The book that started my affair with a Mexican nun...

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	• Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz O Las Trampas De La Fe (Obras Completas) Octavio Paz Fondo de Cultura Economica USA, 1994 - 626 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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This is the book to read if you want the real thing

Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate, poet and one of the best writers of essays in the Spanish language, can give people seriously interested in learning about Sor Juana invaluable information in this beautifully researched book. Everything that is really known about her biography (not anachronistic twentieth-century storytelling and fantasy) is here; and, very importantly, authoritative background information on Colonial Mexican history and culture, social organization, religious practices and norms, and reading materials and habits. Sor Juana is a complex woman, a great reader and thinker that has to be understood in context. This book provides this, and also a sensitive and informed reading of her work. It is also a very good read. Modern-day fictional accounts are deceptive and will short-change you. Don't fall for them. This book is the real thing.

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transported in time

I'm not a particular fan of history or biography but couldn't put this book down. For all the information it offers the reader it's an incredibly un-dull read. It paints such a vivid picture of her life that I felt like I was there. Details were always fascinating, never tedious.

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The book that started my affair with a Mexican nun...

Over ten years ago, this book completely changed the course of events in my life for months. Let me explain!: I was wiling away the hours with nothing to do during a 2-week hospital stay in Madrid, going over the notes for my master's thesis about Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, when someone suggested I read this masterpiece about a Baroque Mexican nun to pass the time. At first I thought the suggestion was absurd, hardly a book that would help the time go by quickly, but I gave the book a chance (this Spanish-language version, of course) and soon met Sor Juana Inés, with whom my only previous encounters had been on a Mexican banknote.

Sor Juana Inés was so far ahead of her time that it would have been a miracle for her NOT to have been persecuted and ejected from the society of her times. Octavio Paz (could anything less be expected from such an author) makes her life even more fascinating than it probably was in reality, as he examines her comings and goings from birth to death, or at least as much as can possibly be known, since his study is probably the most thorough that exists. Sor Juana's biography is amazing and caused me to drop my original thesis and change topics entirely. I spent my whole hospital stay engrossed in her tale of love, erudition and ill-fated struggles for equality. Tomes could be written just on her correspondence with all the scholars and thinkers of the day. It is amazing to read how she manages to combine a life in the convent with a life of study, another of cultural activity, a social life rubbing elbows with Mexico's leadership class, and awareness and intellectual relations with countless (male) thinkers of the 17th century.

I can't shower enough praise on this book, which opened up my appetite for knowing more about her. Since then I have read more and more, as well as all of Sor Juana's works, and never get enough, with a special love for her "Response to Sister Filotea de la Cruz," a treatise on the equality of women's mind centuries before such ideas came into vogue. If you want to see what is was like to know that women deserved full equality, to have intelligence beyond comparison and to be forced to use that intelligence with the utmost care so as not to violate strict social norms, and get away with it for years, Sor Juana will be your heroine, as she should be for so many more women in this world who are unfamiliar with her.

This would be a great text for any hispanic literature, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, Mexican history or a wealth of other courses, or just as a text of interest to women and people in general, so that they can get a practical case study in what women like Sor Juana must have suffered for centuries (and maybe even today in many places) when they tried to go beyond the boundaries that church, state and family had set down to keep them in their place.

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Sor Juana displays an extraordinary sweep of imagination and intelligence, and it is many things: a biography, a critical study, a re-creation of an era, a meditation of Mexican history, a dialogue of poet with poet, a reflection on the role of the intellectual in the modern world.

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