What do You think about Terra Nostra (2003)?
I don't think I was the right reader for this book, it seems to have settled uneasily within me.I am tempted to say the book is about politics and above all political forms. An alternative and ahistorical Philip II (married to Elizabeth of England) fights to impose his will and Catholic orthodoxy on the heterodox rebels of the Low Countries. The external politics is mirrored in his construction of El Escorial as an embodiment of the Orthodox unity he is trying to impose - however even this mighty fortress proves not to be safe from heterodoxy.The figure of Philip is opposed by three six-figured brothers (among others) one of whom surfaces as a Casanova amongst the nuns serving in El Escorial. But all the opposition within time fails.The idea of opposition is broadened by the Old and New Worlds acting as mirrors to each other. The New World seems to offer to the characters the possibility of something alien to the tradition of Empire than is established in Europe, a tradition that has the Emperor Tiberius at one end and Philip II at the other trying to prevent change, to maintain orthodoxy (broadly envisioned) and by so doing maintaining power.Part of the challenge is overtly political and part through stories. Stories can be transgressive because narratives, we see, shape and form reality. This is demonstrated through the stories that a group of refugees from Spain (including the future Philip incognito) tell to each other. The political challenge is shown failing to overthrow the idea of Empire. Opposition then manifests itself in deviance as with the figure hiding among the nuns of El Escorial who then becomes the prototype of Don Juan. In this way we see how stories create counter narratives that embody resistance to the dominant Imperial power which in Fuentes' take asserts itself ad astra, not just in the political field but in all areas of human life.But even stories, including the one we are being told, can only triumph outside of time and so the end of the novel is set in 20th century Paris and is a moment of revolutionary eschatology. Humanity dies off amidst signs and wonders. The last man merges with the last woman in what might be the union of the Old World and the New and then makes love to itself. The figure of the last man (in this case a six fingered one, naturally) and the last woman might be a sign of how far Fuentes is going, the relative positions of men and women, the narratives we exist within of what men and women are and what each can do are themselves power structures, more immediate to most lives than the political structures exemplified by the figures of Tiberius and Philip II in this novel.It's a big novel and sweeps up a lot of material. A socio-political Arabian Nights, one story flowing into the next. Much of this is rich in allusion with deliberate contrasts and confirmations built into the story (Old World versus New, Philip II is a new Tiberius, each an individual as well as the exemplar of an attitude towards life). My problem is that it started to feel unconvincing, the kind of thing full of surface flash and fizz that is very exciting to read as a teenager but is in retrospect too obvious given the degrees of subtly possible in the novel. On the other hand it would make for a striking opera with ballet sequences. Or there again perhaps I'm simply too puritan and not imbued with the spirit of carnival to be a connoisseur of this novel.
—Jan-Maat
Terra Nostra has the most profound opening paragraph of any book this side of The Bible:Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.and then shortly after there, Fuentes lost me. Or, rather, I got lost. This is a huge cosmic book of dense interwoven prose with at least one line as good as the opening paragraph tucked in the folds of each of its 700+ pages. I wish I had the time to sit at it like an eager undergrad, newly acclimated to putting a highlighter to a weathered copy weighing down my backpack, extracting things-to-quote from its thicket, desecrating a weathered copy with my love and devotion, chuckling to myself openly and brazenly about "Fuentes", forlornly wishing there was that one someone with whom to share that one line I'd found that day, and if that person found the line as profound as I, we would be soulmates. I am not that eager undergrad anymore, and I know the bonds of a good line are short-lived in the the actual terra nostra. The actual terra nostra is filled to capacity with good lines, spilling over the edge, likely forming the Abyss we furtively skirt with their radiating heat. And I have a soulmate who has her own well-sharpened sense of literature. And I don't have the time nor really the inclination to clear my calendar to make the time that this book deserves. So I will put this one aside, kidding myself to think I am richer for having spend a quick weekend in Fuentes' world, and nurse daydreams that I will one day return for a longer visit.
—Alex V.
To be truly symbolic I should have finished this book the day I fly out of south america, but I was never much for symbols. One of those novels that feel like a brick and try to encompass the entire world in its great shambling immensity, I had very mixed feelings about terra nostra. As other reviewers have said there are plenty of dazzling sentences in here, the attempt to unify aztec theology, christian myth, and famous spanish literature in one whole is sufficiently mind blowing, and the fact that it eventually settles down to have a kind of plot was most appreciated. At the same time, much of the first section of the novel is just kind of boring and took me endless months to get through, and a lot of the multiplicity of voices and characters felt like padding instead of being necessary to the artistic aims of the work. I also never fell in love with the novel like I have for those of Garcia Marquez, Bolano, or other great dense Latin American novels. So, I think for the right reader this could be something that they really love, for me I can respect it without really recommending it.
—Smoothw
