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I was born in the year of 1809, Octavio Paz tells us. I was born when Napoleon's horse crossed the Alps, when the Rhine thawed, when all Europe breathed with expectation. I have lived through revolutions and civil wars, through war and peace. And in my lifetime, this has become a world of men without stories.This is how Paz begins his story in The Labyrinth of Solitude in which he retells in lush prose to what it means to be Mexican in the 20th century. Here, Paz is talking of the end of the Mexican Revolution (he lived through that too) and the disillusionment that followed. As he continues to tell us this story, he asks of us;"What am I supposed to be doing in this book of mine? My goal is not to write about myself or my own past, but about all men. It is not what I know or who I am, but what you are."Paz further tells us how his life was shaped. He talks of his childhood in which he lived in "desolate townships on the outskirts of Mexico City" and then moving out to the country with only "a few ranchera records and a few books". The rest of his life was spent traveling, he tells us before he then goes on to tell us;"I am an exile. Nowhere am I at home. Always I feel like a foreigner. I feel like a gringo in the United States, first in the Midwest, where the prairies are endless and agricultural life is dispersed along rutted roads, and later in California where all of life is concentrated along the coast. As for Mexico, I am never there for long...I know too much to be able to love it."Through this book Paz tells us about some of his fellow Mexicans that he knows well; writers, intellectuals and analysts that he feels has shaped him into who he is today. His first story is a tale of a boy named Patricio, a boy who could see the dead, and who would later become an interpreter, an interpreter for the dead. He tells us of his wanting to write about "all men", but that as he writes this book he wants to tell these stories about the people that have shaped him into who he is today. This will be his way as he writes this tale.In which Paz regales us with tales from other Mexicans that have shaped him into who he is today. The first person he talks about is a woman named Magdalena Villasenor, a woman whom at the time was a forty-year-old spinster. He tells us of her fate as a spinster as it is shaped by Mexican society. He tells of Magdalena as she tries to live a life full of "her love of storytelling, her simple pleasures, and the rituals that mark the passage from one stage to another". It is a story of someone who has been on the outside looking in and who through this book becomes a part of Paz. He tells us that her life"is a story that's never been told, yet she is nevertheless an old woman, even if likely no one has ever asked her to tell it".In Magdalena's tale Paz talks of his own notions of Mexicaness, of his own notions of self. eccc085e13
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