The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another by Ilan Stavans
Irving Malin

Ilan Stavans, ed. Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another. Duke Univ. Press, 1999. 326 pp. Paper: $17.95.

Stavans uses an epigraph from Eugene O’Neill: “Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.” He then begins his introduction with this sentence: “This is a book about neighbors: not about who our neighbors are but about who we imagine them to be.” Thus he alerts us to the fact that although he offers “South Reading North” and “North Reading South” as the two sections of his volume, he wants us to see that writers are, in effect, “vampires”—they (we) read other writers for their (our) own nourishment.

Borges quotes from the notebooks of Hawthorne: “Two persons to be expecting some occurrence, and watching for the two principal actors in it, and to find that occurrence is even then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.” It is , of course, appropriate that Borges is intrigued by this entry and the story of “Wakefield”; he writes obsessively about solitude, mirrors, and doubles.

I have selected just one chapter to offer my occult interest. If you are able to read me “correctly,” you will see that I have selected an author who reflects my perversities. All criticism is, if you will, veiled autobiography. Boundaries blur—I can’t be “objective”; I’m not sure about geography (North and South America), but I see that Stavans also asserts that “imprisoned in each of us is another self—the mismatched I, the bordered yo and je and ich . . . signaling to be let out.”

This wonderfully complex volume compels us to think about linguistic borders, narcissistic reading, and selfish reflections. I salute Stavans; he recognizes that we “bridge” word and world. [Irving Malin]