SOURCE: A review of The House on the Lagoon, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, Summer, 1996, pp. 690–91.

In the following review, Stavans characterizes The House on the Lagoon in the magic realism mode of Latin-American literature, but also praises Ferré's efforts to make her fictional world accessible to English-speaking readers. This essay is a slightly revised version of Stavans' review in Nation (20 November 1995).

Up until the nineties, Rosario Ferré's career developed mainly on the Spanish-language front. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1942 and educated at Manhattanville College and the University of Maryland, where she received her Ph.D., she is first and foremost a Latin American femme de lettres—baroque, portentous, savvy, erudite. This might sound anachronistic in light of her most recent novel, The House on the Lagoon, a family saga of epic proportions about European immigrants and mulatto servants which, by all accounts, was written...