The publishing house cuadernos americanos has just released a good book, El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], written by a Mexican author who is already known as a good poet and who now makes his debut as a critic and essayist. The book gives us more than the title promises: it contains the solitude necessary for thinking, but the thoughts are applied to the life and history of the Mexican nation. Octavio Paz, the author, comes from an intellectual lineage: his father was an opposition journalist who became a Zapatista revolutionary—a man of action and ideas, who, in turn, inherited the most salient traits of his own father, Don Irineo Paz, Octavio's grandfather.