Word: varela
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Baltasar Bustos, Manuel Varela and Xavier Dorrego frequent the cafes of Buenos Aires. They're in love with Rousseau, Diderot, clocks and, like all selfrespecting romantics, the prospect of Latin American democracy. In Carlos Fuentes' The Campaign, Varela reminisces 10 years later...
...Varela's remembrance echoes Fuentes's central point. The heroes of his novel, The Campaign, want to own time and control history. Their proprietory quest-mythologized through Baltasar's 15 year journey-is intellectual and material, self-serving in its revolutionary selflessness...
...Varela narrates the novel, and his appropriation of Baltasar's adventures signals his assertion of historical ownership. Having risen to power surrounded by the comforts of his publishing business and his favorite fashionable haunts, Varela secretly records an epic version of Baltasar's experience as a revolutionary warrior. His source is his friend's correspondence-which, incidentally, is not reproduced in the text. Varela presents speculative history as documented fact, and Fuentes's reader may begin to question the very notion of historical truth...
Fuentes also displays his long-recognized penchant for experimental writing. The Campaign is an extraordinarily complex book, which operates on a number of narrative levels and employs a variety of expository styles. Varela's description of the Citizens' obsession with clocks is typical of Fuentes's beautiful prose, which transmutes fluidly from dialogue to description to polemic, but always operates within its broader thematic program...
Finally, some minorities don't even have a choice about whether to join a group. Manuel S. Varela '94 was born in Spain. At Harvard, he found organizations for Mexican-Americans (RAZA) and Puerto Ricans (La Organizacion), but not for students from Spain. "To some extent I was turned off by that," Varela says, and as a consequence, he "didn't really get involved" in any Hispanic groups...