Myself with Others

Here is Fuentes describing Prague: ""There is no city more beautiful in Europe . . . its opulence and its sadness consume themselves in a wedding of stone and river.'' This Mexican novelist (Terra Nostra, A Change of Skin) turns out beautifully written essays in a musical, ever-shifting voice that registers his forays as ``a wanderer in search of perspective.'' Dense pieces analyze Luis Bunuel's cinema of desire, Cervantes's Don Quixote, the ``space-time continuum'' of Diderot's novels, the sense of absence in Gogol and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's dark vision of Latin American history as cruel epic. In two revealing autobiographical essays, Fuentes hops from Washington, D.C., to Chile to Paris in quest of his literary mission. A meeting with novelist Milan Kundera, ``the other K of Czechoslovakia'' (a reference to Kafka), sparks Fuentes's thoughts on how to fight injustice without creating further injustice. (April)