Terra Nostra exploits every possibility in the language to make a truly memorable denunciation of the Hispanity symbolized by the Inquisition, the rape of the New World, the Valley of the Fallen and the Escorial palace, the plunder of Flanders, Philip, Franco and their Latin American inheritors. The central theme is, in fact, how a Roman culture pledged to a murderous unity of faith and obedience has waged war on the notions of diversity and fertility. Caught in a sterile dualism—right/wrong, good/evil, God/Devil—Hispanity, to use the novel's curious language, has failed to come to terms with the unity in harmony symbolized by the number Three, a cabalistic emblem Fuentes uses to express a trinity of life in potential which Imperial Spain has everywhere conspired to destroy….

Only knowledge of what could have been can release us from history's repetitiveness: the fantasy in the...