Rev. of El Fracaso del Mestizo

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writers who knew him) and she is at her best in the textual and cultural analysis of Rayuela and Libro de Manuel. There are, however, some weak links and omissions that would have enriched her argument and contributed depth to the book. Her discussion on ideology is slim (where is Althusser?); she seems to think Mario Golobof ’s biography is Cortázar’s official biography (Miguel Herráez’s Cortázar. El otro lado de las cosas is by far the most complete) and her bibliography is inexplicably missing Andrés Avellaneda’s El habla de la ideología. Modos de réplica literaria en la Argentina contemporánea, in addition to Susana Gómez’s book on Cortázar and the Cuban revolution, and other works. At the same time, it lists critics who obviously did not understand Cortázar’s complex trajectory (Guinsberg) or offer a quite tautological view of the relationship between Cortázar and politics (Standish). Orloff misreads—because she accepts too readily writers’ views—what she sees as the “unquestioned intellectual aloofness with which Cortázar seems to be repeatedly dismissed within Argentinian literary and academic circles” (200). It is indeed because Cortázar is valued and discussed—by polar opposites such as César Aira and Piglia, by the younger generation of writers—that he is considered a great writer still. Nevertheless, Orloff succeeds in re-igniting the debate on Cortázar’s works in relation to his politics, and that is no small feat. Pablo Brescia

University of South Florida

Palou, Pedro Ángel. El fracaso del mestizo. México: Ariel, 2014. 213 pp. El fracaso del mestizo studies the rise and fall of the Modern Mexican State through the lens of the mestizo and mestizaje. Pedro Palou acknowledges these concepts as Mexico’s master signifier and unifier after the end of the Revolution in 1917. This ground-breaking work accompanies his earlier La culpa de México, la invención de un país entre dos guerras. In his new work, Palou offers a careful intellectual history of Mexico grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concept of the habitus, that is, the values and expectations acquired through everyday life, which depend on history and memory. Thus for Palou, the Mexican habitus is created and recreated through José Vasconcelos’s and others’ mythical and mystical interpretations of mestizaje. El fracaso del mestizo examines how literature and film reproduce this myth, which has been forcibly remembered in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. The book, Palou’s first written from his academic position in the US, examines Mexico from an outside perspective that remains deeply ingrained in Mexico’s cultural and academic milieu. El fracaso del mestizo’s greatest strength is that it proposes a post-identity politics for Mexico while engaging with theories of identity, gender, sexuality and race. The book begins by accepting the importance of this problematic master signifier, and continuing a discussion begun by critics such as Joshua Lund and Estele Tarica, whose works have enhanced the study of mestizaje and the Mexican State in significant ways.

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Palou’s essential contribution is rereading mestizaje in the cultural practices of literature and film as both an aesthetic goal for the Mexican phenotype and as a defining feature of Mexican State policy. It adopts a thematic rather than strictly chronological approach to survey Mexican history and culture, which succeeds only because it is hyperaware of history. El fracaso del mestizo employs a psychoanalytic framework and dialogues with Slavoj Žižek’s attention to the spectral and haunting elements of the Lacanian real and with Mari Ruti’s understanding of singularity as a self that comes into being in response to this same reality. This innovative theoretical approach leads to fresh readings of canonical texts and films by authors and directors such as José Revueltas, Guillermo Fadanelli and Luis Buñuel. Each chapter pairs literary works and cinematic counterparts, either a novel and its adaptation to the screen or a film with strong intertextual links to a novel. El fracaso del mestizo’s introductory “Obertura” and concluding “Coda” allude to its musical style and suggestively imply that Mexico could be a symphony instead of a disaster. The introduction reviews multiple historical contributions to the concept of mestizaje, including Manuel Gamio, Moisés Sáenz, Octavio Paz, Claudio Lomnitz, as well as Vasconcelos. The book’s musicality further comes to light in multiple chapters that return to one another in a series of narrative asides. The first chapter pairs Federico Gamboa’s Santa and Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua with analyses of their cinematic versions. It explains Santa’s popularity, and relates it to the myth of the Malinche and Hernán Cortés. The chapter then explains how the film changes the novel, particularly as it tames the blind brothel keeper, Hipólito. For Palou, these fatherless novels and films echo how the Revolution killed the national father, pre-Revolutionary dictator Porfirio Díaz. The second chapter compares Luis Buñuel’s documentary Los olvidados to Revueltas’s novel El luto humano. Palou masterfully considers incredible amounts of information without being dense, boring or stilted. He explains that in Los olvidados, the myth of the revolutionary mestizo has been: “traicionado y no puede lograrse porque ese proyecto instala al mestizo mismo como una especie de esclavo asalariado” (69). Palou points out that in Buñuel’s work, the mestizo is free to live as long as this life is invisible; he adds that in Revueltas’s novel, these invisible characters become allegories and symbols for the impossibility of the mestizo. The subsequent chapters deal with Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán and their cinematic adaptations. Palou marries political theory with the extensive critical tradition that deals with both novels and close textual engagement. He draws on Žižek’s understanding of the phantasmatic elements of reality to analyze what he considers to be the absent zombie father in the film version of Pedro Páramo. He observes that the mestizo becomes a bastard child of a State that takes care of this child only to use it at a later date. In a unique reading of the feminine and indigenous elements in Castellanos’s work, Palou posits that Ruti’s singularity could undo mestizaje. This mestizaje, then, in his view, becomes a form of cannibalism that incorporates indigenous people only as it consumes them. The book then compares Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente and José Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto to the films Los caifanes and El castillo de la pureza, whose screenplays were written by Fuentes and Pacheco. Palou

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discusses the origins of the work caifán without entering into significant, yet, for his work, irrelevant, discussions of Chicano identity. El fracaso del mestizo then comments on Mexico’s lack of electoral democracy and unavailable resources for confronting a corrupt electoral system by studying González Iñárritu’s film Amores perros and Guillermo Fadanelli’s novel Lodo. Through Fadanelli’s mud, we realize that democracy is not about the population governing itself, but should be about the population choosing or rejecting its governors. The final chapter compares Mario Bellatín’s Los perros héroes and Carlos Reygadas’s Japón, and explores what it calls a post-identity view of Mexico and Mexican studies. Each chapter hints at this post-identity, but even in the “Coda,” we are never given to understand exactly what it means. The other debility of El fracaso del mestizo is that it has no index. The absent index could, however, haunt the reader accustomed to being spoon-fed information, which would encourage further study. It could also be that Palou’s style, so poetic that we categorize it as creative nonfiction for an academic audience, hints that there will be no objective path for Mexico’s future. The lyric prose outlines what the country could, and at this moment, refuses, to be. El fracaso del mestizo is an invaluable contribution to Mexican studies and the broader fields of race, identity and psychoanalytic approaches to literature. As we read and reread Palou’s work, in the same way that he has read and reread Mexican history in his academic and literary writing, we realize this work redefines the field of Mexican studies. It is now up to us to accept Palou’s call for a post-identity approach, because, as he states, “La tarea postidentitaria sigue pendiente y es el acto político más urgente” (37). We look forward to the English translation. Rebecca Janzen

Bluffton University

Robinson, Lorna. Gabriel García Márquez and Ovid: Magical and Monstrous Realities. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, New York: Tamesis 2013. 188 pp. It is a pleasure to see studies of magical realism expand from largely general to more specific discussions, such as Robinson’s, which presents many insightful comparisons regarding fictional arts and cultural backgrounds in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Robinson proceeds well beyond Ovidian and other classical influences and intertextualities in García Márquez’s work in good ways, in chapters devoted to both formal and cultural comparisons: 1) “Telling Tales”; 2) “Points of View”; 3) “Fertile Ground”; 4) “More than Words Can Say,” the first two and the fourth discussing narrative techniques, the third cultural backgrounds. Thus this is an ideal comparative study, an unexpected and hence imaginative juxtaposition of two not obviously related texts, which teaches us something illuminating about both of them and about the common link between them—in this case magical realism. Furthermore, Robinson’s contention that it can be useful to apply a modern term to an ancient text, “using García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad as a prism