As its title makes clear, wonder and exile are the central themes of Alex Nava's exploration of the historical legacy of the baroque. In Nava's conceptualization, wonder is primarily identified with the unexplainable, the impossible real understood as a form of absence in our systems of knowledge, while exile refers to the experience of dislocation and displacement.

Nava makes good use of these conceptual topoi in his examination of a vast array of texts going back to the writings of the explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries of the New World, and continuing with the literary and artistic production of the so called barroco de Indias, and the iconoclastic aesthetics of Modernist and avant-garde movements, before arriving at the literary bestsellers associated with magical realism and/or lo real maravilloso.

If the astronomical and scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries eroded the authoritative forms of knowledge inherited from the ancients, such catastrophic historical events as plagues, war, and famine would contribute to the perception that the world was out of joint and possibly nearing its end. Yet, as Nava reminds us, no historical event would prove more disruptive and disorienting than the appearance of a massive continent beyond the Western limits of the ancient world. America was literally an impossibility within the confines of Aristotelian and Scholastic thought. As Nava notes, the shattering of the old certainties would result in a general sense of loss and decay, but also in a renewed search for meaning beyond the seemingly chaotic, capricious and traumatic nature of reality.

In the first two chapters of his book, Nava draws daring links between the spiritual journeys of religious mystics across “the barrenness of all our intellectual and cognitive presuppositions about the unknown” (18) and the explorers' experiences of wonder and exile in the profoundly alien landscapes of the Americas. As Nava writes, Columbus may “respond to wonder by a desire to colonize it,” but he also craves contact with the “womb of the Earth, the sacred place where God dwells” (42). For his part, Cabeza de Vaca's sense of dislocation would come to mirror mystical images of the world as a barren, arid, empty desert. His radical experience of displacement would bring him closer to the destitute existence of the colonized. Cabeza de Vaca's apocalyptic vision of America would be shared by Las Casas, whose tragic account of the destruction of the Indies focuses on the devastation caused by colonial violence. According to Nava, Las Casas would distance himself from Spanish ethnocentrism and Christian triumphalism to speak in favor of a different theology that “regards the face of the other as the site of God's revelation” (63).

Las Casas's graphic images of the “ruins of history” (67) may be said to feed into the tragic sensibilities of baroque poets and dramatists on both sides of the Atlantic. As Nava eloquently puts it: “If the term ‘horror vacui’ . . . describes the Baroque obsession . . . the New World had its own version of this horror” (100). Indeed, Nava sees this epochal “horror vacui” as an essential aspect of the American baroque, and, more importantly, as the defining experience of the new Latin American reality: “The New World embraced an art of exuberance to manage the gaping abysses and abscesses created by European Empires . . . ‘Latin America’ emerged out of the vacuum left in the wake of Colonialism” (100).

This notion is central to Nava's discussion of New World baroque writers such as Juan Espinosa Medrano (chapter 3), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (chapter 4), and even modernist and avant-garde poets of the early twentieth century. To his credit, Nava's commentary is equally rich and convincing when speaking of early representatives of the American baroque as when he touches upon more recent Latin American icons such as Ruben Darío and Jorge Luis Borges, and even peninsular models like Góngora and Cervantes. While separated by oceans of time and space, these authors would share in the experience of wonder and exile, and the baroque fixation with absence and ruins. Hence, in Nava's view, the modernist movement and the Latin American avant-gardes would stand as formal and thematic bridges linking together the historical baroque with the best-selling fiction of García Márquez, Cortázar, Carpentier, Rulfo, and others.

Wonder and Exile in the New World is a must-read for anyone interested in the legacy of the baroque and the origins and significance of the Latin American literary tradition, from Colonial times to the so called “boom” of Latin American fiction. While drawing from established theorists and critics of the baroque and the neo-baroque or New World baroque, including Benjamin, Maravall, Carpentier, Buci-Glucksmann, Deleuze, Fuentes, González Echevarría, and Parkinson Zamora, as well as from historians and specialists of the colonial period, Alex Nava offers here a highly original, suggestive, engaging and ultimately convincing work of scholarship.