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Read Terra Nostra (2003)

Terra Nostra (2003)

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Rating
4.08 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
1564782875 (ISBN13: 9781564782878)
Language
English
Publisher
dalkey archive press

Terra Nostra (2003) - Plot & Excerpts

This was originally published on The Scrying OrbThis book is physically daunting. It’s big. Dense. Heavy. Flipping to a random page reveals a tightly woven blanket of text, tightly packed and in small type. The prose is occasionally impenetrable. It took me a month to finish. Its themes are no less than Time and History and Religion.Terra Nostra follows an alternate history of Spain’s past, with King Philip II (El Senor, Don Felipe!) married to Queen Elizabeth. Sick of war and government, El Senor has dedicated his life to raising a necropolis to the dead where he plans to shut himself away from the world while slowly awaiting death and unity with God. His plan is stymied by a trio of identical youths, born with crosses imprinted on their backs and six toes on each foot. In this version of history, it is one of these youths who discovers the New World and the entire middle section of the book (separated into The Old World, The New World, and The Next World) is his journey and immersion in the myths and religion of the Aztecs.Along the way we meet Don Quixote, Don Juan, view a literal transcript of the first page of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis written and stuffed into a bottle by this universe’s Cervantes analogue. We also hang out in ancient Rome with Tiberius in a scene reminiscent of the Pilate scenes of The Master and Margarita, and no doubt countless literary references I am forgetting or missed. The power of books and the written word — the past conversing with the future — comes up frequently. El Senor only believes what is written, not spoken.The cast is a cadre of terrible, awful people. Murderers intent on genocide, rapists, oppressors of chaotic nature. The way Fuentes handles women is questionable even in this supra-cruel world peopled by the worst of scoundrels. And the way he handles the sole little person is downright deplorable. There is a lot of sex. The sex is weird. Sex with animals, sex with skeletons, sex with god-beings, sex without jaws, sex with the supernaturally elderly, sex with a Frankenstein-like conglomeration of corpse pieces… or did she not actually have sex with that last one but just fantasize about it? The very last scene refuses to disappoint this trend and the reader concludes the book amid bizarre, transformative, cosmic lovemaking.As I mentioned, Time is the central theme of the novel. In Fuentes vision, time is not linear. Everything happening — El Senor building his necropolis, the pillaging of the New World, the apocalypse of 1999 (haha), Emperor Tiberius being a sadistic prick, The Crucifixion, the creation of the world in Aztec mythology — is happening at the same time. Will happened, but has happened, is happening. Multiple universes of slightly different results occurring in tandem. One scholarly character hypothesizes it’s impossible to become a full and integrated personality until you’ve lived several lives in several times and possible worlds.There’s a question that runs through the book: if someone could live life over again, would they change the actions they took, the decisions they made? The negative outlook of the novel announces a resounding No. The New World is still raped and pillaged, destroyed and oppressed even though Don Felipe had a chance to alter it. The Spanish Inquisition is just as terrible. In the Year 2000, things have become even worse. In an effort to reduce overpopulation, countries have turned to depopulating measures that match a ‘national character’ — Mexico brings back the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs, France very rationally kills someone for every someone born. It’s a little silly and very dated. Overpopulation may have been a giant, apocalyptic concern in 1975 when the book was written, but I feel like we’ve moved beyond it as a serious fear in 2014. I hope in 2055, global warming based dystopia is a similarly laughable and outdated sci-fi future trope.Finishing this book I feel like I am climbing, bleary eyed, out of a cave. No, not a cave, a pit. A dank and endless cylinder with stairs spiraling to its interminable depths. I’m crawling out of the mind of Carlos Fuentes and the depravity of Don Felipe and friends. The tone of the book, its self absorbed characters, its physical weight — these are the things that will stay with me, more than any triumph of theme or historic analysis. I liked it, but I’m not even sure I’d recommend it. It’s incredibly overwritten and longer than it should be. I am quite certain several sentences honestly do not mean anything and are complete word-salad nonsense. Yet I am absolutely certain that it will stay with me, long, long after I’ve placed it back on the shelf.

Utch, this was a strange one, and one of those books I really hoped I would have liked more then I actually did. It's certainly ambitious, insanely so, and takes some very interesting liberties with narrative space and time. It's also refreshingly aggressive and non-subtle in it's attack on religion and power in general, and quite entertaining too, at least most of the time. Fuentes furthermore seems to have a great love of the grotesque (bodily mutilations and repulsive sex scenes galore) combined with a very dark and morbid sense of humor. All good, but unfortunately the novel is also far to long and overwritten, with characters constantly breaking out in long circular soliloquies, and endless stretches of some sort of collective stream-of-consciousness. Now, as a fan of McElroy, Pynchon, Vollmann etc. I have no problems in general with long books and/or these sort of narrative tactics, but Fuentes just doesn't pull it off quite convincingly. To make matters worse, he also seems to not really trust the readers ability to follow the complex narrative, and so fills the novel with repetition and reminders, in case one should have forgotten what happened 100 pages ago, which - apart from not helping with the length - felt somewhat condescending to at least this reader.Still: It's not a very hard read, and when it good, it's good, so if you like slightly flawed experiments, and don't mind being a bit bored once in a while, give it a go.

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

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