BOOK REVIEW : A Captivating Mosaic of Spanish Culture : THE BURIED MIRROR; Reflections on Spain and the New World <i> by Carlos Fuentes</i> , Houghton Mifflin $35; 253 pages

One of the most startling objects in the recent exhibition of Mexican art and craft at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was an unremarkable stone column, classical in design but crude in execution.

The stone was displayed on a tilt, and we were able to glimpse an Aztec sun calendar of sublime complexity inscribed on the underside. Suddenly, we were given to understand that the Spanish conquistadors had turned the art, technology and faith of a conquered people into the raw materials of their own colonial architecture.

Something of the same sense of irony is at work in “The Buried Mirror,” an extended contemplation of the strange and potent alchemy of Spanish culture in the New World by distinguished Mexican novelist, playwright and essayist Carlos Fuentes.

“Five hundred years after Columbus, we are being asked to celebrate the quincentennial of his voyage,” Fuentes writes. “But many of us in the Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas wonder whether there is anything to celebrate.”

Fuentes is deferential to the native peoples of North and South America, and he pays homage to the “visions of the defeated.” But, in a real sense, “The Buried Mirror” is a bittersweet celebration of the hybrid culture of Spain in the New World, what Fuentes calls “our cultural heritage--what we have created with the greatest joy, the greatest gravity and the greatest risk.” And it is Spain that catches and holds Fuentes’ attention and inspires his admiration and even awe.

“Spain is a double-gendered proposition, mother and father rolled into one, warmly hugging us, suffocatingly familiar, the cradle through which we come into the inheritance of the Mediterranean world, the Spanish language, the Catholic religion, the authoritarian political tradition,” he writes, “but also the possibilities of identifying a democratic tradition that can be genuinely ours and not simply a derivation of Anglo-American or French models.”

Drawing expertly on five centuries of the cultural history of Europe and the Americas, Fuentes seeks to capture the spirit of the new, vibrant and enduring civilization that began in Spain and flourished in the New World.

“The naked facts of conquest were answered by the more secret and insinuating facts of counterconquest,” he writes. “Both the defeated Indian peoples and the mestizos, eventually joined by the African arrivals in the New World, began a process of conquering the conquerors, thus fostering the rise of properly American, multiracial, polycultural society.”

“The Buried Mirror” is not, and does not aspire to be, a comprehensive historical survey. Like the mirror in the title--a reference to the ritual objects found in ancient Totonac graves near Veracruz--the book is “a spark of light in the darkness,” a mosaic of oblique reflections of arts and letters, history and politics, the odds and ends of a rich and diverse culture, everything from the Virgin of Guadalupe to the invention of chewing gum.

“The Buried Mirror” includes what the publisher calls “160 stunning paintings, drawings and photographs,” but the artwork was not seen by this reviewer. Because “The Buried Mirror” is the companion volume to a five-part BBC documentary series hosted by Fuentes, however, we can safely assume that it aspires toward the kind of visual splendor that started with Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” and now constitutes a genre.

There’s a hard edge to what Fuentes has to say, a restless musing over the price of conquest and “counterconquest”--the book is not wholly a celebration.

But the author is driven by a deep and convincing passion for what he beholds, and “The Buried Mirror” is blessed with a dappled lyricism, sometimes fatalistic and sometimes impossibly romantic. Indeed, what Fuentes has given us is a corrido : “Only a song,” as Fuentes writes of the folk singers of the Argentine pampas, “can console him in his pain.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Fields of Glory” by Jean Rouaud (Arcade).