Sefchovich, Sara. Pais de mentiras; la distancia entre el discurso y la realidad en la cultura mexicana. Mexico, D.F.: Oceano, 2008. 391 pp. ISBN 978-607-400-043-6 Mexico is a country with a long tradition of self-analysis. While many Latin American present attempts to engage in a definition of the national essence and tho chart particular idiosyncrasies, it would seem that Mexico has been particularly rich in this intellectual undertaking. Other Latin American countries have major writers who are known for their poetry or their fiction, including those that have received the Nobel Prize. Only in Mexico has a Nobel prize gone to someone who, in addition to his outstanding poetic contributions, is also the author of a major essay of national identity: the 1990 Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz, whose Laberinto de la soledad (1950) remains a key intellectual document in the history of Mexican and Latin American culture, no matter how much it my now require intense contestational readings.
