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Summary
Summary
In this series of essays Paz explores the intimate connection between sex, eroticism, and love in literature throughout the ages. Rich in scope, The Double Flame examines everything from taboo to repression, Carnival to Lent, Sade to Freud, original sin to artificial intelligence. "Brimming with insight, thoughtfulness, and sincerity" (Kirkus Reviews). Translated by Helen Lane.
Author Notes
Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City, Mexico on March 31, 1914. In 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller. In 1943, he travelled to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry. He entered the Mexican diplomatic service in 1945 and was sent to France then India. In 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's suppression of the student demonstrations during the Olympic Games in Mexico.
He was a poet and an essayist. His works include The Labyrinth of Solitude, The Grammarian Monkey, East Slope, and The Other Mexico. He received numerous awards including the Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He also worked as an editor and publisher. He founded two magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural and Vuelta. He died of cancer on April 19, 1998.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a gem of a book, Mexican poet, critic and essayist Paz explores the boundaries between love, sex and eros. He defines eroticism as sexuality transfigured by the imagination, and romantic love as a desire for completeness manifested as a mysterious attraction toward a single person. The Nobel laureate moves easily in these erudite, reflective essays through Plato, Sappho, Provençal love poetry, Dante, Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, Gnostic and Taoist erotic practices, Proust, Joyce, Freud, Breton and Lawrence. He argues that love, in the West, is an exercise in freedom, a creative and subversive sentiment, whereas in the East love has been conceived within a religious tradition. Modern sexual freedom, according to Paz, has become a narcissistic pursuit, accompanied by the erosion of family and personal values. Rejecting comparisons between the human mind and the computer, he calls for a dialogue between science and philosophy that restores the centrality of love and the soul. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The Nobel laureate takes some impressive turns through literary and social history as he pleads for a new eroticism and a new humanity. In the authoritative but gentle voice of a mature literary figure who knows his stuff, Paz (The Other Voice, 1991, etc.) elucidates the ways in which societies--mainly Western, but some Asian--have constructed eroticism using the raw material of sex. From ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the Cold War to the present, he shows how notions of love, romance, and the erotic have changed. Though at times this long historical account bogs down in the details of specific writers and poems, Paz does an admirable job of maintaining interest by drawing comparisons and restating premises. The aim here is more than providing a lesson in literary history. Paz's real purpose is to come around to the present with the message that eroticism and love must change now as they have changed throughout history. Capitalism, he charges, has made of the body not just a commodity--that, he shows, has been done from time immemorial--but a marketing tool, ``turn[ing] Eros into an employee of Mammon.'' Stripped of its sacredness, the modern body is a soulless collection of functions and activities, says Paz. He finds hope, though, in the voices of scientists who believe they have reached the limits of their ability to explain the world and in those sublime moments when we discover ``the unity of life'' in the carnal embrace. Ultimately, Paz can only plead for companions willing to seek out a glimpse of the ``pure vitality'' that is love, but he does so elegantly. Brimming with insight, thoughtfulness, and sincerity, Paz's essays are a poetic road map to the past, present, and future of love.
Library Journal Review
Nobel Laureate Paz comments on love and sex in works ranging from Plato's Symposium to James Joyce's Ulysses. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
