Maps have been invaluable throughout Canada's history. They promised fame and fortune to early merchant-adventurers and guided army commanders. They legitimized a politician's dominion and allowed businessmen to stake new claims. And they helped ordinary citizens build communities.

Terra Nostra is one of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction. Concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations, Fuentes's great novel is, indeed, that rare creation--the total work of art. Magnificently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Terra Nostra is, as Milan Kundera says in his afterword, "the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say."

"Grounding his study on the work of Derrida and Bataille, Abeyta focuses on the theme of the gift in Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra. Analyzing how gift giving, excess, expenditure, sacrifice, and exchange shape the novel, he reveals its relevance to current discussions about the relationship between art and the gift"--Provided by publisher.

Rather than treating the Jewish Kabbalah as merely one heretical doctrine among others in Fuente's novel Tera nostra, Penn (Spanish, U. of Leicester) argues that examining its presence is vital for understanding both the theme and style. He draws on 20th-century scholarship showing links between Jewish mysticism and theories of history and textuality, and literary implementations of the Kabbalah by writers who significantly influenced Fuentes such as Alego Carpentier and Jorge Luis Borges. His discusses the Kabbalistic concept of language and its operation in the novel, Celestina as metaphysical woman, Kabbalistic time, and a novelistic historiography. The text is double spaced. Annotation 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).