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In Light Of India
For six Octavio Paz served as Mexico's ambassador to India. His experiences there changed his life. Now, in Paz's most personal work of prose to date, he brings his poetic insight and voluminous knowledge to bear on a vast and extraordinary subject: the culture, landscape, and essence of India, a continent and culture that has resonated for millenia. With astonishing clarity, Paz evokes the sounds and sights of Bombay; presents a cogent survey of India's dazzling history and polyglot society; and explores India's art, music and history. The result will draw the reader deeply into a world of astonishing beauty and power.
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Blindness
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.