SOURCE: “Horse-Trading in Female Ecstasy” in Nation, Vol. 243, No. 3, August 2–9, 1986, pp. 83–4.

In the following review, Solomon draws comparisons between ecstasy and pain in Dear Diego.

To appreciate what the gifted Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska is up to in her extraordinary novella, Dear Diego, it helps to know an earlier classic, Ifegenia: The Diary of a Young Girl Who Was Bored, written in the early 1920s by the Venezuelan novelist Teresa de la Parra. In Ifegenia, which has never been translated into English, de la Parra examines the psychological and sensual state of a liberated Venezuelan woman just after her return from post-World War I Paris. Although Paris in the 1920s was full of North Americans, European culture didn't dominate them in quite the same way it did Latin American expatriates. In addition to the tango, wealthy Argentineans transported their cows to France so they could drink milk from...