers in essays so precise and lyrical they read like poetry. Dense, essential, the kind of book that changes the frame through which you see everything that comes after it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
- Themes
- national identity
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
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Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
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