Reading this book was an interesting experience for me. All the essays in this book discuss intent to define and try to understand the role played by testimonio from various perspectives.  Where on the one hand John Beverly in his essay Margin at the centre talks about testimonio versus fiction, testimonio versus literature as he mentions “but to subsume testimonio under the category of literary fictionality is to deprive it of its power to engage the reader in the ways I have indicated here, to make of it simply another form of literature, as good as but certainly no better than and not basically different from what is already the case” (Pg 35). Or “Unlike the novel, testimonio promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness” (Pg 26). George Yudice relates testimonio to the fundamental aspect of post modernism, that is, to reject “grand or master narratives” (Pg 43 – 44), and adds that “the rejection of the master narratives thus implies a different subject of discourse, one that does not conceive of itself as universal and as searching for universal truth but, rather, as seeking emancipation and survival within specific and local circumstances” (Pg 44). On the other hand, Elzbieta Sklodowska calls her essay Spanish American Testimonial Novel where she explores the relationship between life stories, novels and testimonios. She concludes by saying that “we will a step closer to recognizing the fact that testimonio does not provide a solution to the problems of Latin American expression, but it continues the same old quest in a new guise” (Pg 99). Doris Sommer argues about the technicality of the genre, the relationship between the narrator and the reader which has been mediated at various levels, hence, the limitation to access the text. Shre question in her text Beverly’s argument  that “testimonio is poised against literature” (Pg 132), tries to find a relation with the autobiographical style, (though she later differs it on the ground of ‘I’ of testimonio which is collective and ‘I’ of autobiography which is singular) and argues that “This relative autonomy, however, may be on the eve of capitulation because, as Gusdorf further observes, the very fact that a first – person singular is marshaled to narrate a plural history is a symptom of Western penetration” (Pg 146).

However, in second part of the book, the two most interesting articles are by Alberto Morieras – The Aura of testimonio and Gareth Williams – The fantasies of cultural exchange in Latin American subaltern studies. Both the text destabilized and deconstructed the fundamental aspects of testimonio. They questioned the existence of testimonio and all the arguments that are based on it.