With Octavio Paz the perfect triangle of twentieth-century Mexican literature closes, because next to it we find Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes. On many occasions it happens that literature results in a kind of generational synergy. From the incomparable historical coincidence in the lives of Cervantes y Shakespeare, the contemporary has been a fact that has been repeated on various occasions.
And while the example of the two great European geniuses represents the summit of this synergy of letters, the triangle temporarily coinciding at its vertices between Rulfo, Paz and Fuentes also has its substance. Because the three represent similar literary peaks from Mexico for the set of Hispanic and world letters of the twentieth century. Known are the social and political disagreements between Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, but these are details that do not overshadow the creative scope of both and the final enrichment of the strictly literary.
But focusing on Octavio Paz, the most illustrious of the three, insofar as he ended up being recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, his creative capacity encompassed poetry and prose with the same solvency, garnering praise and gaining readers of one genre or another. thanks to its balance between aesthetics and background.
Top 3 best books by Octavio Paz
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Modernity, that ideal raised since the twentieth century, builds horizons but at the same time can destroy the most intimate areas of the human being. Undoubtedly a labyrinth of estrangement between what it means to move forward and what it can mean to feel displaced, parked, alienated.
Deciphering that modernity through literature is precisely accompanying that feeling of constant evolution from the innermost, from the essentially human. And this is how criticism is born, the balance.
A volume of essays with overtones of an essential novel, with images that rescue from the Mexican imagination everything that carries the notion of the defeat of the individual with the excuse of the circumstantial.
A book that aimed to compile the Mexican idiosyncrasy but ended up becoming a sociological essay on everything human reflected in that casuistry of the author's homeland.
The double flame
The writer always has that pending book, that desired writing but never committed. And perhaps it is because the moment to write it is when the road is practically covered.
A book about love written shortly before his death, when reconstructing the concept is an exercise of experience and intellectuality, far from the passions of youth. What comes first, sex, eroticism or love? What is separable or indivisible in this triumvirate of our emotions? The first drive is sex, there is no doubt, as a nature that seeks its continuity.
Reason adorns sex with eroticism, but perhaps no less than some animal species in its instinctive courtship. Love is what remains, what may or may not result, what makes that flame change color to need or feeling.
The bow and the lyre
Let's talk about poetry, let's do prose to try to understand the most brilliant manifestation that the word offers: the poem. For those of us who are not much of the lyrical it can be a great enjoyment to find this essay by a masterful writer with a poetic facet no less brilliant.
The laymen of poetry on many occasions try to find that reading taste of sonnets and rhymes by Neruda, Loca or Baudelaire, but perhaps a little more introspection is needed, an access to the exact point at which that inner glory of what is reached is achieved. lyrical.
The keys may be in this book that analyzes poetry, that brings us closer to the course of lyrical inspiration, that explains how the brevity of the most accurate words can fill the intellect and soul of any person.
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