Publisher's Weekly
Here is Fuentes describing Prague: ''There is no city more beautiful in Europe . . . its opulence and its sadness consume themselves in a wedding of stone and river.'' This Mexican novelist (Terra Nostra, A Change of Skin) turns out beautifully written essays in a musical, ever-shifting voice that registers his forays as ''a wanderer in search of perspective.'' Dense pieces analyze Luis Bunuel's cinema of desire, Cervantes's Don Quixote, the ''space-time continuum'' of Diderot's novels, the sense of absence in Gogol and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's dark vision of Latin American history as cruel epic. In two revealing autobiographical essays, Fuentes hops from Washington, D.C., to Chile to Paris in quest of his literary mission. A meeting with novelist Milan Kundera, ''the other K of Czechoslovakia'' (a reference to Kafka), sparks Fuentes's thoughts on how to fight injustice without creating further injustice.

Library Journal
This is a feast of ideas on a wide variety of subjects that include Gogol, Kundera, and Diderot as well as the Hispanic authors one might expectCervantes, Borges, and Garcia Marquez among them. Fuentes ranges from the cinema of his friend Bunuel, which he characterizes as one vast metaphor on the triumphs and defeats of people being with people, to his experiences as a diplomat's son in Washington, D.C. He recalls marveling at our boundless energy and innocence of military defeat. On Nicaragua, he pointedly asks why America is so impatient with a few years of Sandinismo when it was so tolerant of 45 years of Somocismo. Indeed, the wisdom that Fuentes proffers on the current political situation in Latin America is alone worth the price of the book. Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.