The labyrinth of solitude: Life and thought in Mexico

‘The important thing is to go out, open a way, get drunk on noise, people, colours. Mexico is celebrating a fiesta …’

And these fiesta days, writes Octavio Paz, in their brief explosive intimacy are the reverse of Mexican everyday silence, gloom and jealousy [sic] guarded solitude. In nine remarkable essays on his country’s history and psyche, he diagnoses the Mexican’s illness as a starved inability to transcend that solitude and surrender up to anything or anybody, work or love. ‘Man spies on himself’, says Paz, opening his book out into a meditation on mankind.

As Mexico’s finest living poet, he is among the handful of world writers intellectually rich enough, radical and humane enough to make generalizations in a way that is inspiring rather than simply depressing. His book should be read by everybody specifically interested in Mexican life, but also by everyone else. For in Paz’s MExico, you will find yourself.