Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolano and After 9781472543981, 9781441140395, 9781441142597

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General Introduction This book The contemporary Spanish-American novel is much talked about, but all too little seriously understood. This book seeks to remedy this situation by providing an in-depth guide to recent outstanding fiction from the Spanish-speaking Western Hemisphere. It is easy or even axiomatic to think that the best and fairest descriptions of novels might be nearly as long as the massive novels of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. But the struggle with the burden of the past, and the imprecise and predictably partial nature of contemporary novelists’ present acceptance, should not overshadow the inherent and lasting value of the novels and novelists included in The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After. At the eighth Hay Festival held in Cartagena, Colombia that ended on January 27, 2013, Mario Vargas Llosa commented that 50 years ago the Boom (of which he is the only active member left) and its writers opened a door to sophistication and cosmopolitanism that has not been closed. Three younger authors (Valeria Luiselli, Tryno Maldonado, and Carolina Sanín) little known outside of their countries, said that today we witness a “more interesting and sane” dispersion of voices, that the literature published by small Latin American houses has the virtue of breaking “the star system,” and that “the supposed bridge that was Spain does not have that role anymore and it is the small publishers that connect Latin American writers and their readers.” In fact, Vargas Llosa and the younger authors who spoke with him in Cartagena share different types of idealism, and the circumstance that their own experimentation works within the larger parameters and palimpsests of Western literary modernism. Other facts are that the door was kept closed for some authors of the subsequent decades, there is a new “star system” for contemporary authors, the Spanish bridge has, as it were, been simply refitted or brought up to code, and the expectedly smaller Spanish publishers devoted to either the recovery, revelation, or direct publication of Spanish-American authors are still considered prestigious. If Álvaro Enrigue, one of the novelists we include, is correct in stating in Cartagena that there are still authors who want to be published by Alfaguara or Anagrama, both prestigious Spanish publishers with Latin American branches that respond to marketing rules at Spanish headquarters, Enrigue is more correct in asserting that Latin American novels have become shorter, if one were to judge by most of the novelistic production included here. So the differences between before and after are not straightforward. Consequently, a major goal of this book is to introduce and correlate the new “new” novelists to a readership that may get to know them in languages other than Spanish, in different cultural contexts, and certainly out of their original time frame.

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Our effort responds to what is known about them in Spanish, and to a degree in English, providing scholarly and concise overviews engendered by fine tuning our choices and considerations with our publisher, and the anonymous readers before asking the contributors to work on the novelists we gather. This is the first comprehensive book devoted to the continent’s present novelistic production, in English or Spanish, and introduces English-language audiences to the richness and complexities of Spanish-American novels by authors born between 1949 and the early 1970s, and to novels published mainly between 1996 and 2012. Besides this criterion, which does not define generations or movements by birthdate, other criteria employed are: 1) the authors’ reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain; 2) existing and ongoing translation into English by the authors chosen; 3) critical reception as revealed by the presence of their work in university courses worldwide; and not unimportantly 4) evident literary authority of the fiction published to date. Factoring in their degree of publication outside of Latin America, some of the new novelists are more visible than others. Some whose novels are translated have not maintained their prestige beyond the Western Hemisphere. Others who are prominent in the continent have had a poor reception in other languages, yet some Spanish-language publishers still put out their books. Still, we bet on the posterity or establishment of these novelists, and do not aim for recovery or justify “promise” based on a single novel of great value, entry into foreign bestsellerdom, or a teaser for better things to come. These additional contexts can help explain the division between larger and shorter essays, and striking a balance in our selections. Readers familiar with these novelists or with the younger ones who do not necessarily follow in their footsteps now have an authoritative and all-inclusive context for a combative novelistic tradition that is transforming contemporary world fiction. Given Spanish America’s diversity, considering issues like exile or migration (Goldberg, Pohl), and gender representation from the sixties on (Febres), this volume covers all demographic areas, including some novelists who emigrated very early in their lives to the U.S. and write originally in English. There are many older Latino novelists who still enjoy recognition, but in this century there are important differences: the younger ones are being translated quickly into Spanish, particularly due to the borderless location of culture and greater diversity they inhabit, as with the Dominican Junot Díaz. We do think it is relevant to include Latino authors who are not from older, dominant U.S. groupings (e.g. postwar Puerto Ricans or Chicanos). Recent authors such as Díaz have expanded not only the definition of what U.S. Latino writing is but operate in very different linguistic matrices than earlier texts, for instance being translated into Spanish and gaining wide traction in the Spanish-speaking world. Until very recently the trend was, instead, to translate Spanish-American novelists into English. Now, with the ones we include, not only is the corpus of the “Spanish-American” novel rightly expanding, but also there is a new concept of what is and should be Spanish American that is not dependent on previous identity politics. After all, the current U.S. canon of Spanish-American novelists hardly does justice to the diversity and richness of the continent’s recent fiction, even when a few U.S. editors publish some of their novels in the original Spanish.

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We include original essays that provide an overview of the authors’ development. The essays are informative and strike a balance among description, updated critical information (local/national and foreign), and conceptual apprehensions; without depending on a particular theory or theme, and avoiding the limitations of encyclopedia entries or biographical dictionaries. This latter information is now readily available in writers’ blogs and other internet sources, and our contributors are aware that when one buys a novel one is also buying the history of that novel, not all of which may be of interest. Given Spanish America’s diversity and again considering issues like exile, migration, and gender representation, we divide our volume according to standard demographic areas: Mexico, Central America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (including Venezuela), the greater Andean region (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay), and U.S. Latino authors. Although there are no common traits applicable to all novelists, especially in a grouping that could be larger and is certainly dynamic enough to change, its few critics, foremost among them the Spaniards Ignacio Echevarría and Eduardo Becerra, have culled some commonalities. Keeping in mind that the author cohort included has an uneasy relation with hierarchies; those qualities can be subsumed as perhaps the most important rewriting of the codes of Spanish-American literary production since the avant-garde from the 1920s and 1930s, which in turn had its precursors in the abstract turn in art from a century ago. Among the changes, perhaps the most pertinent is the search for new masters from abroad, who tend to be new to Latin America although of earlier generations (Roth, Carver, and Sebald, not Faulkner, for example) or younger or more “hip” authors of the English-language tradition (Auster, Foster Wallace, Tóibín) or earlier Latin American avant-gardists, in addition to the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas and the Mexican Sergio Pitol, both of whom privilege self-referential essayistic modes for their novels. Rather than a totalizing rejection of previous novelistic characteristics, the preceding can be conceived as a renewal of depleted themes, and not as exclusive or permanent preferences.

Before this book As readers of The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel may know, Isabel Allende is one of the most popular Latin American writers of the last century. Prolific, she publishes simultaneously in Spanish and English the type of novels international readers tend to associate with the continent. Her best-selling The House of the Spirits is now 30 years old, and the novelist, now over 70, is at the height of her magical realist powers. At about the time that novel was published in Spanish (the English version is from 1985, the film from 1993), on February 16, 1982 The New York Times published Edwin McDowell’s “U.S. is Discovering Latin America’s Literature.” Since many of the notions introduced by McDowell are still present in The New York Times’ important and ongoing construction or (re)discovery of a novelistic world canon in languages other than English, the article is disheartening.

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McDowell’s view is emblematic of the wonderment with which Latin American literature is still perceived, and of the uninspired repetition of some clichés about the content and form of the continent’s novels. He provides the usual statistics still found in comparable reports, and although he rightly includes Brazilian masters, many now forgotten, McDowell underestimates and ignores numerous Spanish-American novelists who even then were distancing themselves from the Boom of the 1960s and 1970s that did so much to make Hispanic fiction part of world literature, with a boomerang effect. McDowell incorrectly states that “The problems of suburbia are about as remote as anything could be from the themes developed by Latin American writers in recent and forthcoming books, most of which invoke illusion, metaphor, fantasy and mysticism.” Such views—written for U.S. lay readers for whom the Boom was in full flower even when it was inactive in Latin America as a cultural production—are representative of reception norms for Latin American narrative since the 1960s. In that decade, the distinguished British translator J. M. Cohen published an anthology that became an early reference for English-only audiences. For him “Around the year 1940, literature in Latin America achieved independence and maturity” (11), adding: “Lacking selfassurance and an interested public, their novelists and poets either pursued a course of restless experiment, or explained themselves and their situation in excessive detail” (11). He also notices a condition that, despite new media, many small publishers or nationally published novelists could confirm today: “Owing to difficulties of communication, custom barriers, and the lack of an international book trade, nothing is harder than for the Mexican writer to discover what is being written in Buenos Aires, Santiago or Rio de Janeiro, and vice versa” (12). Cohen, whose introduction is dated “December 1964” (by 1963 Vargas Llosa had published The Time of the Hero to great, lasting acclaim) excludes Jorge Amado from the older writers and Vargas Llosa from the younger ones “because, being principally novelists, they have written nothing suitable in length and quality [sic]” (14). It is fair to ask—even in hindsight, keeping in mind that older novelists frequently speak to new generations with greater brilliance or propinquity, and putting aside that to some critics and readers writers do not become “writers” until they have published novels— if Cohen would have excluded Borges if his anthology had concentrated on the novel instead of on the short story and poetry. Here we see novelists being defined by genre, not, as post-Boom novelists often were, by generation. It is interesting that the rhetorical self-definition of current novelists is so generational when that of the Boom, with some exceptions, was not. The Boom was less of a group because, despite their sympathies and associations, detailed in José Donoso’s 1972 (rev. in 1983) Historia personal del boom (The Boom in Spanish American Literature: a Personal History, 1977), and in various memoirs by Spanish publishers and agents, interviews or press reports by some protagonists who did not want to be perceived as a generation. A manifesto would have put them in an aesthetic straitjacket, but there was one exception: Carlos Fuentes’ La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969, The New Spanish-American Novel), which extended his own implicit poetics to other Boom novels. The non-movement’s writers also received an

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unexpected boost from the uneven yet informative Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers (1967) by Luis Harss, with Barbara Dohmann. Those conversations, which include interpretative commentary and was the first to perceive the Boom novelists (without using the term) as a group but not a canon, were published in Spanish a year later, with the triumphant title Los nuestros (Ours)—it was finally published in Spain in 2012. The irony that this survey was published in English first should not be lost on readers, especially when U.S. publishing still contributes to defining what a Latin American writer is or should be (De Castro). Throughout the 1980s academic critics were also recycling similarly trite topics for interpretation, even when they may have had the advantage of knowing the work of avant-garde novelists of the 1920s and 1930s who rejected the social realism that ruled in Latin American aesthetics during those decades. Those novelists wrote about cities (suburbia was then more of a U.S. development) invoking totally different types or uses for illusion, metaphor, fantasy, and mysticism. By the 1980s, testimonial literature patterned on that of the Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú, whether as novelization of violence based on ideological struggles, or easily morphed into eyewitness narratives of human concern that had little to do with verifiable political agency, was coming to an end. Despite the unease among self-anointed progressive critics, novelists started to write fiction that was not exclusively dependent on specific social or historical contexts, so that they could stand up without time-locking apprehensions, and the practitioners included Central and South Americans who were somehow expected to be committed to myriad political causes. Around 1982 the oldest of The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel authors were in their early thirties, the youngest were not ten. McDowell mentions plans to publish novels by Donoso, several books by Julio Cortázar, and that Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, about to be published, was “a story about the narrator’s scandalous relationship with his aunt and with his fellow scriptwriter.” McDowell naturally could not estimate how the work of those Boom writers would exert varying kinds of influence on the future generations of novelists, or how the older novelists have not been very forthcoming in supporting the younger ones, an exception being Vargas Llosa, so recognized by new novelists and critics in Vargas Llosa. De cuyo Nobel quiero acordarme (2012, Vargas Llosa. Whose Nobel I Want to Remember). McDowell does mention that Jaime Manrique, included in this volume, has a contract for a novel (1983’s Colombian Gold), and that, according to translator and agent Thomas Colchie, “In contrast to only a few years ago, most comparative literature programs today include selections or books by Latin American writers.” McDowell’s article, despite its good intentions, is ultimately indicative of the disconnection between foreign and local views of Spanish-American narrative, a condition this volume endeavors to correct with the advantage of hindsight but without relying on foresight. About ten years ago, in Madrid’s El País newspaper, the youngish (he was 45 in 2012) Colombian author Efraím Medina Reyes impudently and rudely referred to the now 84-year-old Gabriel García Márquez as “García Marketing.” Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean master to whom any evaluation of contemporary Spanish-American novels must return, was no less kind with Allende or most of the Boom authors (see

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the posthumous nonfiction of Between Parentheses). He called them “grandpas,” and referred to contemporary magical realism imitators as “the retarded children of García Márquez.” The prolific Argentine César Aira, a less-heralded master for many novelists born in the 1960s and 1970s, expressed his contempt for generational groupings in a 2002 article on “The books of the Past” for Barcelona’s Guaraguao: “I lost my taste for reading my contemporaries many years ago. It is an insurmountable indifference, a mix of distrust and disinterest that paralyzes me before novelties.” (59). Such comments and others by the Mexican Ignacio Padilla, are more a trademark and less of youthful bravado, given the age differences among Aira, Bolaño, Mendoza, and Padilla. These views can be put into greater perspective by consulting the still underexamined yet already numerous nonfiction published by these and other novelists (Corral 2012), a template of which may be Aira’s quirky and arbitrary views in his extensive Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos (2001, Dictionary of Latin American Authors). More importantly, even before stereotypical magical realism had been reified among U.S. critics, the notions espoused by the younger novelists, Cohen, and McDowell had been explicitly contradicted by Vargas Llosa in a classic article called “Primitives and Creators” published by The Times Literary Supplement in November 1968. If at one point many novelists born around 1968 seemed “typical,” such dating, while signaling a parting of the waters, omitted slightly older authors born in the 1950s who were foundational or representational in many respects, among them Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Héctor Abad Faciolince. There were naturally others born immediately before them (Aira, Diego Cornejo, Diamela Eltit, and Manrique, all born in 1949), and a few in the 1970s, all of whom are also defining what the continent’s contemporary novel is becoming. In these unavoidable intersections gender, borders, and other analogous notions are part of the larger novelistic reality with which we deal, and any “representational” purpose flouts literary history to allow readers to discover even more novelists who should or could be in our book. Authors like Medina Reyes are still to find their niche in the story of the SpanishAmerican novel. Other than Bolaño’s, a major impetus, their reputations as builders of new trends are more familiar than their fiction. In interviews published in Spain and Argentina, Medina Reyes and others seem to be looking for a bad master or a bad influence, and their outrageousness is better known than their novels. Lest one think that that kind of sarcasm (and frequent misogyny) is the privilege or monopoly of whippersnapper novelists, consider the two following press reports. In 2004 the late Mexican master Fuentes—the only living major Boom writers are Vargas Llosa and García Márquez—was asked by the Chilean press about the continent’s new narrative. Fuentes curtly said that Juan Villoro, a serious and wellrecognized author was “a Mexican writer,” adding: “I don’t know Bolaño and I have never read anything by him.” By the time of his death Fuentes had acknowledged Villoro’s existence, and was even stating he would read Bolaño. The earlier assertion of incuriosity was odd for a novelist like Fuentes, famous for being up-to-date with recent trends on a cosmopolitan basis. Yet it is the same Fuentes who said in a different

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2004 interview: “I have been a companion and friend of the generation that followed me, made up of people who are 50, just as I am a friend of the generation that is between 30 and 40, the famous Crack: Volpi, Padilla, Palou, and Rivera Garza’s are my friends; so they keep me young.”

McOndites and Crackites Those two stories merely confirm that in literature, as in other humanistic endeavors, generational struggles and differences are common. But how does one negotiate aesthetically with the misbehaving recent generations? There are very few gestures by new writers that are as hostile or prone to ostracism as self-definition, trying to prove you are new, rebellious or erudite, giving yourself a place in history, or leaving a generational testament. In 2003 a dozen younger Spanish-American writers did all that at a conference in Seville, sponsored by the Spanish publisher Seix Barral, which initially published most if not all of the Boom writers. The young ones were in Seville mainly to “translate” the generation that immediately preceded them, and to speak about how their narrative had to negotiate the influence left by the frequently masterly narrative produced by the Boom novelists. The proceedings of that gathering were published as Palabra de América (2004, America’s Word). The intricacies of the Spain/Spanish America literary relations at the time of the Boom are sorted out in the reprints of original reviews in Spanish newspapers and journals gathered in the exhaustive volume edited by Marco and Gracia, which includes critical overviews, while Burgos has collected revealing statements and poetics of the immediately preceding generation, sometimes mistakenly related to the “postboom.” The authors invited to Seville were Bolaño, Jorge Franco, Rodrigo Fresán, Santiago Gamboa, Gonzalo Garcés, Fernando Iwasaki, Mario Mendoza, Padilla, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cristina Rivera Garza (the only woman so “honored”), Iván Thays, and Jorge Volpi, most of whose novels are discussed in this volume. It is a safe bet that of those twelve disciples only Bolaño’s name rings a bell for general readers outside of the Hispanic world, and in Between Parentheses Bolaño goes out of his way to herald the work of some of them, sometimes exaggeratedly or contradictorily, or with pithy comments. With the exception of Bolaño and Garcés, all the Seville participants were born in the 1960s and are still relatively young in terms of promise. Other than their talent, many share having lived in Spain, where some still reside, or lead nomadic lives, a frequent theme in their narrative. If the anointed in Seville represent “America’s Word,” there are logistical and conceptual problems with that representation, because other novelists, some of whom write successful detective and crime fiction (let us remember Borges and others) and even sentimental romances, also represent that “word,” including a Chilean partially raised in the U.S. like Alberto Fuguet and the Latino novelists we have chosen. Any sensible and fact-based assessment of contemporary Spanish-American narrative and its history so far safely allows adding a good number of “new” authors, not all born after 1968. Among them are the Mexican of long residence in Peru, Mario Bellatin, as

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well as Gamboa, and to a different degree the Puerto Rican Mayra Santos Febres, the Dominican Pedro Antonio Valdez, and from those born in the 1970s, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra, Patricio Pron, Guadalupe Nettel, and Pola Oloixarac. There are many others, some included here, affected by what could be called the curse of local publishing; that is, having one’s novel appear in small national presses of little or no circulation and distribution: this is true, for instance, of some of the Central American writers we have included. The novelists born in the 1970s habitually share having started writing in their countries, and staying in them for some time. They are also generally identified by not having sought publishers in Spain (who came to them only after their novels became a critical or public success in their own countries), a condition that initially did not define, for example, the Peruvian Thays in the Palabra de América group. In her introduction to the paperback edition of The Savage Detectives, her translation of Bolaño’s masterpiece, Natasha Wimmer, who is gaining prominence as a U.S. reviewer of Spanish-American literature, provides a trenchant if perhaps tendentious critique of the relations among the new novelists: Some young writers of the 1990s, such as the Mexicans Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, set their novels in Europe or in imaginary European-seeming countries. Others, like the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, borrowed heavily from North American writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and focused on upper-middle-class Latin Americans lost in the shallows of North American pop culture. In general, these were programmatic rebellions, and it showed. They lacked the new life, the freedom of imagination, and needed to produce work that was urgent and active, rather than reactive. (x–xi).

Amid all the generational posturing, the reader without a stake in these quarrels will want to try to find what is worth reading. We do not assume readers’ familiarity with these novelists and novels, and leave the choice of specific works of intepretation about them to our critics. With the exception of Bolaño, Aira, and Volpi, the reception of this new narrative is understandably dispersed in reviews, interviews, general journalistic notes, surveys (Ruffinelli), a few academic journals with limited influence, and collections that provide understandably incomplete views of these novels or novelists (Balanzó, Becerra, ed., Bolognese, Esteban, Fornet, Montoya, Noguerol, Ramos Izquierdo and Barataud). Informative, these studies do not always curb their enthusiasm or avoid becoming endogamic or a catalog of curiosities (see Raphael). The premature reception of some novelists and their works has no set aesthetic permanence or market rules, even if these times are more attuned to their values and meaning of those novels. In that context, it is unwise to underestimate the influence of Spanish and SpanishAmerican newspapers, literary supplements, and journals in the reception and initial introductions (Becerra 1996, Fuente) to these authors. At the forefront of these efforts is Babelia, the weekly cultural supplement of the influential Spanish newspaper El País, which not coincidentally, is the property of the conglomerate that also owns Alfaguara publishers (Barrera Enderle). Babelia’s articles, notes and book reviews, sometimes

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written by Latin Americans, are not necessarily objective, truly informative, unbiased toward Spanish editions of Latin American prose, or ideologically impartial, and frequently seem to be discovering gun powder to Latin American readers and critics. Not all countries are selected, and the issues Babelia devotes to smaller ones like Ecuador, and the absence of countries like Paraguay, Uruguay and others, have occasioned questions about the consultants, invited editors, and contributors, who tend to be selected from already existing elites. Something similar happens with ADN Cultura, the cultural supplement of Buenos Aires’s La Nación. Nevertheless, these supplements’ issues on national literatures, despite their introductory level, at least keep novelists and their novels on the radar, at times with some inspired interpretations. Letras Libres, the influential Mexican cultural journal that also has a Spanish branch, offers generally scathing reviews and notes on contemporary fiction, most of them on target when it comes to Mexico. Related to the press, the loosely defined Boom, now half a century old, had a very positive effect on the diffusion of Latin American literature and its present international influence, but it is still hard to fathom its real effect on the contemporary novel. As Nicholas Birns rightly asserts in his essay on Fuguet, “Despite their different subject matters and approaches, there is a fundamental continuity of values between the Boom writers and the McOndo writers,” and it may be that both generations did not present themselves as guardians of a lost art. Immediately after the purported end of the Boom, which many critics and authors see as a Spanish commercial enterprise, the continent’s novel was vaguely described as the “Post-boom,” a period in which the “new historical novel” abounded, although there were other narrative expressions that combined high and low cultures. Those hybrids were engendered by postmodernism, an umbrella term that caused publishers to generally ignore great and valid exceptions to that literary trend (Burgos). While it is possible to force comparisons among postmodern characteristics and today’s Spanish-American novel, they do not hold up under close scrutiny. It is similarly unsustainable to argue that the contemporary novel obliterated national or regional literatures by setting many of its works in non-Latin American settings, because “peripheral” novels can respond to hierarchies that could easily present them as canonical, with a logic that has little to do with the market. By the period between centuries digital culture had changed the logistics of writing, if not its conceptualization. The resulting narrative seemed to project the notion that many of its paragraphs were placed in a certain part of the novels simply because it seemed a place as good as any other to shove it in. This practice went unchallenged until the mid-90s, when some publishing events changed the panorama and outside perception of Spanish-American narrative. In 1996, a sort of annus mirabilis for the production of contemporary narrative and the beginning of critical awareness of it, a short-story anthology entitled McOndo (Barcelona: Mondadori) put together by two then unknown storytellers, Fuguet and Sergio Gómez,was published to great acclaim. The compilation professed to introduce the new wave of Spanish-language (some of the authors were Spaniards) narrative, and to that end anthologists Fuguet and Gómez provide a sort of poetics in their Introduction. Among their many pronouncements designed to startle the cultural establishment, and impact the market, one reads:

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Latin America is MTV Latina […] Televisa, Miami, and banana republics and Borges and Sub-Commander Marcos and CNN en Español and NAFTA and Mercosur and external debt and, of course, Vargas Llosa. To sell a rural continent when in fact it is urban (beyond the fact that its overpopulated cities are chaotic and don’t work) seems to us an aberration, convenient and immoral. (18)

The anthologists base their statements on a lasting conceptual conundrum for the continent’s writers: what should define Latin America, the necessarily continuing social struggle for justice and exoticism based on regionalist referents, or the Western cosmopolitanism that defined the twentieth century? The McOndo generation obviously prefers the latter. Not totally different from their predecessors, they have no problem accessing high and low cultures, combining them as they see fit, yet not disdaining canonical traditions. For them, “McOndo” replaces García Márquez’ Macondo as the mythical and idealized Latin American locale to which foreign readers are accustomed. For Fuguet, Gómez, and the other twelve Spanish-American and four Spanish writers included in McOndo the world has no borders, conventions are unwelcome, “magical realism” is rightly long gone, replaced by magic neoliberalism, and recent culture serves to trump U.S.-inspired political correctness. Most of our novelists’ work confirms those beliefs and to varying degrees their novels put in practice versions of the attitudes mentioned by Fuguet and Gómez. The new location of culture for the recent generation includes ghettos (not in the preferred U.S. barrio sense), McDonald’s, Mac computers, gigantic malls, the TV host Don Francisco, Ricky Martin, Julio Iglesias, apolitical stances and telenovelas. Clearly not all our novelists belong or would have wanted to belong to that world, particularly those born in the early 1950s, who did not come of age during neoliberalism and were earnest progressives in their youth but, like Bolaño, became critical of political excesses of any stripe. A typical case is that of another Chilean, Roberto Ampuero, author of The Neruda Case (2012), the first of his crime fiction bestsellers to be translated into English. According to José de Córdoba in the December 21, 2012 Wall Street Journal, “… Ampuero’s life of exile is representative of the experiences of a now-graying generation of idealists who lived through Latin America’s heady decades of revolutions, coups and guerrilla wars, only to be shipwrecked on the shoals of history, living Robinson Crusoe-like lives in the wreckage of socialist island paradises” (D5), a development for which Corral (2010) provides a more ample context. Still, if those born in the early 1950s and those born in the late 1960s do not comprise a generation per se, they share the attitude of not being afraid of what they call “bastard” culture, and they welcome opera, Spanish-American rock, and traditional authors. Theirs, especially the McOndo writers, is also a decidedly antiprogressive positioning, for at least a couple of reasons. First, presumably speaking for their fellow writers, they admit to being conscious of the “feminine absence” in their book, attributing it to “publishers’ lack of knowledge and the few books by SpanishAmerican women writers we receive” (16), adding “At no moment did we think about the laws of compensation in order to look bad to anybody” (16). Secondly, they argue,

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“There is a sector in the academy and the traveling intelligentsia who want to sell the world not only an ecological paradise (Santiago’s smog?) but a land of peace (Bogota, Lima?). The more orthodox among them believe that being Latin American is being indigenous, folkloric, and leftist. Our cultural creators would be people who use ponchos and sandals.” (17). Around the time of McOndo, in 1996, the young Mexican writers Pedro Angel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Padilla, and Volpi, with assistance from Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, published their “Manifiesto del Crack.” In the late 1980s, Padilla, Urroz, and Volpi had met in high school, and together with Alejandro Estivill, came up with the idea of putting into one volume what they had written up to then. Admirers of Juan Rulfo, who wrote sophisticatedly of the desolation of rural Mexico, they yet saw themselves “affected by all the clichés of the false ruralism and magical realism a la García Márquez.” They opted for writing a “novel” composed of falsely rural short stories, to be narrated by “Hugo,” a composite of the four authors, and the result was Variaciones sobre un tema de Faulkner (1989, Variations on a Faulkner Theme). They called themselves “La Compañía Antirruralista” (The Anti-Rural Company). That short novel, a user’s manual from 2004, the Crack manifesto, and a bibliographical narrative of 365 five ways of “doing Crack,” were published in 2004–5 in Mexico and Spain as Crack. Instrucciones de uso (Crack. User’s Manual). What does “Crack” stand for, when each member has gone out of his way in interviews and reports to deny that such a movement, generation, or group exists, that it is a “literary joke”? Are they having their cake and eating it too? It would seem so, despite the fact that Volpi is the only member whose works have had consistent recognition, and translations with smaller presses. Different from the McOndo writers, who have disbanded and express nary a word about a communal aesthetic, the “Crack” group insists on and markets a single world view, despite their vast differences in talent and reception. Almost 20 years have passed since the McOndo and Crack generational grandstanding, and although there has been a parting of the waters among the groupings, they all still refuse the fraidy-cat tolerance of all points of view. They are more a clutch of writers who share a lack of pedigree. The problem with thinking that both generations offer something new is that there is a cyclical nature to literary rebellion, and it is not difficult to find the equivalent of their attempt to shock the bourgeois throughout previous centuries. As Birns also reminds us vis-à-vis the McOndo group, they criticized their predecessors for being too provincial in much the same way the Boom writers had censured their immediate literary ancestors. Believing what is recent to be totally new is also the fault of the few critics who have tried, prematurely, to define these groups or denounce their sexism (Palaversich). Focusing primarily on a few authors since the late 1990s leads some of those critics to a blurring (Noguerol 2008) regarding the impact of immediately earlier novelists and their poetics (Burgos) and subsequent ones, or to those who publish locally, references to whom are very rare, not unfailingly accurate, and expectedly perfunctory (Bértolo). What is new about the “McOndites,” “Crackites” and similar parvenus is their daring and willingness to name names, especially in a climate in which sensitivity has

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acquired surplus value. But of the eighteen writers gathered for McOndo, only three made it to the Seville canonization. Among them only the Colombian Gamboa has consistently written well-received novels, only one of which is available in English, while a couple of other less accomplished McOndites have had theirs appear in that language. McOndo did not invite Volpi, one of the better known writers of the new generation, but did include the Ecuadorian Leonardo Valencia, who is not in Palabra de América, despite his successful fiction and positive reception in Spain. Aira, who publishes an average of two short novels a year since his first one in 1975, was not invited to Seville either. Literary history repeats itself: generational categories are notoriously subjective, clearly incomplete, hastily assembled, and can thus have an undeservedly negative effect on a writer’s reputation, or an exaggerated one, particularly on a younger writer. Birns affirms that “One could argue that the novel genre has to take in too much of the human experience to be strictly defined by generational self-assertion and/or resentment,” to which one could add self-indulgence. In most of the metafictional novels of this generation little is interesting enough to not notice an egotistical authorial presence suspended above. In a sense the new novelists are aware that the Spanish-American “novel of language” from the 1970s, much touted by Fuentes, made too much of an effort to impose on narrative language a slippery content that was never expressed, thereby defeating the purpose of communication and relativizing meaning. There are of course many metafictional exercises in today’s novels, but they are not a stock in trade for any one author, and they all seem aware that those devices were daring and amusing, but now they have to work better. Those experiments leave plenty of room for endless and self-defeating interpretive disputes about originality and textuality, and no easy comity in storytelling. So, today the novelistic emphases are on concision, easy wit, fairly straight narrative flow, vernacular insights, a continuing discovery of new masters, and even bittersweet perspectives on emotions and moods. As counterpoint to the anxieties of influence it is useful to comment on the one member of the new generations who is not only their peer, but their predecessor: Bolaño. The subtitle “After Bolaño” should be understood in its full semantic possibilities: as influence or idea whose time has come, lapsed progenitor, point of reference, and not a perfect personal or aesthetic model. It is very revealing, in terms of generational self-perception, that he is not in McOndo, and was made an “honorary member” of the Crack only after his death. Yet, he is the only one of them to have become a legend, a myth, an overnight success, and an industry, all at the same time. He is the master of the new generations. Sadly, just as Bolaño railed broadly and sometimes unjustly against what he called donositos, or reverential followers of Donoso, readers are already dealing with derivative McOndites, Crackites and “Bolañites” who show that imitation is not the best form of flattery. There seems to be a consensus that if any author or work from the generations we include will survive the frenzy of trying to select the one with long-lasting values, the Chilean is ahead. Generational groupings persist, and perhaps the most accurate template is Eduardo Becerra’s thorough, and polemical anthology Líneas aéreas (1999, Airlines). The following year, the U.S. branch of Spain’s Alfaguara marketed the somewhat arbitrary

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anthology Se habla español. Voces Latinas en USA (Spanish Spoken. Latin Voices in USA). Bolaño is absent from both compilations. Recently, tomes like Bogotá39. Antología de cuento latinoamericano (2007, Bogotá39. Anthology of the Latin American Short Story), which gathered authors who were under 40 then, and Diego Trelles’ El futuro no es nuestro: narradores de América Latina nacidos entre 1970 y 1980 (2008, with a more representational and shortened English translation in 2012), try to expand the corpus, betting on younger writers, some of whom are included here. The new generations may be overhyped, self-congratulatory, and gimmicky, but there is no doubt that they are optimistic and quixotic, and frequently promising, which is a positive stance for the Spanish-American novel at this time. One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the generational tangle we summarize—keeping in mind its state of flux—is that its authors are vastly changing what is meant by “national” literatures, fitting in imperfectly with the new definitions of “world literature,” including the “world republic of letters.” Blatantly urbane and open, these novelists cannot let go entirely of personal codes that can frequently be construed as their “Inner Latin American,” a condition they generally employ for one-upmanship when confronted by identity politics. In this regard, they are not different from, say, recent English authors whose cultural origins are in the Indian sub-continent, practicing what Fredric Jameson, in “Dirty Little Secrets” (London Review of Books [November 2012]) has called “transcoding,” which “presupposes an allegorical structure, a system of levels, in which we find ourselves obliged to translate from one to the other, inasmuch as each of these levels speaks a different language and is decipherable only in terms of a specific code” (39). More significant than that code switching, the paucity of women among the new generations is cause for concern, and keeping in mind our selection one cannot fail noticing that in the U.S., Latina writers, conversely, generally have a greater public than that of men. There are aesthetic and publishing lessons in this situation, and generational change does not make those lessons pointless. A related question, which we put in check by opening our contents to a wider audience, is who is defining the new Spanish-American canon for the continent, and for whom, especially when U.S. Latino writers prefer to write in English because their Spanish is merely functional, judging by interviews and press reports. Given the new media (many of these writers have blogs), a conclusion that is perhaps closest to present reading experiences is that the new generations, in their work and public pronouncements, are trying to deemphasize the literary marrow of their interests, which might be a good thing. The new novelists, some of whom practice criticism, know that at this time there are no large, heroic critical figures and that with the new media critics have to be on their game, since anyone with access to a computer could quickly subvert persistent or canonical critical assumptions. The new generations have obviously not ended, and perhaps in another generation we will have the perspective to judge them fully. In the meantime, we have their bangs, not their whimpers.

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Pedagogical aspects As a teaching tool The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel is a complete view of the trends and developments of the last two decades. We purposefully introduce new critics, from outside the U.S. academy and from all over the world, which is an attractive feature in itself, and a hedge against U.S. parochialism—one of our corrective aims. In an environment only now attentive to literature in translation (Lowe and Fitz, Adamo et al.) and conscious of the growing economic and political importance of Latin America, we provide a sense of its recent narrative as a whole. In addition to adaptability as a textbook, and its greater accessibility to a general readership beyond college libraries, The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel is capacious and pluralistic, and suggests new authors for publishers, course syllabi, libraries and general culture journals. We also envision this book as an indispensable resource for larger non-academic libraries and institutions, as well as for teachers of Spanish-American literature at the university, college, and community college levels. In that sense this General Introduction could be construed as a guideline for courses on the contemporary Spanish-American novel, by the regions into which we have divided it, or for selection from those parts. Many of these authors are gaining an increasing readership in English, and a few are frequently taught. Yet there is little criticism in English beyond book reviews, often written by authors unfamiliar with the field. The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel affords the professional guidance necessary to understand these authors and works. It also includes a register to key works of criticism and further readings on its topic that can be browsed to gain general background on current developments or deepen one’s grounding in world fiction. This approach makes a wide range of inquiry trustworthy and realistic. While we do not provide a history of the contemporary Spanish-American novel, we endeavor to be panoramic and specific, engaging not technical and readable as a holistic reference. At the same time, our contributors expand aesthetic parameters in order to be inclusive and responsive to readers’ reactions about novelists who should be added to our selection. In many ways our chronological parameters answer the conjecture of what happens to a hypothetical novelist who was born after 1949 or in the 1950s but did not publish anything of significance after 1996 (see Bértolo, Fuente)? In that regard our sections are necessary for these novelists’ broader context, and our contributors endeavor to not isolate ideas, while explaining each with concision that nevertheless allows for illuminating commentary. We are not betting on the development of a particular trend, but at this point our novelists seem to be choosing, against some of their previously immediate interests, more of a tidy narrative, less of the strangeness of complicated story lines that are beyond the grasp of corroboration or disbelief. The intricacies of that preference are so different from other returns to conventionality that to specifically delineate how and why they come about is to spoil their effects. Authors like Aira and Bellatin, in particular, and to a lesser degree, for example, the Uruguayans Mario Levrero (1940–2004) and Rafael Courteoisie (b. 1958), the Argentine Eduardo Berti (b. 1964) and the Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon

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(b. 1971) sustain their narrative force with page after page of distorted images that sometimes fade into a tangle of neologisms and puns. But toward the end of the plot readers can recover the sentences that felt like obstacle courses. Not all of these novelists are included in The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel, for a variety of reasons common to books like this one. Yet, it will be clear from the chosen entries that many other novelists have been kept in mind, just as our contributors have signaled the presence or relations with those included by putting an asterisk after the initial mention of their names. We offer this general introduction and the ones to the different sections aware of the fact that the negative result of not curbing interpretive enthusiasm is that the search for world identity through the novel is becoming as feeble as searching for a national distinctiveness, and thus we also need to be selective in the recommendation of interpretive sources. In addition to thanking our contributors for their patience and understanding during this long process, we would like to express our gratitude to the external evaluators of The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel for their similar empathy and above all for their open and constructive criticism, implicitly added to this introduction, that helped this vast project come to fruition. We would also like to thank our contributor Valerie Hecht for her invaluable translations of some of the contributions we include. The absence of some novelists or the lack of familiarity with the ones who are included is not a liability. Rather, therein lies the value of this gathering. Space constraints do allow us, however, to provide the Suggestions for Further Reading that follow, of equally select but thorough articles, essays, and interviews for further analysis of particular countries (Hind). At this stage of the reaction to these novelists and novels it is perhaps expected that the criticism about them be rather similar in theme, tone, choice of anecdote, grandiose speculation, perhaps endogamous in terms of interpreters, or tainted by the absence of even token disapproval by purportedly major critics. Thus, The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel brings to the attention of students and professors of Spanish-American literature young and younger novelists whose work deserves to be much better known outside of Spanish America and Spain. Will H. Corral

Suggestions for further reading Adamo, Gabriela, ed. La traducción literaria en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2012. Balanzó, Iago de, et al., Cuadernos de la Cátedra de las Américas I. Barcelona: Institut Catalá de, Cooperació Iberoamericana, 2004. Barrera Enderle, Víctor. “Entradas y salidas del fenómeno literario actual o la ‘alfaguarización’ de la literatura hispanoamericana.” Ensayos sobre literatura y cultura latinoamericanas. Santiago: LOM, 2002. 91–111. Becerra, Eduardo. Pensar el lenguaje; escribir la escritura. Experiencias de la Narrativa

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Hispanoamericana contemporánea. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1996. —“La narrativa hispanoamericana en España: la necesidad de un nuevo lector.” Letras Libres [Mexico] IV. 40 (Abril 2002): 34–7. —ed. Desafíos de la ficción. Alicante: Cuadernos de América sin nombre, 2002. Bértolo, Constantino. “El nuevo y último redescubrimiento de la Literatura latinoamericana.” Guaraguao 3. 9 (Otoño 1999): 82–7. Bolaño, Roberto. Between Parentheses. Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003. Ignacio Echevarría, ed. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New Directions, 2011. Bolognese, Chiara, et al., (eds) Este que ves, engaño colorido. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2012. Burgos, Fernando, ed. Los escritores y la creación en Hispanoamérica. Madrid: Castalia, 2004. Chávez, Ricardo et al. Crack. Instrucciones de uso. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2005. Cohen, J. M. “Introduction.” Latin American Writing Today. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967. 11–14. Corral, Wilfrido H. “¿Qué queda del sesentayochismo en los nuevos narradores hispanoamericanos?” Guaraguao. Revista de Cultura Latinoamericana 13. 30 (Verano 2009). 39–54. [Entire issue is devoted to contemporary Spanish-American fiction] —“Not Their Masters’ Voice: Latin American NonFiction.” World Literature Today. 87. 2 (February-March 2012). 20–4. De Castro, Juan E. “Reading, Publishing, and Writing Networks: The Hispanophone and Latin American Literary Spaces in the Twenty-first Century.” The Spaces of Latin American Literature. Tradition, Globalization, and Cultural Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 91–104. Echevarría, Ignacio. Desvíos. Un recorrido crítico por la reciente narrativa latinoamericana. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007. Esteban, Ángel, Jesús Montoya, Francisca Noguerol, and María A. Pérez, (eds) Narrativas latinoamericanas para el siglo XXI: nuevos enfoques y territorios. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2010. Febres, Laura. La mirada feminina desde la diversidad cultural de las Américas: Una muestra de su novelística de los años sesenta hasta hoy. Caracas: Universidad Metropolitana, 2008. Fornet, Jorge. Los nuevos paradigmas. Prólogo narrativo al siglo XXI. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2006. Fuente, José Luis de la. La nueva narrativa hispanoamericana. Entre la realidad y las formas de apariencia. Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial, Universidad de Valladolid, 2005. Goldberg, Florinda F. “ ‘Only the Fog is Real’: Migration and Exile in Latin American Literature.” Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas. Ed. by Luis Roniger et al. (eds). Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. 386–410. Hind, Emily. Entrevistas con 20 escritores mexicanos nacidos en los 70: De Abenshushan a Xoconostle. México: Ediciones Eón, 2013. Lowe, Elizabeth and Earl Fitz. “Translating the Voices of a Globalized Latin American Literature: The McOndo Revolution and the Crack Generation.” Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 122–34. Marco, Joaquín y Jordi Gracia (eds) La llegada de los bárbaros. La recepción de la literatura Hispanoamericana en España,1960–1981. Barcelona: Edhasa, 2004.

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Montoya Juárez, Jesús and Ángel Esteban (eds) Entre lo local y lo global. La narrativa latinoamericana en el cambio de siglo (1990–2006). Madrid: Vervuert, 2008. Noguerol, Francisca. “Últimas tendencias y promociones.” Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. III. Siglo XX. Trinidad Barrera, ed. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008. 167–80. —María A. Pérez, Ángel Esteban, and Jesús Montoya Juárez (eds). Literatura más allá de la nación: de lo centrípeto y lo centrífugo en la narrativa hispanoamericana del siglo XXI. Madrid: Vervuert, 2011. Palaversich, Diana. “De McOndo y otros mitos. Realismo virtual vs. realismo mágico.” De Macondo a McOndo. Senderos de la postmodernidad latinoamericana. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2005. 33–48. Pohl, Burkhard. “¿Escritores nómadas? La migración cultural en la narrativa latinoamericana a finales del siglo XX.” Aves de paso. Autores latinoamericanos entre exilio y transculturación (1970–2002). Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner and Edna Pfeiffer (eds). Madrid: Vervuert, 2005. 55–69. Ramos-Izquierdo, Eduardo and Marie-Alexandra Barataud (eds). Les espaces des écritures hispaniques et hispano-américaines au XXIe siècle. Limoges: PULIM, 2012. Raphael, Pablo. La fábrica del lenguaje, S.A. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011. Regalado López, Tomás. “Del boom al crack: anotaciones críticas sobre la narrativa hispanoamericana del nuevo milenio.” Tendencias de la narrativa mexicana actual. Madrid: Vervuert, 2009. 143–68. Ruffinelli, Jorge, ed. La narrativa del milenio. Nuevo texto crítico [Stanford] XXI. 41–2 (2009). Trelles Paz, Diego ed. The Future Is Not Ours. Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2012. Wimmer, Natasha. “Introduction,” in Roberto Bolaño. The Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ix–xxiii.

* Except where noted, our contributors have translated all quotations from the primary works and secondary references, generally following the MLA format. It is a given that a work is “Print” when others are identified as “Web.”

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Mexico Introduction The impact of Mexico’s revolution (1910–20), the last of the great peasant revolts and the first major revolution of the twentieth century was felt on much of the literary production of the country throughout the first two-thirds of the last century. Novels such as Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915), Agustín Yañez’s At the Edge of the Storm (1947), more indirectly in, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), Rosario Castellanos’s Balun Canán (1957), Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come (1963), Fernando del Paso’s José Trigo (1966), and Elena Poniatowska’s foundational testimonial novel Here’s to You, Jesusa (1967), reflect on this central event in the country’s history. Even critical and philosophical works, such as Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), can be read as attempts at coming to grips with the revolution and the political system it set in place. The centrality of the revolution is not surprising. Not only had it led to the death and disappearance of millions and to the beginning of Mexican migration to the United States, but the stable one party state (PRI) that controlled the country from 1929 to 2000, and which was itself a topic of major fictive and essayistic reflection, was the direct inheritor and result of the revolution. However, by the mid-1960s, Mexican culture was profoundly and directly marked by international cultural and political trends. La Onda (the wave, vibe) novelists—José Agustín, Gustavo Sainz, and Parménides García Saldaña—wrote from a perspective akin to the international youth counterculture of the time. Rock, by then the established musical lingua franca among those under 30, drugs, and the uninhibited sexuality of the time, are among the privileged topics of these writers. One can argue that La Onda is in some ways a literary counterpart to the Mexican student civil rights revolt of 1968, which despite their radical trappings and language, ultimately presented demands, not so much for revolution, but for democratization and political liberalization, compatible with the values implicit in the youth counterculture. In their rejection of the high modernist aesthetic characteristic of such diverse writers as Rulfo, Fuentes, and Garro, La Onda novels constitute one of the earliest examples of post-Boom narrative. La Onda’s embrace of urban youth culture has in fact served as precursor and influence on the narrative of later Mexican novelists like Juan Villoro, as well as other Spanish-American writers, among them the Colombian Andrés Caicedo, the McOndo group, and in particular, its spearhead the Chilean Alberto Fuguet. The

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Mexican movement’s emphasis on sexual freedom—already present in the Boom and other earlier novelists—would be developed by authors such as Luis Zapata, whose Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel (1978), would help introduce the topic of homosexuality in the Mexican novel. Perhaps spurred by the example of Poniatowska’s populist female-centered writings, the 1980s saw the rise of best-selling female novelists, primarily Ángeles Mastretta, author of Mexican Bolero (1985) and Lovesick (1996), winner of the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Award; and Laura Esquivel, whose internationally successful Like Water for Chocolate (1989), also shows the influence of Gabriel García Márquez and, especially, Isabel Allende (see the General Introduction). Arguably, these writings can be interpreted as a counterpart to the social vision found in the novels of Fuentes and others in that they provide, a gynocentric, though not necessarily feminist, revision of Mexico’s twentieth-century history. One could, perhaps, include Carmen Boullosa in this group of writers, though, in her case, for instance in Cielos de la tierra (1997, Heavens of Earth), historical revision dovetails with formal experimentation and a more clearly articulated feminist perspective. 1996 was the date when Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Ignacio Padilla and Jorge Volpi, published the “Crack Manifesto.” Defined in counterpoint to the Boom—crack meaning bankruptcy or break—their novels, however, did not reject the formal ambition that characterizes the novels of Fuentes and the other Boom masters. Unlike the contemporary McOndo novelists, the Crack attempted to reclaim complexity as central to literary practice: Urroz’s contribution to the manifesto mentions Yañez, Rulfo, Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, etc., among the writers claimed as predecessors. Urroz also envisions the Crack as opposed to the “apocryphally profound” and “apocryphally literary” novels published after the Boom, one assumes by authors like Mastretta and Esquivel. The group’s celebrity was probably helped by the unexpected foreign setting of two of their best-known novels: Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor (1999)—dealing with physics in the 1940s and the Nazi attempt at building an atomic bomb—and Padilla’s Shadow without a Name (2000), which combines the topics of the possible escape of Adolf Eichmann and chess. The manifesto was also an implicit reference to the state of the Mexican economy in the early 1990s, after the oil boom of the 1970s had faded. The economic “crack,” which had begun towards the end of José López Portillo’s administration (1976–82), would be one of the main reasons for the progressive loss of support for the PRI regime. In fact, despite the eventual neoliberal reforms, including the sale of the Government-held telephone monopoly and television stations, which began with President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–8) and were radicalized under Carlos Salinas (1988–94), the country has not achieved any long-term sustained growth. In fact, after a brief boom, economic degradation increased immediately after the end of the Salinas presidency in 1994. Ironically, this “crack” coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which formalized the growing presence of global capital in the country, hence the appositeness of the name taken by the “Crack” group. Perhaps, a more faithful, and critical, reflection of the times, with its post-Onda embrace of international mass culture and of neoliberal economic policies, together

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with the celebration of a potentially radical Zapatista-inflected multiculturalism, is found in novels by authors such as Xavier Velasco in Diablo guardián (2003), with its ironic take on the aping of U.S. traits by Mexico’s middle-class, or Enrique Serna’s Señorita México (1993), a novel that parodies the country’s media and its stars. To this economic crack, one must add the progressive loss of legitimacy of the country’s political system, beginning with the student massacre in 1968, the failure of the government to help the population after the earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985, the probable electoral fraud in 1988 (also novelized), which stole the elections from the left opposition leader Cuahtémoc Cardenas, and, finally, the Zapatista uprising in 1994, which highlighted the mistreatment of indigenous and other minorities. Notions of a civil society, as radically opposed to the state, became central to the liberal democratic consensus progressively developed during these decades. Ironically, though logically, this loss of support for the PRI and the political regime it had instituted led to the victory of the conservative Mexican political party: the explicitly Catholic Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), which came to power in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox, a historic event which broke the PRI stranglehold. If the contemporary Mexican novel developed in a different political and cultural context from its Boom predecessors’—that is, of a center right consensus, and of the opening to and embrace of a globalized economy and mass culture—it also has had as a background, and frequently as a topic, what could be called the “narcotization” of the country’s economy and society. Anomie, violence, and social fear, are among the consequences of the growing presence of drug cartels. Beginning in 1993, Ciudad Juárez became notorious for the numerous unsolved femicides which began taking place there, with over 400 murders and more than 4,000 disappearances between 1993 and 2005 (Araluce 151). In recent years gendered violence, without having vanished, has been overwhelmed by general lawlessness as drug cartels fight among each other for ever greater shares of their markets, while, at the same time, infiltrating the country’s society. For instance, again in Ciudad Juárez, the total number of murders was 3,100 in 2010 (“Death Toll”). The growing violence is a sign of the failure of PAN President Felipe Calderón’s decision to incorporate the military in the struggle to contain the cartels. Perhaps as proof of the still hegemonic center-right consensus, the beneficiary of the failure of the PAN was not the center-left Partido Revolucionario Democrático, but the PRI, whose candidate Enrique Peña Nieto was elected president in 2012. Not surprisingly, this changed reality has found expression in the novel. As is well known, Roberto Bolaño, who had close personal and intellectual ties to Mexico, includes the femicides in his posthumous 2666 (2004). In fact, a whole “narcoliterature” has developed, which includes novelists such as Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’s Tijuana: Crimen y olvido (2010, Tijuana: Crime and Punishment), Élmer Mendoza’s El amante de Janis Joplin (2008, Janis Joplin’s Lover), and also the late Daniel Sada, a novelist included in this book and best known for his linguistic recreation and experimentation, who in his posthumous novel El lenguaje del juego (2012) incorporates the topic. Despite the ominous political, economic, and social turns taken by Mexico in the

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late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the country has maintained the position of a “cultural meridian” of Northern Spanish America, as already identified by the iconic Peruvian Marxist critic José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s. As commentators have already noted (Carrera and Keitzman, Chávez Castañeda and Santajuliana), the vibrancy of the country’s novel leaves no doubt that Mexican literature will continue, in the foreseeable future, to be a bellwether for the contemporary Spanish-American novel. Juan E. De Castro

Works Cited Araluce, Olga Aikin. “Transnational Advocacy, Networks, International Norms, and Political Change in Mexico: The Murdered Woman of Ciudad Juárez.” Human Rights along the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gendered Violence and Insecurity. Kathleen A. Staudt, et al. (eds) Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. 150–67. Carrera, Mauricio and Betina Keitzman. El minotauro y la sirena. Entrevistas-ensayos con nuevos narradores mexicanos. Mexico City: Lectorum/CONACULTA, 2001. Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo and Celso Santajuliana. La generación de los enterradores II. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 2003. “Death Toll in Drug-Plagued Mexican Border City Tops 3100.” 15 December 2010, EFE. Web. Palou, Pedro Ángel et al. “Manifiesto del Crack (1996).” In Ricardo Chávez et al. Crack. Instrucciones de uso. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2004. 207–24.

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Mario Bellatin (Mexico, 1960) “What kind of horror has been capable of engendering writing like this?” (Biografía 46), wonders the narrator of Biografía ilustrada de Mishima (2011, An Illustrated Biography of Mishima) upon seeing Bellatin’s 1999 Salón de belleza’s (Beauty Salon, 2009) theatrical montage. A reader could ask the same question about any Bellatin narrative, all marked by nihilism. In them, life is reduced to the simple and tedious act of habitually showing up at the office, as happens with the doctor-narrator in 1990’s Damas chinas (Chinese Checkers, 2007); or else it is treated as the painful absurdity that leads Antonio, the protagonist of Efecto invernadero (1992, Greenhouse Effect) to wish he’d never been born; or the narrator of La escuela del dolor humano de Sechuán (2005, The Szechuan School of Human Pain) to prefer crib death. This rejection of the world, reinforced by the conviction “that the only thing real was a gaping void. An unfathomable and infinite space” (Biografía 49), increases in his recent autobiographical fiction, even to the point of considering “suicide a valid option. Not as a decision, but rather as a desperate dimension of things.” (La jornada de la mona y el paciente [The Monkey and the Patient’s Day], 2006 36). Los fantasmas del masajista (2009, The Masseur’s Ghosts) and Biografía, assembled in La clase muerte (2011, The Death Class) end with this terrible possibility. This roaring nothingness, inscribed in the answer to the question about the relationship between authors and their work, is not a personal matter, and in his case is only now attracting international attention (Rohter). Bellatin knows it: nihilism is modernity’s dark side and has everything to do with secularization, as is noted in “La mirada del pájaro transparente” (The Transparent Bird’s Gaze) and in Jacobo el mutante (2002, Jacob the Mutant). There, some Muslim youths must execute their parents, who, seduced by the innovations experienced by their society, idolize money and forget that God is one and the same for everyone. Here, the toppling of the Jewish faith and tradition, not by pogroms, but rather by the ways of life embraced by the surviving generations, is expressed. But nihilism also has to do with the fallibility and impotence of science, the most advanced expression of reason, and the key to modernity. This is what is suggested in Flores (2004, Flowers), a novel in which Bellatin thematizes his being a victim of Thalidomide, a condition which permeates the entire narrative. Above all else, it has to do with the triumph of the State, which, as guarantor of liberty, eventually becomes its warden. That is the climax recreated in the Kafkaesque universe of Canon perpetuo (2001, Perpetual Canon), a place that could be Cuba. And it is also that nightmare in Poeta ciego (1998, Blind Poet) called the Final Citadel, where those affected by transmissible diseases are locked away. It is about a society whose citizens willingly accept their confinement, rejecting freedom, “because living conditions are less difficult than on the outside” (Poeta 11), to the extreme that some even traffic in infected blood in order to be confined.

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Dystopia, embodied in The Poet in his “notebook of hard-to-explain things,” captures the secret nucleus of society: the fear of freedom. The Poet, interested in graffiti and the political slogans chanted by protesting students, refuses, nevertheless, to preside over his Assembly. He’s much more interested in the hierarchical and authoritarian model that the Boy Scouts represent. It is the awareness fearing no longer being subjects in order to become real citizens that allows him to create a religiously inspired Brotherhood. Poeta ciego, divided into seven chapters, like the seven tracts written by The Poet, narrates his life story with grotesque touches: the foundation, the schism after The Poet’s assassination and the annihilation of the Ancient Brethren at the hands of the New Brotherhood, in order to end with the assassination and suicide of its members. In the face of this irrational setting, in the face of a social reality that accentuates the meaninglessness of his incarcerated condition, the only stronghold seems to be the “I” (Berlin 179). As young Werther wrote: “I curl up inside my shell and there I discover a whole world.” Possibly, no other novel of Bellatin’s better reflects this transit than La escuela… . Complex, perhaps the most cryptic of his works, it is an exercise in writing, to use his own words, in which it is difficult “to discern the differences between plot, characters, time, space” (“Condición” 22) and other analytical categories of literary theory. It’s a transgeneric text, as much an unusual and dramatic text as it is an unusual novel, made up of fragments—minimal scenes, minimal narrative sequencing—that only at the end can be integrated into a whole. Impenetrability is born of the represented world’s strangeness, China, and fundamentally, the constant shifts in narrator, a complexity to which is added the fact that these narrators in turn are characters who shift identities; an assortment of different, yet identical ones. The chaos begins to dissolve when, among the different stories, it becomes possible to recognize the story that functions as a frame: it’s the one about the boy with the prosthetic arm, whose father beats him senseless for failing in school and, above all else, for the suffering that his son’s handicap brings upon him and whose mother locks him in his room: “Before she retires to her bedroom, he asks her that she open, even just a little, the window so he can hear the echoes of a television set turned on in some neighboring house” (La escuela 20). In that room, prison and refuge, shell of subjectivity, the boy has the distance and protection he needs to daydream and to try to comprehend the world through fiction. He can understand that the family contains, like a nut, the social whole, that pain is a school that allows people to submit or that prepares them for adverse situations and that it can even open up unsuspected possibilities, like that of the volleyball players who, upon having their fingers amputated, discover that they can spike the ball much harder with their stumps. On the other side of that small open window is China, which is also Mexico (where he was born and had a writing fellowship from 1999 to 2005) or Cuba (where he studied screenplay writing) or Peru, where he lived with his Peruvian parents. In China the boy becomes the leader and founder of the school of human pain, and also the younger son, whose testicles may or may not have been amputated as well as the girl (perhaps the castrated boy) who drowns the third child of each family, as the country’s demographic policy

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demands. Paradoxically, from the cave of subjectivity, the boy—who at the same time is also an adult—observes social reality with clarity and perceives throughout history—empire, popular republic and democratic transition—a constant of meaninglessness: “(…) children should obey their parents almost blindly. From the most remote of ancient times every theory has been directed toward this end” (La escuela 37). If the momentary distancing from the world does not offer any valid pretext, the only thing that works is to penetrate the deepest passages of the “I.” This means an ambiguous gesture. It can be limited to a hedonistic withdrawing. But it can also be a search; something close to Schelling’s doctrine, latent in most modern artistic concepts, that postulates that “the function of the artist consists of delving deep within himself, in going within the dark and unconscious strengths that inhabit him and bring them to the light of conscience by way of a violent and agonizing internal struggle” (Berlin 135). This search is present throughout all of Bellatin’s works. We already encountered it in his first novel, Las mujeres de sal (1986, Women of Salt), which presents many of the most characteristic traits in his writing. Those who search here are an old gardener, Brother Francisco, somewhat retarded and very given to religion; two women, Dorila, determined to find her roots, and Beatriz, in attaining the beauty of what exists within her care; “people who have not let themselves be defeated” (Las mujeres 25) and whose labor, opines the painter Andrés Montiel, “was analogous to my own search within art” (Las mujeres 25). It is this analogy which allows him to have the women embark on a collective project that ends in failure. In reality, the true protagonist is Montiel. Faced with “the fatuous and the intranscendent of his era” (Las mujeres 29), he searches through his own media for “a higher order” (104). In the risky process he abandons painting and sinks into a state of “self-destruction” (15) and “[I] couldn’t find anything that would redeem me enough to keep on existing” (24). Until he stumbles upon the garden that Beatriz and Brother Francisco are tending and finds what he’s been looking for. The obscure explanation that he gives to Ricardo, his disciple and double, who is also looking for “that which does not give itself up” (15)—a task “driven by something that is beyond us” and “driven toward something sublime” (25), “fusion between man and nature,” “inanimate objects to those in which something akin to the soul awakens” (Las mujeres 24)—suggests a sort of plenitude or transcendence that brings art closer to religion, like what occurred with Spanish-American modernism. That progression allows for remembering that the analogy between writing and other activities will be the foundation of the Dynamic School of Writers, which Bellatin directs, and, whose El arte de enseñar a escribir/The Art of Teaching Writing is a group poetics by its professors and students. If symbolism is perceptible as well in the figure of Andresito, the innocent murdered child, “son” of the virgin Dorila (the coincidence of her name cannot be casual), the artist, betrayed as well by his disciple Ricardo, is elevated to the category of redeemer Christ. Las mujeres is, then, an artist novel, in which art and the artist are sacralized, as happened in Spanish-American modernism. And it is that “the relationship between art and nihilism reaches an indescribably

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more profound zone than that in which the poetics of aestheticism and decadence move through” (Agamben 97). Seen this way, it cannot be surprising that Bellatin would title one of his fictitious autobiographies, included in the Duchampesque El gran vidrio: tres autobiografias (2007, The Great Glass: Three Autobiographies) “A character modern in appearance” or that in La jornada de la mona y el paciente we would read: “…the analyst’s techniques, all too modern in appearance […] come from those manuscripts” (41), from the texts of ancient mystics. Regarding Las mujeres, one could say that the same thing that the narrator of Jacobo affirms about one of Joseph Roth’s apocryphal novels: “(…) it would be somewhat hasty to consider this text as a work of apprenticeship, since in some way the previous books are marked by the narrative lines that are present in this novel” (Jacobo 17–18). Indeed, the works written after Las mujeres are, in good measure, artist novels, that proceed to tilt themselves to the point that the artist becomes Mario Bellatin himself. But from the beginning, though veiled, his presence is constant. In Efecto invernadero, which recreates the death of Peruvian poet César Moro, called Antonio here, he lets himself be glimpsed, still a child, when a doctor orders a radical treatment to cure the mysterious illness that prevents him from moving one of his arms: “keeping the healthy arm tied down with a cord” (Efecto 10). The blind Poet acquires an identical doubling condition in the dream described in the last pages of the “little notebook” when, trying to move his right arm, he feels that it’s inert, as though it were a phantom limb. Even in Las mujeres his shadow is projected in the second chapter, which deals with the hospital basements where prosthetics are made and where an artist—presumably Montiel—goes to take notes. In Flores he does not yet have his own name, but he’s already “the writer protagonist of this story” (Flores 12), although here it’s not an arm but rather a leg that he’s missing. Finally, it will be in Lecciones para una liebre muerte (2005, Lessons for a Dead Hare) where he will appear as “mario bellatin.” It could be expected that the use of his name corresponds to the discovery of a subjective solidity to cling to; although the lowercase letters do suggest that the personal is also general. The writer “mario bellatin,” established as the first-person narrator, is someone who is sick, with memory and temporal confusion problems. He has lost the ability to organize his past into a coherent recounting; thus his discourse’s reliability is questionable. It would be difficult to expect that such a subject’s cultural production would yield any result other than a collection of fragments. A Meccano-novel, it ends with the understanding that its numerous stories, in a complex game of doubles, are like the distorted reflections in a broken mirror, although it is not clear who the person looking into it is. That is to say, Bellatin brilliantly thematizes identity’s dilution, the so-called death of the subject, while at the same time explaining the schizophrenic nature of postmodern writing. Nevertheless, in a project that identifies life and writing, like the artist novel, this discovery is not perceived as an achievement of the intellect, but as an existential disgrace. That death of the subject runs contrary to the writer Bellatin’s wishes, which in the face of current theories in literature, defended by him up until then, reject “the death of the author,” in a (supposed) text that hasn’t yet appeared, titled Yo soy el autor de este libro (I am the author of this book) as well as in “Lo raro es ser un escritor raro”

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(The Odd Thing is Being an Odd Writer). “This need to affirm the author’s presence” (“Lo raro” 120) responds to the efforts to assure that this will keep the subject alive. The agony is such that his last eight books up until 2012 are auto-fictions. Possibly, none of them deals more firmly with that dramatic relationship than La jornada. Here, the one doing the telling and writing remains anonymous, but a name ends up not being necessary. At times it seems to be the analyst, at other times his wife; and others the one being analyzed himself, as though a sort of transference were occurring and confusing them. Little by little it becomes evident that the narrator is the character undergoing analysis, referring to himself as “the patient.” This is regarding the author of Salón, who, when he stops taking some pills, falls into a state of panic and fears losing his identity, since he feels that something has broken inside of him, and he contemplates suicide. He turns to the analyst to get rid of “the agony and the internal drama, thus preserving the writing, that for sure” (La jornada 19). The discourse not only again poses the idea of pain as a germ of and a catalyst for fiction, as in La escuela, but besides that, highlights, perhaps against the feelings of the narrator, writing’s priority over the person: “[…] writing as the most important point of existence. As though his being were only an excuse for writing to exist […] Writing is better than you, it is perhaps the premise.” (La jornada 19). One lives to write, then. The problem is that the patient Bellatin is prevented from doing so, too blocked by fear and angst to find an out. The novel ends with this question: “Would he be able to begin to write?” (La jornada 53). The writer’s situation is similar to that of the monkey that he bought when he was a child and that he locked in a cage on the rooftop. It’s also similar to his father’s situation. The monkey manages to escape and jump into the void. The father also jumped, to catch the monkey, but he only reaches nothingness, splattering against the pavement. Oppressed by the guilt the memory induces, Bellatin knows that he must look for an out, like the monkey, though he runs the risk of dying, like his father. In fact, his situation when he goes to the analyst is much closer to that of his father. “By any chance, did this shrink even notice that I was dead?” (La jornada 45). Regarding the final question, “the key to everything, I’m more than certain, is found in writing itself, provided that this writing is taken into consideration in its prophetic nature. Everything is written” (La jornada 21). If everything is written, even when it’s being written, it has already been written. The future, strictly speaking, does not exist. Attentive reading allows for comprehension, against the impression of immediacy, that that which is narrated—psychoanalytic therapy—occurred many years before the text we’re now reading was written: “I don’t know why I took so many years, some fourteen or fifteen, to associate the room, that the analyst calls an office, with the room located in the market area, where the man surrounded by hundreds of caged animals lived” (La jornada 47). The key, again, is in writing. That is to say, the text itself posits the affirmative answer to the question at the end of the story. And it is, besides, the work of someone who’s been resuscitated, given that the patient has the diagnosis of a terminal disease hanging over him. Curiously, this intelligent rewriting of Kafka’s memorable “Report for an Academy,” a tale tormented by nihilistic desperation, ends up being Bellatin’s

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most optimistic text, the one in which salvation is attained, which is here a philosophical not theological category, a text closer to what Jameson calls a “providential novel.” But it deals with a transitory salvation, the writing is barely a “refuge capable of making the desperation diminish” (“Disecado” [Dissected] 31), but not disappear. In fact, Bellatin is convinced that he will not find any certainty in taking refuge in the deepest passages of subjectivity; that it doesn’t make sense to be “the act of writing and, not even, that of being alive” (“Lo raro” 123). Even so, in light of this rejection of the world, of this life not lived—“The impeccable Japanese professor ended his intervention affirming that Mishima [that is to say, Bellatin] had never really existed” (Biografía 50)—art, writing, offers at least “the possibility of traversing a space that’s parallel to reality, subject to its own rules” (“Condición” 9), of dreaming or living other possible lives, “all of my possible lives” (11). Those possible Bellatins are his auto-fictions’ protagonists and, at the same time, “the personalities needed to keep on writing” (“Un personaje” 159); because that and no other is the principal objective of writing: “I think that my true interest is present there, in the possibility of generating new writing” (“Condición” 22), given that the core of real biography “would be each one of the books that I’ve published” (“Un personaje” 158). It’s not odd that writing ends up being defined as “that strange exile” (Biografía 24), nor that the abject universe represented in Bellatin’s novels should be “the height of reality” (Biografía 46); or even more so, “true reality,” gifted “with a luminosity and transcendence that everyday life lacks” (“Disecado” 17). The inevitable consequence is the need to belong to that universe, gifted with meaning “in order to live fully” (Biografía 46), in order to reach “full existence” (“Disecado” 17). In this way, the auto-fictions of the last period are justified and that subject’s evolution ends up more and more distanced from an eroded world: in “Disecado” an ancient Bellatin’s ghost appears to the current Bellatin to finish showing himself to be like “an old and wrinkled sheet of paper” (58), that is to say, like a paper entity, and in “El pasante del notario Murasaki Shikibu” (Murasaki Shikibu’s Notary Clerk) the first-person narrator (perhaps one could think of him as Bellatin himself) turns out to be the character in a literary work by Margo Glantz, transformed into the writer Murasaki Shikibu and at the same time into a notary clerk. In this feverish daydream, the Bellatin character and narrator acquires consciousness of his alienation and loneliness as the last lines of his most recent novel, El libro uruguayo de los muertos (2012, The Uruguayan Book of the Dead) will attest, once again: “[…] I don’t want to write anymore. I don’t want to live anymore. I will be only a character, as perhaps a Muslim child in a mosque predicted, one more character in El libro uruguayo de los muertos” (El libro 276). More than thinking about the prophetic nature of writing, so often mentioned by the novelist, it is fitting to think about the completion of the project foretold in Las mujeres: “self-destruction is often the product of a rational process” (Las mujeres 15), that Ricardo fears for Montiel and for himself. The longing for what never was remains in deception, the unfulfilled search, even as a continuity of the work can be perceived. Between Montiel’s project to live life through art, in Las mujeres, and the intention of living within art, in the same texts, more than

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25 years have gone by, but each novel published corroborates the author’s convictions: “Each one of the books is some aspect of a book that I’ve been editing ever since I was child …” (“Condición” 13). Knowing that unity makes it clear that Bellatin not only structures each novel, but rather that total book as “a precise game of observations, echoes and affinities” (Borges 259). A particularly striking case is the mention of an apartment, located on the top floor of a building, through whose window a strange and clumsy character enters. The sequence appears in 1998’s Poeta and is taken up again in “Disecado” 13 years later. Only then does it become clear who the apartment belongs to and why there was an automatic respirator in it. Perhaps Lecciones and Condición de las flores (2008, The Flowers’ Condition) are, by their very nature, the novels which best illustrate this conception of writing. In Lecciones, which repeats Flores’ narrative structure, based on the number of different stories that make up a whole, the characters, storylines and themes of previously published novels are glimpsed, until it all turns into the same writing, into one and the same book. In it, Las mujeres, Efecto, Salón, Poeta, and Flores are all easily recognizable. In a more obvious way than in others of Bellatin’s texts, Lecciones represents the provisional nature of his thought process; what seems to conform to the poetics expounded upon in the “Prologue” to El arte de enseñar a escribir: “[…] a text, as we are used to understanding it, tends to become blurry in order to give way to processes more than results” (El arte 13). In a work that’s conceived of and completed in terms of a continuing process, Lecciones is a kind of stop in the road where one has to look back in order to be able to synthesize. This trait is even more explicit in Condición, which, on the other hand, closes a series of novels that formally take on the aspect of literature in the second degree: El jardín de la señora Murakami (2000, Mrs. Murakami’s Garden), is introduced as the translation of a Japanese narrative, Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficción (2001, Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction), a critical study by Bellatin about the life and works of an author he has created, just like Jacobo el mutante is a Borgesian report about an apocryphal novel by Roth. His Obra reunida (2005, Collected Works) already published, Condición de las Flores, subtitled “Apostillas” (Comments), supposedly gathers together some texts typed by Bellatin on his portable Underwood; they would be the drafts of Canon, Efecto, and Poeta, annotated and interpreted by an Argentine researcher, Graciela Goldchluk, who takes part in the novelist’s game. This apocrypha—if only because of what its editing date refers to—is a good example of the way that Bellatin takes up his texts again and reworks them. The work and art of rewriting can range from the simple mention of characters belonging to another novel, with which Bellatin’s universe expands, to the combination of themes, stories, structures, and even novels, as occurs with Lecciones. This rewriting gives this entire book an abstract palimpsest-like character, but also a certain repetitive aspect. Nevertheless, what confers upon each one of the books the right to form part of Bellatin’s total novel or book? More than the recognizable universe of deformed bodies, missing members, family violence or changes in identity, is the will that brings them to life: fill the void, nothingness, with words (not simply writing):

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“Each time that Mishima wanted to fill the surfaces on which he was writing with words […]” (Biografía 26, my emphasis). Despite the admitted tedium, the presumed defeat, each text is a gesture of resistance. It is not unusual that Bellatin highlights the singular character of his novels in the face of their chaotic, disjointed appearance. It is this type of text, in the face of reality’s stuttering chaos, that pushes him to want to be only a literary character. This is the compensatory nature of these daydreams that can come to be terrible, frightening, but that, unlike the world, can reveal a meaningful order. The secret hope of this resistant attitude is that that meaning be the reflection or the refraction of the meaning of reality, perhaps safeguarded by a saturation of occurrences, as noted in “Condición.” In other words, the implications that can be derived from the structure allow for an understanding of the importance that Bellatin attributes to it in his texts. Beyond the spatial and numerical arrangement of the significant connections between the diverse plots, structure is first and foremost the order of knowledge and, perhaps, the order of being. So then, the author must be “attentive to the murmur of the text, to the rules that can be derived from its essence” (“Condición” 16), in such a way that the form should be the expression of the content, as with Lecciones, which thematizes the dilution of the subject or in “La verdadera enfermedad de la Sheika” (The Sheika’s True Illness), in which the dervish Bellatin, with his narrative gyrations manages to make it so that everything is the same thing: dream and reality, fiction and reality; and there is no present, past or future, since everything is written. Now, then, the possible ontological meaning that can be derived from the structural order is questioned by the nature of his narrators, often de-authorized. Compulsive liars, the sick, the stubborn, tell their stories “from a lack, a shortage, in its meanings of void as well as of infraction” (“Lo raro” 109), like the narrator of Damas, a negligent doctor or killer father. That effort to point out the gaps and silences, “to write without writing,” explains the rejection of traditional narrative structures and the use of different word resources, primarily photography, the “Occurrences of writing” (“Disecado” 19). Perhaps the order that is found is nothing more than the desire that that order exist. In the face of doubt, Bellatin, like Descartes, believes that “there’s no resource other than to take cover under a transcendent order” (“Lo raro” 110), to convert to Sufism, if we are to believe what we read in “Disecado,” “so that his literary doubts were addressed in a definitive way: nothing less than the way of mysticism” (21). It is the paradox of a contemporary novelist who, as the Spanish-American modernists did with occultism and theosophy, has searched for an aesthetic function in religion, but also an answer to the evolution of the world, forgetting what Kafka called “the matter of the writer”: “Perhaps it is possible, I don’t know, that a man who controls chaos could begin to write; these would be sacred books; or could love; this will be love for, not fear of chaos” (Kafka 240); that is to say, it wouldn’t be literature. Bellatin’s most recent novel is Gallina de madera (2013, Wooden Hen). Francisco J. López Alfonso

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Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. El hombre sin contenido. Trans. Alicia Viana Catalán. Barcelona: Ediciones Áltera, 1998. Bellatin, Mario. Las mujeres de sal. Lima: Lluvia Editores, 1986. —Efecto invernadero. Lima: Jaime Campodónico Editor, 1992. —Poeta ciego. Mexico City: Tusquets, 1998. —Jacobo el mutante. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002. —Flores. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004. —La escuela del dolor humano de Sechuán. Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2005. —“Lo raro es ser un escritor raro.” Pájaro transparente. Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2006. 105–24. —La jornada de la mona y el paciente. Oaxaca: Editorial Almadía, 2006. —“Un personaje en apariencia moderno.” El gran vidrio. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2007. 121–65. —“Prólogo.” El arte de enseñar a escribir. Ed. Mario Bellatin. Mexico City: Escuela Dinámica de Escritores/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. 9–13. —“Condición de las flores.” Condición de las flores. Apostillas. Buenos Aires: Entropía, 2008. 7–29. —Biografía ilustrada de Mishima. La clase muerta. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2011. 9–91. —“Disecado.” Disecado. Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2011. 9–64. —El libro uruguayo de los muertos. Barcelona: Sexto Piso, 2012. Berlin, Isaiah. Las raíces del romanticismo. Trans. Silvina Marí. Madrid: Taurus, 2000. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1932. “El arte narrativo y la magia.” Obras Completas I. Barcelona: Círculo de lectores, 1992. 254–60. Jameson, Fredric. El realismo y la novela providencial. Trans. Julían Jiménez Heffernan. Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2006. Kafka, Franz. Cartas a Max Brod (1904–1924). Trans. Pablo Diener-Ojeda. Madrid: Grijalbo Mondadori, 1992. Rohter, Larry. “A Mischievous Novelist with an Eye and an Ear for the Unusual.” The New York Times. August 10, 2009. C1.

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Carmen Boullosa (Mexico, 1954) Carmen Boullosa has written a remarkable variety of novels. From brief to long narratives and from remote histories to dystopic science fiction, her literary project has persistently renewed itself across some 15 novels in 25 years (1987–2012). This intrepid writing does not lend itself to imitation. As Boullosa herself notes, she is not a “model writer,” and her work can be “sometimes disagreeable, caustic, even unpopular” (de Beer 189). Certainly, few writers take the risks that she habitually assumes, such as sharply irregular chapter structures, complex and even invented vocabulary, inserted illustrations, and open-ended plots that unsteady themselves through multiple, argumentative narrators. She has remarked that her prose is “wilder” than she perhaps intends (de Beer 178). Despite the often anxious stylistics, in person Boullosa conducts herself graciously and delivers thoughtful and calm conversation. Thanks in part to an active public relations effort, she has inspired more academic interest than any other living Mexican woman writer of experimental tendencies, with the possible exception of the ten-years-younger Cristina Rivera Garza.* Rivera Garza and Boullosa write poetry as well as novels, now reside in the U.S., and teach at the university level. Boullosa has earned numerous grants and awards, from the early Salvador Novo fellowship, to later induction into the Mexican System of National Creators, a Guggenheim fellowship and two German awards. Despite the analogous professional curriculums, Boullosa and Rivera Garza are hardly identical. Boullosa cares more than Rivera Garza for developed character psychology, a preference perhaps coached by work in the genres of theater, children’s literature, and autobiography. Her novels also flirt more legibly with a heterosexual romance plot, as in the novels La otra mano de Lepanto (2005, The Other Hand of Lepanto), La virgen y el violín (2008, The Virgin and the Violin) and Las paredes hablan (2010, The Walls Speak). The array of her novelistic approaches, from the experimental to the straightforward, logically elicits a wide variety of critical reactions. Christopher Domínguez Michael finds her work both fascinating and irritating, sometimes “within the same book” (59). He labels two currents in Boullosa’s texts that call forth these distinct moods. On the one hand, she writes didactically with a “very professional command of history and fiction,” which can create frustratingly “academic” novels that defend a mission (59). On the other hand, Domínguez Michael enjoys what he calls the streak of erotic confession in Boullosa’s work, apparently linked to her commendable talents as a “savage poet” (59). The alternately smart and savage literature strikes a chord with graduate students, who have discovered that Boullosa’s “professional command” of the literary tends to supply an almost readymade dissertation analysis. In fact, simply venturing a summary of Boullosa’s plots can make one sound learned.

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The best point of departure for studying her novelistic production is not the first novel, Mejor desaparece (1987, Better Disappear), a rambling dysfunctional family narrative, but the slim second novel Antes (1989, Before), winner of the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia prize and translated into French and German. The mesmerizing Antes turns on the implicit question, “What horrid fate awaits a girl if she is afraid to mature into a woman?” In response Antes recalls by turns an idyllic and tortured Catholic childhood in Mexico City for an anonymous girl protagonist born in 1954, the same year as Boullosa. The novel recreates a capital that seems still familiar, with the ducks in a lake in the park (an unnamed Chapultepec, the author confirms in a recent email), the Liverpool department store in the Historic Center, and the bullyinfested schools run by English-speaking nuns who teach Catholic lessons—an illegal pedagogy during that time of official secularism. This grounding in recognizable mid-twentieth-century Mexican history makes all the more chilling Boullosa’s gothic experimentation, and Antes features fantastic, nonverbal “footsteps” and other enigmatic noises that persecute the girl protagonist. Jean Franco comments that Antes shares with the first novel an atmosphere of paranoia, although she wonders whether the word “paranoia” imposes too great a structure on the vagueness of Boullosa’s second novelistic achievement (24). Like the unnamable and threatening “that” (eso) of the unruly Mejor desaparece, the noises in the better-edited Antes remain indefinite, as “intuitions” according to Franco’s description (24). Significantly, illness and maturity among females come to be confused over the course of Antes. In what might be termed a “gothic creep” fueled in part by the protagonist’s love for comic books about the lives of saints, the steps at first fatally stalk a child classmate and then the protagonist’s mother, strangely called Esther and not “Mom.” Lastly, the sounds catch up to the protagonist during what appears to be the onset of menstruation. The ambiguous conclusion of the novel describes the girl’s “death,” and that metaphorical ending means that from the beginning, the autobiographical narrator functions in spectral fashion, as the grotesque remains of that destroyed girlhood. The beautifully, poetically, misshapen Antes predicts the startling originality contained in the string of brief novels that follow. For example, They’re Cows, We’re pigs (1991) relates a jaded pirate history that has inspired innumerable academic articles, not to mention translations. The untranslated Llanto: novelas imposibles (1992, Weeping: Impossible Novels) supplies its enthusiastic critics with a constantly collapsing, constantly recommencing, text of an odd temperament, ostensibly about the impossible return of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma to late twentieth-century Mexico City. La milagrosa (1993, The Miracle-Worker, 1994), translated into several other languages, modifies the political thriller by keeping the text brief, avoiding a resolution, and basing the plot on miracles. Finally, Duerme (1994, Sleep) spins a slight sixteenth-century Sleeping Beauty tale that warps into a gender-bending fantasy without a happy ending and has also attracted translations. As the plot summaries of these four short novels indicate, each text hinges on an academic conceit, and that hypothesis—more a provocative question than a controlling thesis statement—develops in a series of doubts and discrepancies until each novel arrives at its final irresolution. The unfamiliar novels hold up to multiple readings and even improve with the reader’s increasing fluency in Boullosa’s novelistic aesthetics.

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Even with the gothic and experimental moods operant in her work, not all is wild invention in her fictional world. For example, the death of the mother character in Antes forms a biographical parallel with the sudden passing of Boullosa’s mother, also named Esther, when the future novelist was fifteen years old. Some five years after her mother’s death of a suspected brain tumor in 1969, Boullosa lost a younger sister to a lethal traffic accident. In between these awful events, the writer left home, spurred by conflict with her father’s young second wife, whose description in one interview vaguely resembles that of the housekeeper in Antes, a domestically dull young woman described as an ass (Pfeiffer 32, Boullosa 84). An autobiographical essay available online, “Mis cadáveres” (My Cadavers), further recounts the details of Boullosa’s unusual life story, including her background as the daughter of deeply Catholic parents who belonged to the Opus Dei and who took their children on missionary work in rural Mexico. As a result of that intensely religious upbringing, the young Boullosa believed that she would levitate when she took her first communion: “My disappointment was terrible,” she reports (Ochoa Sanday 292). In that interview she also remarks that her desire for mystical experience did not find an outlet until adolescence and adulthood, when she discovered eroticism (292). Thus, although from a relatively young age Boullosa strayed from her family’s religious convictions, her otherwise defiant novels retain the Catholic influence of allegories, mysticisms, and ambivalence about the body. That last subject, the body, supplies an elegant tool to organize her work. Claire Taylor has noted the tendency in Boullosa’s writing to convert the body into an intellectual problem. For example, Taylor writes of Duerme that “the body is never simply self-evident” (“Geographical” 228). If in Antes, the narrator “dies” after her first period starts, in Duerme, a novel set some four centuries earlier, the protagonist, Claire Fleurcy, a prostitute looking for a new life in New Spain who falls victim to death by hanging, magically survives by virtue of an indigenous medical cure. Claire is relieved of her pesky mortality when an Indian healer replaces the blood in her veins with enchanted water. This cure has a limiting condition: Claire loses consciousness, as per the title, if she leaves the Valley of Mexico. In evidence of Boullosa’s enduring sense of humor, the undead Claire ends up leading an army into battle while asleep on horseback because she has exceeded her perimeter of conscious existence. An underlying theme in Duerme touches on Boullosa’s steadfast refusal to imagine a thriving woman intellectual—whether artist or social leader—who would also be biologically normative. That is, Antes and Duerme reveal the ideological obstacle that Boullosa seems to encounter in fiction when sensitive characters fill the role of thinker: they lose their capacity for normative sexual reproduction. Before reviewing additional novels that address the cerebral, non-reproducing body of Boullosa’s tormented imaginary, it seems relevant to cite her early conviction that women could not be simultaneously adequate intellectuals and mothers. Boullosa, now the mother of two grown children, admits in various interviews that until an irrepressible urge to procreate struck her around age 30, she did not believe that women could have a domestic life and be serious artists (Pfeiffer 43). In a related observation, the early Boullosa insists on her nature as a “man writer” rather than

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a “woman writer,” because she does not publish romance, domestic, or otherwise formulaic “women’s” fiction (Ibsen 53, 54). Given this initial ambivalence over integrating motherhood and artistic work, it is not surprising that Boullosa’s novels continually complicate and even redesign embodied existence. For example, the girl protagonist of Antes believes that Esther, despite having given birth to her, is not her “real” mother. Perhaps not coincidentally, Esther is a painter, and the difficulty of being an artist and a mother may influence the narrative need for Esther to die. This lack of continued genealogy and reliable relationships for the main characters also affects the plot in Boullosa’s third published novel, They’re Cows… . This examination of a seventeenth-century all-male pirate community introduces the unnamed former prostitute who will become Claire Fleurcy in Duerme, although the pirate tale is set nearly a hundred years after Duerme begins. Like Duerme, They’re Cows… plays with the impossibility of accurately knowing the past, although like Antes it largely rejects nostalgia. The titular “pigs,” the laissez-faire pirates on the Island Tortuga who decline the placid ways of the bourgeois settlers, or “cows,” form loving homosexual couples, but as a group the pirate “pigs” cannot resist exercising serious injustices on one another, not to mention on the hapless colonists and natives who suffer piratical rapes, murders, and looting. In response, one of the memorable scenes of physical violence has vengeful natives begin to eat the body of a despised sadistic pirate, a former abused slave, while he is still alive and able to watch (170). The range of pitiless crimes that the pirates enact on others’ bodies, alongside their brutality that alternates with the ideal of brotherly love, echoes Boullosa’s novelistic discomfort with the body and the domestic role. Her historical novels could be called “historiophobic” because they decry and flee the notion of history whenever they are not chasing after it. Thus, They’re Cows… unfolds not so much as an immediate adventure tale, but more as a distanced meditation on the hopelessness of trying to craft reliable historical fiction. Besides the impossible narrative by the dead pirate, cited above, another narrative voice interrupts the novel at one point to deny the veracity of facts already delivered. This alternating affirmation and denial of narrated events also characterizes the approach in later historical novels such as Cleopatra Dismounts (2002), a fragmented version of Cleopatra’s frustrated life story, told from her perspective and that of her reminiscing aged scribe, and the untranslated La otra…, also about the doomed adventures of a non-white woman in a man-made world. In the atypically protracted second work, lively protagonist María proves a quixotic type, by turns a skilled storyteller, love interest, and expert swordswoman of Arabic origin in Habsburg Spain. As the intertextual relationship with Cervantes’s character “La gitanilla” (The Little Gypsy Girl) anticipates, La otra… merits special mention as an ambitious dialogue with Early Modern Spanish literature. However, these later historical novels do not necessarily trump the early achievements of the short novels, since the longer texts simply revisit more extensively the “historiophobic” experiment. As evinced by the constant undermining of and distraction from the would-be affirmations about the known past, Boullosa fashions historical narrative as if by way of an artificial limb whose alien manipulation proves at least as interesting as the material she intends to narrate by it.

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In the 1990s, critics sometimes referred to Boullosa’s work as “postmodernist,” and this quality of uncertain pastiche can be seen in the political caper The Miracle…, released in between They’re Cows… and Duerme. Like the other novels, The Miracle… boasts numerous self-reflective voices and poses itself as a roughly assembled compilation of found papers that plausibly describe fantastic events. The text also ducks the notion of the biologically normative body. The protagonist, Elena, begins the novel as a late-twentieth-century virgin who attends the faithful at her home in the impoverished area of Santa Fe in Mexico City. The miracles she brings about appear to include advancing or decreasing the supplicants’ age and making “normal” the petitioners’ unusual bodies—the latter somewhat less of an insult to Disability Studies than it might seem, given the tediousness of the task for Elena. This miracle-working virgin grants these petitions by way of nighttime dreams that come true and which she does not fully control. Once Elena realizes that her gift has aided a selfish and corrupt politician, she tries to leave the dreamy miracle business in favor of a wide-awake romantic relationship with the detective sent to investigate her. The novel’s conclusion does not detail Elena’s destiny beyond the misty end of the affair, which may mark the vanished hope for a “personal” or private life for the vocation-obsessed Miracle-Worker. Given that the plot thickeners never congeal themselves into a legible solution, it seems acceptable to skip forward to the last bit of the novel, which is narrated by a neighbor in Santa Fe. The neighbor’s final speech clarifies that her connection with the Miracle-Worker is not visible. The idea of the nonmaterial nature of the body surfaces, as the neighbor woman scoffs: “Only blunted souls, unaffected by any degree of intelligence or eroticism conceive of the body as the thing perceived” (132). Relevantly, Boullosa often mentions her characters’ success at dreaming, and throughout her oeuvre, the task of rational thought and the aptitude for creative dreams prove interdependent. As Boullosa develops her literary career, the novels grow longer. Boullosa’s Cielos de la Tierra (1997, Heavens on Earth) rotates among three narrative voices that contribute to a decidedly academic and lengthy novel. Sixteenth-century Hernando, a fictional indigenous character raised with sexually repressive and racist monks at the historically real Colegio de Tlatelolco, leaves a text found by the 1990’s Estela, a researcher at the Colegio de México who shares some biographical characteristics with Boullosa, but not that of motherhood. Neither Hernando nor Estela manages to enter into a relationship with their bodies that could be called comfortable. The third narrator, Lear, reads the manuscript that Estela and Hernando have secretly bequeathed humanity. Given that humankind has been destroyed, Lear’s post-human race of “Atlántidos” is all that is left to ponder the text. Actually, only Lear can read Estela’s and Hernando’s words, because the other members of L’Atlàntide elect to give themselves language-destroying lobotomies. The removal of language from the body unleashes ghastly consequences. Lear’s compatriots lose contact with stable time and space, and they assemble and disassemble themselves at will, a possibility that supports Boullosa’s long-standing interest in surrealist imagery. Taylor writes that in this novel, “the body itself becomes a code” (“Cities” 482). Not only do the Atlántidos lose the stable “code” of their bodies, but also some of them break the prohibition against

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reproduction. In a final escape, Lear decides to create the “Heavens on Earth” of the novel’s title through the abstract solution of a “kesto,” a term in Esperanto for book, which Lear plans to inhabit along with Estela and Hernando. For Margarita Saona, all three narrators’ times have in common a failed hope for language reform: Hernando shifts satisfactorily from his noble family’s culture to the Catholic ways of New Spain, Estela’s generation does not fulfill the promise of sexual freedom and racial justice heralded by the Indian-supportive, Boom-novel-buying movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and, as just described, Lear sees “the Brave New World” of L’Atlàntide disintegrate (227–8). The critiques by Saona and Taylor suggest that in Boullosa’s novels, the failed reformation of codes, of language and the body determine the failure to achieve an always-dreamt-of utopia. Due to the link between the body and language, Boullosa’s compulsively reshuffled “corporal code” almost inevitably leads to the topic of translation. The novels tend to foreground the slide from one code to another, whether in the form of the contradictory intercalated texts in They’re Cows… and The Miracle…, or in the form of alienated bilingual characters, like the protagonists of Antes, Duerme, and Cielos…, or even the German-speaking Mexican editor Delmira de Agustini of Leaving Tabasco (1999). Like Estela in Cielos…, the figure of Delmira in Leaving Tabasco operates as a lonely, childless thinker who turns to autobiographical writing for company. Leaving Tabasco concludes with the aforementioned exile of Delmira de Agustini as she migrates from a warm childhood of “magical real” happenings to a colder adult exile in Germany. Delmira’s unforgivable crime in Mexico is, on one level, that of political activism, which she advocated in her only distributed literary text. On another level, perhaps the more profound, the protagonist commits the mistake of signing that literature with the name of a famous Uruguayan poet. Boullosa’s “Delmira de Agustini” (the Second) condemns herself to derivative status in her own life story by unwittingly borrowing someone else’s name—a perplexing crime, since that name is actually shared and not stolen. In a parallel meditation on an innocent literary infraction, Boullosa seems to use the novel to work out the implicit “plagiary” of following in the footsteps of Boom novelist superstars like Gabriel García Márquez who struck it big with magical realist texts like One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a title mentioned by a disillusioned Delmira: “Imagine my disappointment on flipping through its pages […]” (239). In the same paragraph that discusses One Hundred Years of Solitude, Delmira regrets having failed to write the memoir she would have liked, the one that would have released her “from her idiotic errors” (239). The original title of Leaving Tabasco is Treinta Años, or “Thirty Years,” a sum that tallies a much reduced horizon from García Márquez’s original century. One Hundred… also figures in Cielos… as the text representative of a revolutionary promise that Estela’s generation fails to complete. García Márquez’s novel seems to trouble these two semi-autobiographical narrators imagined by Boullosa, perhaps because for these women characters the literary achievement of the novel cannot be lived up to, and yet it cannot be forgotten. García Márquez’s century seems fated to outlast Boullosa’s narrators’ creative attempts to begin anew. Despite her narrators’ despair for their careers as would-be important intellectuals or writers, Boullosa’s work orients itself to original and consistent internal

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idiosyncrasies. Most strikingly, Antes, They’re Cows…, The Miracle…, Duerme, Cielos…, and Leaving Tabasco, feature alienated narrators, variously disenfranchised from their “tongues,” in the double sense of languages and bodies. These protagonists and narrative voices suffer in the context of cruel and shallow societies that tend to practice sexism, racism, environmental irresponsibility, and even “anti-lingualism,” and in response, the sensitive thinker characters fail to reproduce an intellectual heritage with progeny, students, or some other human genealogy, aside from the reader. Thus, neither translation nor eroticism represents an entirely optimistic, solitude-remedying activity in Boullosa’s novels. More commonly, the texts focus on the impossibility of accurate translation, faithful company, or reliable historical fact. If the twinned notions of translation and the body prove difficult to resolve in Boullosa’s novels, a third thematic wriggles forth from that struggle: the conundrum of the image. Some of the novels fear the image. In Cielos…, suspicion of the word leads to a disastrous nonverbal community. In Antes, nonverbal persecution “kills” the protagonist, and not coincidentally, the novel intercalates a picture of a waterfall as the only possession left from the protagonist’s childhood, and her “death” follows a troubled relationship with a mysteriously appeared painting. In similar fashion, La novela perfecta: Un cuento largo (2006, The Perfect Novel: A Long Story) imagines a scene of technological visual disaster, in which characters in virtual reality begin to exchange body parts and dismember themselves. In more dreadful detail, La novela perfecta postulates the perfect novel as one that takes cinema to the next power, a sort of utterly convincing virtual reality. Since this virtual reality is narrated by way of pure thought rather than words, this languageconscious novel demands the ruin of the machinery, which spins out of control and threatens its creators before it can be shut down. The artistic talent behind the perfect novel, Vertiz, a Mexican in New York who is caught between languages and cultures, develops a second plot-line, the “long story,” referenced in the novel’s subtitle, and the meltdown of the “perfect” novel along with the inspired insertion of the short story come to facilitate an allegory about contemporary humans’ disrespect for the word and greedy desire for the material. That an allegory should surface in the middle of a novel about instability—a novel so unstable that it wanders away from the genre by way of a short story—reveals one of Boullosa’s favorite tensions. Despite her novelistic insistence that history, language, computers, and characters—or “codes”—are unreliable, Boullosa not infrequently indulges in allegory, a trope that assumes a steady separation between manifest and latent levels. The narrators in Antes, Cielos…, and La novela perfecta overtly reclaim the technique of allegory and thus install a potentially hilarious self-invented stability in the midst of persecution, chaos, solitude, and enigma. Somewhat contrary to the stable allegorical lesson of La novela perfecta, which seems to argue that people should keep reading imperfect books rather than trying to buy the “perfect novel” of a new technical platform, Boullosa has the most provocative of the longer novels reject didacticism in favor of the experimental aesthetic of the shorter narratives. That is, despite the accumulating pages in works like Cielos… or El velázquez de París (2007, The Velázquez of Paris)—the latter an adventure tale

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about a painting that does not exist—there is little “progress” made in the plot or the characters’ development. That observation leads to a final discussion of one last text, the deserving winner of the Café Gijón award, El complot de los Románticos (2009, The Romantics’ Conspiracy), which dazzles with neologisms, conflicting narrative voices, and non-progressive plot moves. Domínguez Michael bestows an adjective-strewn, comprehensive, rave review on this novel: “A funny novel with prose that flows like that of her best poems without risking their pathos, El complot… is entertaining, musical, lively, richly vernacular without being crass, learned, witty, and surprising” (60). Indeed, El complot… handily defies even the most elongated threads of critical descriptors. The plot, such as it is, concerns a frustrated narrator’s task of organizing a conference for deceased writers. The narrator is suited to the job because she feels like the living dead, a neologistic “supramuerta” (supra-dead person), due to her unsuccessful writing career and meager personal life. She travels from New York to Mexico City and eventually Madrid, and the intermediary scouting trip provides the excuse for dragging Dante into the twenty-first century in order to give him a tour of the Mexican capital. Dante is shocked by contemporary times, but then, even a living, U.S. poet turns out to be baffled by the experience. This fictional figure spends her time typing on a Blackberry in a frantic attempt to follow the allusions that Dante and the narrator trade. Like Moctezuma who visits Mexico City in Llanto…, Dante in El complot… seems at first unable to take in his surroundings. Eventually, the spectral poet adjusts, and to the prim narrator’s annoyance, he learns to enjoy a music video by Britney Spears, broadcast in a mall where he purchases a casual hipster outfit. Boullosa engineers another opportunity to show off her narrative abilities when, at the conclusion of El complot…, during the end of the conference finally held in Madrid, the dead writers throw their body parts at one another in a surreal, “horripid” (“¡horrípido!”) free-for-all. The body-part fight entertainingly switches out “grammar” for “muscles” (250). This scene, of course, recalls the bodily confusions reviewed in Cielos… and La novela perfecta. The matter of translation almost necessarily accompanies the eccentric body play, and word games emerge in El complot… through astonishingly fresh forms. For example, Boullosa’s narrator breaks the grammatical rules of Spanish and claims that due to the “jigsaw-grammar” (rompegramática) of a scouting trip, it ought to be “wrote up” (escribido) rather than “written up” (escrito) (52). Similarly, Dante has only quirkily “deaded out” (morido) rather than normatively “died” (muerto) (75). Besides the pretext that the presence of undead authors gives Boullosa to destroy and revive language, the loose structure of the novel allows for an intermittent struggle between an author named “Boullosa” and the haplessly inferior woman narrator. Author Boullosa tends to dominate these power plays, and her reward is the steady intromission of sections of autographical narrative. Authority both intrigues and repels Boullosa, as is evident from the seams in her writing that join a rebellious style with an obedient preoccupation for academically approved themes and thorough research. Boullosa writes introspective, self-doubting novels, and yet also pilots a savvy career that involves world travel, lectures and teaching, and a slick internet page. These conflicts in the novels between rebellion and cooperation, isolation and internationalism, brain and body, poetry and preaching,

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might also be couched as an ongoing tussle between informal invention and formal critique. In sum, Boullosa’s novels convince as critical masterpieces, especially when they fall far short of traditional novelistic form. Emily Hind

Works Cited Boullosa, Carmen. The Miracle-Worker. 1993. Trans. Amanda Hopkinson. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. —They’re Cows, We’re Pigs. Trans. Leland H. Chambers. New York: Grove, 1997. —Leaving Tabasco. Trans. Geoff Hargreaves. New York: Grove, 1999. —“Mis cadáveres.” Debate Feminista 14.28 (2003): 23–50. De Beer, Gabriella. “Carmen Boullosa.” Contemporary Mexican Women Writers: Five Voices. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 157–209. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (1955–2010). Trans. Lisa M. Dillman. Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2012. 58–61. Franco, Jean. “Piratas y fantasmas.” In Acercamiento a Carmen Boullosa. Barbara Dröscher and Carlos Rincón (eds). Berlin: Tranvía, Walter Frey, 1999. 18–30. Ibsen, Kristine. “Entrevista a Carmen Boullosa.” Chasqui 24.2 (1995): 52–63. Ochoa Sandy, Gerardo. “Carmen Boullosa.” La palabra dicha: Entrevistas con escritores mexicanos. Mexico: Conaculta, 2000. 291–8. Pfeiffer, Erna. “Yo no tengo misterio, tengo aplicación: Carmen Boullosa.” EntreVistas: Diez escritoras mexicanas desde bastidores. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992. 27–46. Saona, Margarita. “Pierced Tongues: Language and Violence in Carmen Boullosa’s Dystopia.” In Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State. Arturo J. Aldama, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 227–43. Taylor, Claire. “Cities, Codes, and Cyborgs in Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la Tierra.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.4 (2003): 477–92. —“Geographical and Corporeal Transformations in Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.3 (2006): 225–39.

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Álvaro Enrigue (Mexico, 1969) “The road would be long. All roads are long that lead toward one’s heart’s desire.” That line, from Conrad’s The Shadow Line, struck me when I read it, and years ago I jotted it down on a now-faded index card. I classify certain travel books, whether fiction or nonfiction, under that tag. Enrigue’s novel, El cementerio de las sillas (2002, The Chair Cemetery) is one of them. It’s a book, in the author’s own words, faithful to the “art of navigation that—if there’s no battle or storm—consists of staying awake as you fight tedium; that’s what it comes down to and, strangely, that’s also what the sort of enduring, moderate happiness that can be achieved on the high seas is all about.” Enrigue the Navigator tells the story of a family going back to the times of the Cyclopes; treks through North African deserts ruled by Emperor Tiberius; crosses the sixteenth century from Flanders to Mexico’s Puebla; adds to the never-ending stories about Jesuit conspiracies; and finally hones in on a contemporary Mexican family who seem unworthy of their ancient roots. But El cementerio de las sillas is not a “historical novel,” if by that we mean the kind of marketable fiction published by any academic with a degree or two who decides to dramatize some era or other in order to shed Light on the hackneyed conventions of our time. Ever since the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, Spain and Latin America have been plagued by inept historical reenactments: the “discovery” and conquest of America lend themselves beautifully to the art of pulling the wool over readers’ eyes. While it’s true that El cementerio de las sillas takes place in history, the novel’s historiography serves as an indicator of the voyage’s inverted (or lost) time. On a deeper level lies a fictional reality that Enrigue makes credible by presenting us with a poor soul who lives on pizza and desperately wants to escape this century, and the hovel where he lives in Mexico City’s Mixcoac neighborhood. The man, whose surname is Garamántez, is a chip off the old Herodotus—specifically, Histories, book IV, chapters 183–4, in which the historian tells of the fabled Garamantes, an extinct tribe of hunters and farmers who occasionally crop up in mythologists’ conversations. In that vein, Enrigue decided to write a weighty enough adventure story to function also as a meditation on our origins. In El cementerio de las sillas, similar to Melquíades’s last stand in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the beginning is at the end of time. And since the end of this novel pays homage to the grandeur of the American continent, you might be inclined to think it’s a roundabout way of talking about the origins of Mexican identity. I don’t think it is, even though he partially attempts that in his latest novel, the bildungsroman Decencia (2011, Decency). If Enrigue’s soteriology demonstrates anything, it’s his indifference to origins, a sort of inverse manifest destiny. If any old Puebla family can be descendants of the Garamantes, then origins are just a beautiful but useless subterfuge. Enrigue believes in values and, loyal to the

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rhetoric of adventure stories, he exalts courage, friendship, and mestizaje; but none of these attributes imply any sort of overarching quintessence. When he began his voyage, Enrigue was less concerned with foreign lands than with making sure his ship never sailed off course, and he put all of his narrative talent into the endeavor, using a confident, calculated language that sets him apart from other contemporary writers. In El cementerio de las sillas a single voice speaks through its many narrators and protagonists, a voice discernible by its sense of humor and present-day Mexican Spanish. In its conversations, which span centuries, it’s always Enrigue speaking in an ironic falsetto, with crafty suspicion and mestizo pride. Using this language, the novel introduces a powerful cast of characters including Carib Indians, the Flemish Christophorus Gaaramanjik, and his final avatar, the Garamántez who travels to Puebla to solve the mysteries of his ancestry, fending off death with a stack of chronicles, the sort of “suit of armor” only a literature student could conceive of. Critics seem to have formed a certain, often cranky, consensus that there are essentially only two convincing ways to write contemporary short stories. One dates back to Borges and condemns authors to be never-ending commentators; the other prides itself on following Chekov’s method (or Raymond Carver’s, in its more up-to-date manifestation). After reading Hipotermia (2005), published in English as Hypothermia in 2012, I think I can say that Enrigue is one of the few Mexican writers not writing either Borgesian or Chekhovian short stories. In Hipotermia, both publisher and reader—and Enrigue himself—feel the urge to seek some sort of “hybridity” and turn the collection into a novel. Despite the fact that the literary times in which we live celebrate cross-fertilization and tearing down genre boundaries, I think Enrigue is an exemplary short story writer, so good in fact that by unexpectedly leading us into this genre of old, he presents it as if made anew, a species awaiting baptism. He knows it too, and with the self-confidence to which good writers are prone, Enrigue, who has disclaimed his earlier collection Virtudes capitales (1998, Capital Virtues), has no qualms about confessing the secret of his poetics: “It’s something I’ve done since I was a boy: pretend I have a secret life, one that nobody can see. It’s like I’m a blind man in the Bible. Although he regained his sight, he has to pretend he didn’t, because Jesus Christ himself ordered it that way.” All of Enrigue’s fictional talent stems from that statement, and there’s often only one type of narrator in his novels and stories: a man who’s a failed writer and yet pulls all the strings in the comedy of his own life, his alter ego. The creator or hack (or cook in one of the stories) reflects and analyzes so much throughout Hipotermia that I’m tempted to say Enrigue’s only weakness is that he becomes a commentator on his own work, laughing at his own jokes almost as a form of therapy. But it couldn’t have been any other way in this implicitly existential book that traverses a dense emotional jungle; in fact, that’s what was lacking in his first book of short stories, Virtudes capitales, whose three tales have been read as a composite novel. Hipotermia could also be read as a travel novel of a sort, the logbook of an explorer voyaging to the mysterious source of the river. Like Somerset Maugham in the Far East, Enrigue, who in 2011–12 lived in New York, went to Washington, D.C. to

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corroborate and refine his preconceptions about the human condition. These days, on a planet characterized by air traffic, few people have soul-searching experiences when they travel. But the details Enrigue found in Washingtonians (and Dalmatians, in another story) could only appear (in the ghostly sense of the word) to a writer profoundly concerned with issues of moral theology, with unjustified acts that lead us to distinguish good from evil. In the “Grandes finales” section of Hipotermia, Enrigue satisfies his urge (both loving and concerned) to explore lost civilizations and languages. These, too, were the stuff of El cementerio de las sillas. Hipotermia tells one story about the extinction of the last Dalmatian, another story traces the museographic history of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian. These archeological hidden treasures turn Enrigue into a sort of sublimated Egyptologist, making his first novel, La muerte de un instalador (1996, The Death of an Installer) reminiscent of Gautier’s The Mummy’s Foot, where the ruins of postmodernism are symbolic of Antiquity. The notion of fictional character as survivor and repository of a family, a clan, a dynasty, permeates Enrigue’s books. In Hipotermia, failures with happy endings make possible sentences like this one, about the people who lived through the 1985 Mexican earthquake: “Though it might be hard for earlier generations to accept, what we had was a Hemingway-style revolution, (with us) as stretcher-bearers.” Some time ago I read a statement by French poet and essayist Charles Péguy that now seems written expressly to describe Enrigue’s world. “Fathers are the great adventurers of the modern world.” Enrigue’s stories often have father and son as lone heroes, accomplices on an odyssey whose routine ending in Ithaca is one of the great achievements of an author who rejects Carver-style mini-tragedies and instead reduces myths and legends to their most concise, as in “Escenas de la vida familiar” and “Ultraje,” the latter being one of the best Mexican short stories in recent years and worthy of a Terry Gilliam production. By explaining the transformation of a trash truck into a pirate ship, Enrigue presents his own style of metamorphosis, the kind that occurs when a piece of literature turns a literal reading into an Olympic curse. Enrigue’s recent novel Vidas perpendiculares (2008, Perpendicular Lives) is, in a sense, like a second version of El cementerio de sillas, one that perfects that novel’s journey through the centuries in search of a family’s lineage. By establishing the circular nature of his obsessions and then mastering them, Enrigue has set himself apart as a mature writer who has come of age. In the school of contemporary Latin American novelists to which he belongs—and is one of the best of—it is uncommon for a writer to turn down a sure bet, to refuse cliché formulas that attract readers not looking to be challenged. Vida perpendiculares is a historical novel. But not because it traverses the three ages (the divine, the heroic, and the human) into which early modern prophets divided history, nor because it invokes the imperial legion who killed Christ in Palestine, nor because it recounts the adventures of a seventeenth-century monk-hunter (and friar), nor for the Francisco de Quevedo-esque tone that ebbs and flows in verses and harangues, nor because it dares to record pre-linguistic humanity and risks describing prehistoric milieus that less ambitious writers would avoid. Nor is it a historical

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novel because Enrigue’s sources of inspiration include Georges Duby, Mel Gibson, pre­historians, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Jesuit metapsychologist Carlos M. de Heredia’s 1930s Las memorias de un repórter en los tiempos de Cristo (The Quest of Ben Hered: Memoirs of a Reporter in the Times of Christ, 1947), and Mark Twain, who used his own time machine to plumb the lives of King Arthur and Joan of Arc. Vida perpendiculares is a historical novel because its fictional substance is grounded, if I’m not too far off base, in some of the ideas of Neopolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1745). With delightful eloquence, clever imagination and fantasy, Enrigue toys with phases of world history that come and go through recurring cycles—Vico’s corsi and recorsi. And Enrigue’s talent stands out: this is some of the most polished prose in Spanish, notable not only in its felicitous phrasing but also in the final flourish with which Enrigue ends each chapter, without exception. These are signs of a true storyteller.What Vico was aspiring to was a form of psychological empathy, an anti-Cartesian method based on the conviction that the mind can only understand what it has made, and to paraphrase what he said in Scienza Nuova (1725), although the mind clearly perceives itself, it does not make itself. The focus of that knowledge, the protagonist who embodies it, is Jerónimo, a boy who’s been reincarnated multiple times, and recalls each of his lives throughout the course of history—and his past lives have certainly lived a lot. A novel so noble as to be grounded in the history of philosophy, Vidas perpendiculares is not by any means boring, but it does demand a lot of its readers. Once again, they’ll find Enrigue’s phlegmatic, sardonic prose, which almost banks on being reread, in order to fully appreciate and understand the problems it poses and then solves. Such is the case with his tale of two cities, which posits a Babylonian Mexico City against a sad and empty Guadalajara; with his tale of Jesuit education, a unique purgatory that becomes art in Enrigue’s prose; and with the eternal battle between pagans and Christians, which takes permanent hold. Vico, in his autobiography, explains how when he was seven years old, he fell down a staircase, and spent five hours “unmoving and deprived of all feeling,” which made his family fear that, his skull fractured and numb, he’d be left retarded. “Thank God,” he says, using third person, “that fate did not come to pass … but healed from the accident, he was affected from then on with a gruff, melancholic nature …” Like Vico, the protagonist Jerónimo, born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, in 1936, was taught by Jesuits and, rather than becoming a halfwit like Juan Rulfo’s character Macario, he turned into a Borges-style, “memorious” Funes, a character who forgets nothing, as the earlier critics of Vidas perpendiculares have already noted. Jerónimo, throughout the course of his lives, is always dying. But while other novelists (Carlos Fuentes in The Death of Artemio Cruz, Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil) decided to stuff their moribund men with every memory they could think of on their deathbeds, Enrigue did the opposite, allowing memories to substitute death. Vidas perpendiculares might have ended with any of the lives that overtake Jerónimo, who lives simultaneously through many ages. But instead Enrigue decided to be faithful to the new religion and subjected Jerónimo to a higher law, that of love, a decision that would have satisfied the Neapolitan philosopher but might displease

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some contemporary readers. It’s as if the author were unwilling to carry to its logical conclusion the art of memory that his novel summons. Enrigue decided to put an end to the errant Jerónimo by freeing his avatars, having him find peace through sex, climax, and serenity. That is almost like killing Melmoth the Wanderer, the Wandering Jew type of Charles Robert Maturin’s eponymous gothic novel.1 Christopher Domínguez Michael

Works Cited Enrigue, Álvaro. La muerte de un instalador. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1996. —Virtudes capitales. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1998. —El cementerio de las sillas. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2002. —Hipotermia. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005. —Vidas perpendiculares. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2008. —Decencia. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011. —Hypothermia. Trans. Brendan Riley. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 2013.

Translated by Lisa M. Dillman. An earlier version was published in the author’s Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (1955–2010) (2012).

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Ana García Bergua (Mexico, 1960) Ana García Bergua is one of the most original voices of her generation, and paradoxically her works have not yet received the attention they deserve. In contrast with some of the novelists of the Crack, for example, she does not claim a cosmopolitan artistic heritage, proudly displaying a narrative temperament that reveals an intimate relationship with preceding traditions of twentieth-century Mexican culture (Literature, Theater, Cinema, and Journalism). Early in her career, García Bergua received the endorsement of one of Mexico’s most important literary critics, Christopher Domínguez Michael, when he included her in a very select group of writers representative of a new and increasingly visible generation in late twentiethcentury Mexican narrative (Antología de la narrativa Mexicana), an endorsement he continues in essays and book reviews. By that time, she had published a promising first novel, El umbral. Travels and Adventures (1993, The Threshold. Travels and Adventures). El umbral… represents something of a romantic portrait of her brother, himself a young writer whose premature death impacted García Bergua’s early writings. These are defined by a fantastic style that was also the trademark of most of the short stories reunited in El imaginador (1996, The Imaginator) and Otra oportunidad para el señor Balmand (2004). García Bergua’s early reception mentioned this fantastic character of her prose, identifying her with other female writers of her generation such as Adriana González Mateo and Cecilia Eudave (Domenella; Carrera and Keizman). Although some of the stories might fit this characterization, the ones collected in El imaginador could also be read in relation to their affinity with prominent Mexican authors such as Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Salvador Novo, and Carlos Fuentes. After these early incursions into fantastic fiction, a trait not present in Edificio (2009), her most recent story collection, García Bergua’s style would mature into a vigorous realism combined with parodic modes in her later novels: Púrpura (1999, Purple), Rosas negras (2004, Black Roses), Isla de bobos (2007, Isle of Fools), and La bomba de San José (2012, The San Jose Bomb). While her stories take place in different moments of the national past, they do not conform to the model of the New Historical Novel (see Díez Cobo, and Fernández Pereda for Mexico) that became popular in Latin American narrative in recent decades. Her novels are not intent primarily upon revisiting history and/or confronting official accounts. Instead, they serve as impeccable recreations of people’s lives during various emblematic moments of modern Mexican history, offering a glance into private spaces and social conventions through a humorous mode. Daughter of acclaimed film critic Emilio García Riera, García Bergua grew up in a middle class family that was immersed in the cultural atmosphere of 1960s Mexico City (see Rivera Garza). She pursued studies in French literature as well as in theater set design, and, not surprisingly, her novels develop impeccable staging in which everyday life is recreated in

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meticulous details (clothes, utensils, diets, etc.). Furthermore, and with respect to the scope of her recreation of social types within a national culture, her narrative project could be linked to the works of writers such as Novo and Carlos Monsiváis for their common interest in portraying the “sentimental education” of modern Mexico. In discussing García Bergua’s novels, I emphasize one of the main features of her fiction: the prominent inclusion of protagonists playing the role of readers through various modalities. In other words, her characters represent the act of reading as a practice that determines their personalities, actions, and ambitions. All of them depend on their readings to construct a self-image that corresponds to the type of texts they consume feverishly. In El umbral, for example, young Julius lives in the midst of books, creating an imaginary, ethereal world in which he is singled out as the chosen one. In a final scene in a public library, Julius is abducted by a black angel and undergoes a magical transfiguration by which he becomes a fictional being, a character within a book of Travels and Adventures. The story of Julius, a figure who has been associated by critics to the writer’s brother, Jordi García Bergua, represents, then, a kind of narrative exorcism and/ or a fictional tribute to this indelible presence in García Bergua’s memory. After El umbral, she devotes herself to a more realistic prose that incorporates parody as a central feature. Púrpura narrates the adventures of a young and ambitious character, Artemio González, who moves from the hinterland to the capital to emulate his elegant and prosperous cousin, Mauro. From this initial move, the story follows the bildungsroman form wherein Artemio incarnates a kind of Mexican Julien Sorel in his quest to achieve social and literary success. Under the influence of his many readings, Artemio attempts to become an educated man but his efforts seem futile and artificial, as long as he is out of step with the times. In mid-century Mexico, the new social manners are emerging not from literary sources but from the novel space of cinema. Púrpura is hence more than just the tale of Artemio’s personal quest, for this is at the same time a novel about changes in urban mores brought about by a burgeoning film industry in modern Mexico. Therefore it is not surprising that Artemio’s adventures develop along the lines of a melodramatic screenplay in which any heroism is dismissed in favor of stereotypical situations that transform this coming-of-age plot into an amusing account of frustrated ambitions. In addition, in the many depictions included in the text, the reader recognizes the influence of Novo’s diaries and chronicles, his informal and humorous way of portraying the modernization of daily life and social traditions in 1940s Mexican society. Like Salvador Novo, Artemio arrives to the city from a provincial state to encounter a vibrant rhythm of life, and to experience first-hand the elegant sensibility of the homosexual dandy in the figure of his charming cousin Mauro, for whom Artemio will develop an irresistible attraction. It seems evident that Novo’s writings are the subtext of this fictional account, which constructs a figure whose actions respond to the subliminal commands of the social commentaries of this emblematic figure of Mexican modernity, an author whose chronicles and texts educate his

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audiences about how to behave in the vibrant urban scenes: what suit to wear, what car to drive, what places to frequent, what company to seek. In Rosas negras, the story is set in a rural Mexican town at the end of the nineteenth century, in the years known as the Porfiriato, a historical period when local tradition was being reshaped by the ideas of modern progress and by the philosophy of Positivism. In the midst of these transformations, García Bergua introduces a set of various characters who are drawn hilariously into the incredible story of the soul of a dead man who resists abandoning this world, and his desirable widow who is coveted by his male friends. One of these, Dr. Bonifacio, is the director of a mental institution in charge of treating women who suffer from hysteria, melancholia, and other allegedly feminine syndromes. Although his treatments are prescribed by the doxa of scientific protocol, this doctor is a surreptitious reader of esoteric books and the organizer of clandestine spiritualist sessions where attendees gather around an Ouija board to convene paranormal encounters. We hence recognize in Rosas negras another instance in which the act of reading unfolds into a narrative parody that accentuates the contradictory motivations of fictional characters, mocking the apparent normativity of social conventions. Isla de bobos explores the possibilities of parody in retelling historical events. In this particular novel, García Bergua recreates the curious episode of Clipperton Island through the story of Captain Raúl Soulier. Isla… revisits a subject previously explored by Laura Restrepo* in her Isla de la pasión (2005, Passion Island), but while the Colombian writer inscribes her text within the canonical model of the New Historical Novel, García Bergua resorts to a more fictional version of the events and the characters involved in this tragic adventure. In order to achieve a more intimate reporting of the facts, the Mexican novelist builds a romantic portrait of Soulier through his inclination to literary readings. His overly sentimental temperament responds to what writer Ricardo Piglia refers to in El último lector (2005, The Last Reader) as the imaginative inclination of the “female reader,” one who approaches literary texts not from a pragmatic stance but as the threshold of an imaginary universe able to compensate the limitations of a rather constraining reality. Isla… explores the tensions between the objective language of journalistic accounts of the tragedy of Clipperton Island, and the intimate perspective taken up by its fictional version to refer to the passionate nature of her protagonists. Soulier and his wife, Luisa, become enraptured in a literary idealism linked to the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and the biblical myth of Adam and Eve, founders of an Arcadia that the Mexican characters seek to replicate on this islet of the Pacific. Similarly, in her latest novel La bomba de San José, García Bergua recreates the revolutionary 1960s through the perspective of a middle-class woman who passionately reads the romance novels of Corín Tellado as she seeks to find meaning in her own affair with a friend of her husband. Maite and Hugo, a quintessential couple of the emergent urban professional class, experience a series of amusing adventures that capture the frenetic culture of this era. Again, the reader is presented with two alternative discourses, the language of advertising, on the one hand, and the melodramatic stories of the popular novelist Corín Tellado on the other. Hugo, a marketing executive

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who creates advertising slogans, lives and fails according to the artificial credo of his business; while Maite finds a way to personal reinvention by throwing herself into Tellado’s melodramatic stories, and paradoxically gaining a new independence. García Bergua’s novels revisit Mexican history through secondary stories/ characters, portrayed through literary humor, and they create a peculiar human comedy which is her particular contribution to contemporary Mexican fiction. Her work stands out among recent literary trends in Mexico and Spanish America, as she maintains a unique style matched by a spirited playfulness in narrating stories. Although Ana García Bergua has not achieved the international visibility of others of her generational peers, her novels and short stories certainly deserve the recognition granted to other writers of lesser merit. She has maintained for over two decades her consistent effort to build a literary career outside the most popular trends, always loyal to her exact style. This is a plus for readers who enthusiastically follow her novels, anticipating that good laugh that few authors can convoke nowadays. Anadeli Bencomo

Works Cited Bencomo, Anadeli. “La imaginadora: el arte narrativo de Ana García Bergua.” Explicación de Textos Literarios. Oswaldo Estrada ed. 36.1–2 (2008). 78–89. Carrera, Mauricio y Betina Keizman. El minotauro y la sirena. Entrevistas-ensayos con nuevos narradores mexicanos. Mexico City: Lectorum, 2001. Díez Cobo, Rosa María. “La reescritura de la historia en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea.” Tendencias de la narrativa mexicana actual. José Carlos González Boixo, ed. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009. Domenella, Ana Rosa. “Tres cuentistas neofantásticas.” Cuento y figura. La ficción en México. Tlaxcala: UAT/BUAP, 1999. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. Antología de la narrativa mexicana del siglo XX. 2 Vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994. —Diccionario crítico de la literatura mexicana (1955–2005). Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. —“Humorista en estado puro.” Letras Libres. 12 August 2012. Web. Fernández Pereda, Manuel, ed. La literatura mexicana del siglo XX. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Conaculta/Universidad Veracruzana, 2008. García Bergua, Ana. El umbral. Travels and Adventures. Mexico City: Era, 1993. —El imaginador. Mexico City: Era, 1996. —Púrpura. Mexico City: Era, 1999. —Rosas Negras. Mexico City: Plaza Janés, 2004. —Isla de bobos. Mexico City: Seix Barral, 2007. —La bomba de San José. Mexico City: Era/UNAM, 2012. Rivera Garza, Cristina, ed. La novela según los novelistas. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Conaculta, 2007.

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Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico, 1973) Guadalupe Sánchez Nettel, who won her first literary prize, from Radio France (1992) for the best French-language short story written outside the Francophone countries, is now an important contributor to Mexico’s current literary scene. Christopher Domínguez Michael blogs that Nettel is far from being a stranger to Latin American literature: and in fact, she has since gone on to publish, in Spanish and drawing on the Latin American literary tradition without being derivative of it, two novels and three collections of short stories, which have been translated into numerous languages. In 2006, Nettel was named one of the “most illustrious representatives of the new generation of authors” by Gatopardo. Like her contemporary Daniel Alarcón,* in 2007 she was listed among the 39 most important Latin American writers under 40 in a collaboration between the Bogotá39 Hay Festival and UNESCO World Book Capital City. In 2008 she was the first woman to earn the Antonin Artaud Prize for her short story collection, Pétalos y otras historias incómodas (2008, Petals and Other Uncomfortable Stories) and the next year she was awarded the Anna Seghers prize, an honor she shares with her compatriot Cristina Rivera Garza.* Nettel’s delicate and intelligently strong narrative, tends to suggest, rather than explain themes or situations, without the obfuscation, linguistic gymnastics or other stylistic tics that would tie her to any group or movement. Refreshingly free of maudlin exaggerations or strident declarations, her treatment of difficult themes, like the excruciating loneliness children often live with and the vulnerabilities of the adults around them, reflects her own deep wisdom and life experience. Her latest effort, 2011’s novel El cuerpo en que nací (The Body I Was Born Into), described by Valeria Luiselli as “transparently autobiographical, or perhaps more precisely a long autobiographical essay” is also a work that Domínguez Michael has deemed “a novel of maturity.” Certainly it does signal a departure from the previous works, which also are studies in teratology, but El cuerpo en que nací transcends an anecdotal noting of physiological abnormalities, the author’s sharp, clear language and use of an often caustic humor that is not as present in her earlier works cut straight to the existential essence of marginality occasioned by physical weakness. Nettel is a passionate reader and prolific critic of her contemporaries, publishing articles and reviews (and fiction) regularly to Letras Libres. As early as 1998 she wrote, that there was a certain arrogance to the posturing of “Crack” Generation’s founding members: on the one hand that they had been too critical of prior work without having themselves demonstrated that they were safe from their own accusations and on the other, that they’d declared themselves a movement rather than waiting for critics or even their readers to find the similarities that would lump them all together under a specific name. In fact, Nettel has eluded or eschewed being grouped in with the Crack

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or any other generation of authors. Her work does share some similarities with that movement: a placing of characters in universal, rather than uniquely Mexican settings, like the Japanese protagonist of “Bonsai” and the toilet-sniffing Parisian detective of “El que huele los retretes” (The One Who Smells Toilets) in Pétalos… . Like some fiction by other authors born in the 1970s, hers (which often draws heavily on her own life experiences) tends to deal with, in one way or another, abject, marginal, and abnormal subjects, as her critics point out (see Works Cited). In this, she is not an exception, but rather a rare entity within the greater panorama of the contemporary Spanish-American novel. Unlike her contemporaries, she has not hesitated to pay homage to the movements that preceded her, recognizing especially the influence of Boom authors and their works in her own development as a writer. She affirms first that a novel is not necessarily a genre for the mature writer only, citing Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero; second, and for Nettel, most importantly, that one should not write in imitation of any admired author, but from one’s self; and third, that it’s better not to belong to any literary group that tries to put Latin American literature into a particular box. Nettel’s first novel, El huésped (2006, The Guest) in fact, nods to the modern canon with its overarching themes of blindness and doubling, evoking Borges in its first line “I always did like stories about doubles” (13) and immediately after, Julio Cortázar’s “House Taken Over” comes to mind in reading her description of the disturbing being that inhabits the protagonist narrator, “The first territory to be invaded was that of dreams; little by little, between the ages of ten and twelve” (14). That this work should hark back to Cortázar is not surprising (she has also produced a study, Para entender: Julio Cortázar, (2008, Understanding Julio Cortázar) and with this novel revisits the fantastic genre, which she considers to have reached its peak with Cortázar. El huésped reflects her fascination with and affection for the monstrous, speaking to subjectivity and exploring the parallel universes that she believes exist within each of us. Like most of her characters, Ana, the protagonist of El huésped, is an outsider with some physical or psychological abnormality that prevents her from finding a place in the world. El huésped recounts the life of a young girl who believes she shares her body with a violently problematic alter-ego, which she has named The Thing. As with her Mexican literary predecessor Amparo Dávila (b. 1928)’s short story of the same name, we are not sure if the problematic entity is real or if it exists only in the character’s imagination. But whether real or emblematic of an advancing blindness, Ana fights a silent battle with this internal Siamese twin, and eventually begins to lose to The Thing as this part of her shows itself more and more, and takes over all that is familiar to Ana. She starts fights at school without remembering them, for example, but she is always painfully aware that sooner or later, she will have to fully split. The novel recounts Ana’s gradual letting go of her sense of sight and an acceptance of her blindness while encountering other blind people as she moves through a Mexico City that is represented also as a monstrosity that lives within everyone who lives in it. Nettel herself has explained that the charming old neighborhoods and the underground cohabitate, but are also split.

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The novel, she clarifies in interviews, is part of a particular historical moment, when Mexico was longing for a change in political administration and when she perceived anger among her compatriots. Ana, more and more nearsighted, paranoid, and isolated from her once familiar surroundings as the novel advances, ends up in the interstices of Mexico City, living in the corners of subway stations (the literal underground) among beggars and others who, because of some physical or mental defect do not fit anywhere else and who are organized into a sort of parallel society. Their leader is, in fact, inspired by Subcomandante Marcos: El Cacho, a manipulatively inspiring caretaker of the extremely downtrodden while also being sarcastic and exceedingly vulgar. He corresponds, Nettel indicates, to her idea of the stereotypic revolutionary leader. This marginalized group lives by their own values and attempts to find ways to appreciate and understand their rare appeal and beauty and Nettel explores their universe, guided by the hunch that perhaps in what we refuse to allow ourselves to see in our surroundings and in ourselves, is precisely what we need to endure life. Nettel’s second novel, El cuerpo en que nací, also begins with one of the author’s concerns regarding her real physical limitations or weaknesses, her vision. We learn early on that Nettel, the narrator, has some form of early onset macular degeneration, and ocular imagery pervades the entire novel, which is narrated as a monologue in the form of a therapy session with her psychoanalyst. Despite the presence of Dr. Sazlvaski, Nettel does not use this narrative strategy to explain her own psyche. Since the analyst just sits in silence, Nettel is able to make intelligent, sarcastic side comments and criticisms (most often self-deprecating and cruelly humorous) that another type of narration would not as easily permit. It is in these spaces where we are able to view, through the author’s own deformed eye, her tense and uncomfortable early childhood and late adolescence. Here, she not only sees clearly, the change in the Mexican family dynamic in the middle of the twentieth century, but also exposes the inherent problems with the ideology of that time and with her family’s way of living out that ideology in both Mexico and France. Nettel’s vision is, then, also influenced by the then contemporary guiding principles as manifested in her parents’ open marriage, her mother’s insistence on her Montessori education, experiences in a hippie commune and sexual freedom. While El cuerpo en que nací seems to describe a childhood filled with extraordinary and interesting experiences, like El huésped, it also focuses on the ideal of marginality, starting with what can be considered a physical defect and continuing with Nettel’s unconventional upbringing. Following her parents’ divorce, the family travels to France, where they reside for several years, and again, her protagonist comes in contact with other marginalized people: immigrants from North Africa. She deals with her mother’s conflict between raising her children and finding a “room of her own,” as well as with the absence of her father, initially due to the divorce but further complicated by a mysterious period of incarceration. She is eventually taken in by her hoarder grandmother, who turns out to be her strongest source of support. The chapters of the novel that take place in Mexico City occur in the Olympic Village, which served as shelter to Chilean, Argentinian and Uruguayan exiles in the decades following the 1968 games, and their presence also opens up another world of outsiders

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to Nettel and her heroine. This novel explores the darker side of childhood, making penetrating and astute analyses of bullying, the awakening of a passion for reading, friendship among pre-pubescent kids of both sexes, the contrast between French and Mexican educational systems, and sexual discoveries on the exterior staircases of buildings. Juan Villoro* has indicated of this autobiographical novel that Nettel, from her intimate world, tells her story through the inexhaustible literary theme of families, especially those who have some sort of problem because literature is born out of pain, and of the need to tell how that pain happened. Nettel’s own acute sense of feeling abnormal comes through in her fiction and she states that the side she wanted to show most is this marginalized side of all human beings, whether physical, psychological, geographical or social, or some combination of them. While her fiction does not mince words when describing the horrors and isolation of the existence of the outsider, they do show the other aspect of human life that Nettel wishes to highlight, that the beauty of the human form is similar to that of a work of art. It’s hidden, she states, in the force that living beings radiate, in that uniquely moving and surprising way (Aux.magazine, 49). Certainly, her characters are often surprised upon discovering their unique and innate beauty despite their best efforts to hide it. These discoveries happen in moments of deep pain or other extreme circumstances, “when we stop faking” (Words Without Borders). The protagonist of “Bonsai” comes to accept the fact that he always has identified more with the cactus than with the other plants in his garden after his divorce. The model in “Bezoar” also shows that she is “someone else” before the cameras, when in reality it’s her weakness or defect (she pulls out her own hair, a little each day) that makes her attractive to the person who loves her deeply. In these moments, says Nettel, “The mask lifts, and it’s then that the splendor of our humanity is revealed: fragile, at times very brave, and moving in all of its contradictions.” Like Kafka, she applies the cockroach metaphor to explain her literary creations, stating in an interview with El Diario de Navarra that: “Cockroaches crawl alongside the house walls. I also walk close to the walls, partly to protect myself and partly to just go unnoticed.” Guadalupe Nettel has managed to create an autobiographic body of fiction that escapes melodramatization in distinctly innovative manners. The elements of her oeuvre that draw upon her own private world refuse to “Go unnoticed” (indeed do a complete “180” from), something that has not exactly happened for this productive and award-winning novelist and short-story writer who manages to write the intimacy of her private life for an increasingly wide public. Valerie Hecht

Works Cited Amutxategi, Abel. “Guadalupe Nettel: Autobiografía de lo extraño,” Aux.magazine 52 December 2011–January 2012. 48–9. De La Garza, Alejandro. “Aislamiento y crossover,” Nexos en Línea. January 11, 2011. Web.

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Domínguez Michael, Christopher. “Una novela de madurez,” Letras Libres, Blogs. July 7, 2012. Web. “Guadalupe Nettel se reconcilia con su cuerpo y su pasado en El cuerpo en que nací.” El Diario de Navarra. October 10, 2011. Web. Gutiérrez, Norma. “Guadalupe Nettel se explica a sí misma,” El Informador.com. November 29, 2011. Web. Iaconangelo, David. “Private Acts: An Interview with Guadalupe Nettel,” Words Without Borders. October 14, 2011. Web. Lemus, Rafael. “Pétalos y otras historias incómodas de Guadalupe Nettel,” Letras Libres 111 (2008). Web. Luiselli, Valeria. “El cuerpo escrito de Guadalupe Nettel,” Nexos en Línea. January 12, 2011. Web. Montaño Garfias, Ericka. “Pétalos y otras historias incómodas muestra la belleza real, la que nos hace seres únicos,” La Jornada. August 31, 2008. Web. Nettel, Guadalupe. Juegos de artificio. Mexico City: Instituto Mexiquense de la Cultura, 1993. —“Cuatro novelas del ‘Crack’.” Vuelta 225 (1998) 46–8. —Les jours fossiles. Paris: Éditions de l’Eclose, 2003. —El huésped. Mexico City: Anagrama, 2006. —Pétalos y otras historias incómodas. Mexico City: Anagrama, 2008. —El cuerpo en que nací. Mexico City: Anagrama, 2011. —“50 aniversario: ¿Qué aprendí del Boom?” Vanguardia. November 5, 2012. Web. “Nuevo libro de Guadalupe Nettel luce como ficción con tintes autobiográficos.” Conaculta.gob.mx. February 24, 2012. Web. Punzano Sierra, Israel. “Guadalupe Nettel retrata en El huésped la verdad de lo oculto,” El País. January 23, 2006. Web.

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Ignacio Padilla (Mexico, 1968) The literary work of Ignacio Padilla is characterized by a strong commitment to literary tradition and by an ample sense of the importance of form in storytelling. Besides being one of Latin America’s most enjoyable and intelligent novelists, he is a notable writer of short fiction, an insightful essayist and Cervantist, a recognized author of youth fiction, and an award-winning playwright. His work is a palpable demonstration of the aesthetic value and cultural specificity of literary writing, and he unapologetically pursues a notion of pure fiction that resists the pressures of popular culture, globalization and the market. This approach has not prevented Padilla from receiving major national and international awards for fiction and non-fiction. If anything, his work is a testament of the role that literature’s cultural specificity continues to have in the contemporary world. His early forays into the novel defined his commitment to learned fiction. His Imposibilidad de los cuervos (1994, The Impossibility of Ravens) included in the 1994 trilogy Tres bosquejos del mal (Three Sketches of Evil) along with works by Jorge Volpi* and Eloy Urroz,* is an intensely erudite thriller of gothic undertones, which attempts a renewal of Mexican narrative through a practice that resembles Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft. While it is not a major book, this novel exemplifies well the nature of Padilla’s place in the Spanish-American novel. Against the grain of Boom and magical realism legacies or imperatives, his narrative is invested in renewing the genealogies and aesthetics of fiction-writing in Spanish, which he does by working in relationship to traditions—such as travel literature, gothic terror and colonial adventure genres. While his second novel, La catedral de los ahogados (1995, The Cathedral of the Drowned) moved further into a practice highly committed to erudition and stylistic care, it remained bound to narrative conventions connected to the Latin American Boom and its global inheritors. The novel has a complex structure, with each section corresponding to the architecture of a church: the atrium, three naves, the presbytery and the apse. Through this configuration and a style that navigates between self-reflection and fable, Padilla stays within a global magical realist tradition (which includes Italo Calvino and José Saramago), somewhat undermining his attempt at renewing Mexican narrative. Both novels are a testament of a young writer seeking to move beyond national literature constraints whose hegemonic models were in crisis. In hindsight, the novels suffer from a certain inability to transcend practices already exhausted by Boom and Post-Boom writers. Padilla joined the Crack group in 1996, which brought together the three authors of Tres bosquejos del mal with writers Pedro Ángel Palou,* Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and Vicente Herrasti. In his involvement in the “Crack Manifesto,” Padilla advocates for the “dislocation” of fiction to the point where it “does not aspire to prophesize or symbolize anything,” and for “renewing language within itself, that is, feeding it

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with its most ancient ashes.” (Crack 219). Specifically, by joining that group, Padilla re-defines his narrative in terms that illuminate well his role in the context of the Mexican novel. First, by advocating a linguistic revolution from within, he makes clear his attempt to liberate Spanish-American fiction from its taste for popular culture, developed in trends such as the “literatura de la Onda” or the so-called “novelabolero.” Padilla himself reserves the use of rock and music for “others, those who have faith,” admitting that such work “feels old” (219). Rather, his section in the manifesto claims for a radical assertion of pure literary writing, liberating it from the need to surrender to the historic pressures of popular culture and media. In addition, he wants to emancipate Spanish-American writing from the “prophesizing” of the total novel, eliminating the burden of representing the continental phenomenon at large as the main goal of the region’s novel. Thus, his work is interested in the right of the Latin American writer to not be a mere producer of national allegories and foundational fictions. This is why his novels only very rarely have Mexican characters, and his most memorable creations, such as Zacarías Kuhne (protagonist of Imposibilidad de los cuervos) or the two main characters of Amphytrion (Viktor Kretzchmar and Thadeus Dreyer), typically belong to non-Latin American geographies and territories, and, in some cases, even resist their specific national reality. Padilla’s third novel, Si volviesen sus majestades (1996, If Your Majesties Returned), part of the editorial release that accompanied the “Crack manifesto,” does not represent quite yet the full extent of his break with Latin American traditions. However, it exemplifies well what he means by innovating literature through feeding it its own ashes. The book is a Beckettian fable centered upon a seneschal (a Court head servant) who has spent three centuries awaiting the return of the “majesties.” The novel is fully written in Spanish Golden Prose, with strong Cervantine echoes (a topic he has developed in a couple of books and his doctoral dissertation) and in the picaresque tradition. In doing so he questions narrative convention by claiming the aesthetic legacy of a foundational moment in Spanish-language writing, when the novel left the fantasy-world of chivalry fiction and entered the contradictions of modernity. Padilla, however, is not interested in claiming the historicity of this style. Rather, by using it to construct a fable, he isolates the linguistic from the historic, setting the stage for a novelistic project fully constructed on a sense of literature-in-itself. Padilla won the prestigious Primavera prize in 2000 thanks to Amphytrion—his only novel available in English as Shadow without a Name. Amphytrion is a complex exploration of the question of evil, traced back to a chess game between two characters whereby the winner obtains the right to switch identities with the loser (thus the title’s reference to the Theban general). The novel ultimately spans through much of the twentieth century via four unreliable but fascinating narrators, focusing mostly on Adolf Eichmann’s fondness for chess and on a project to change the identity of senior Nazi officials. Padilla’s award followed the international success of Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor, which also deals, albeit in a completely different style, with the question of evil and Nazism. While Volpi’s is an expansively erudite thriller, strongly focused on plot and highly invested in the intersection between science and literature,

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Padilla opts for a tighter, subjectivist approach, which produces a more polished and emotionally intense novel, written in an admirably clean and highly aestheticized prose. The English translation merited a very positive review in the New York Times, a recognition bestowed on few contemporary Latin American novelists. In the review Barry Unsworth praises Padilla for his “power of invention and an imaginative force here that mark Padilla as a writer of outstanding gifts. He is a novelist who can disarm our sense of likelihood, of the norms of behavior, and so extend our sense of human possibility.” This strong endorsement shows the true meaning of reading Padilla’s novels: a re-design of the world through the complex and vast use of the language that ties its binds. Padilla’s commitment to literature does not mean that his novels do not elicit possible political readings. In a compelling study, Anne-Marie Stachura suggests that, by connecting the Amphytrion myth of supplanted personalities to Eichmann’s trial, Padilla undermines both the foundational myth of the State of Israel—by questioning the ability of his trial to truly deliver justice for Holocaust victims—and the myth of transnational justice at large, by plotting a narrative in which evil can scape the Law through forgery. One could extend this reading by suggesting that in doing so Padilla also expands the privilege of the literary as a form of knowledge, since the exploration of the subjective made possible by fiction is one of the few instances that unveil the truth behind social myths. Still, Stachura’s point touches upon another issue relevant to the novel: the evolution of Padilla’s cosmopolitanism from literary archive to a fictive participation in world affairs. His narrative maturity came about when his attempt to liberate himself from the magical realist imperative went from the simple reference to the cosmopolitan to a truly worldly stance in which the Mexican writer is part of the global tradition. While this process is already at work in Amphytrion, it achieves its highest point in his masterpiece, La gruta del Toscano (2006, The Tuscan’s Grotto). This novel provides a long history of travelers and adventurers seeking Dante’s inferno in a cave in the Himalayas. The story involves different generations of explorers seeking to reach the depths of the cave, focusing not only on their ideas and passions, but on the central subject of the novels of exploration: the hubris of humans who seek to transcend the limits of the knowable and the possible. Here Padilla draws from a tradition of travel literature which includes Paul Bowles (also an influence on Padilla’s short fiction), Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. Padilla’s location of Dante’s Inferno in an actual geographical location is a fascinating resource, showing his commitment to literature as the central structure of his fictional worlds. By rewriting a foundational text of Western literature into a genre that seems distant to it, he claims his right to fully intervene in the imaginary of world literature at large. The novel is written with a narrative tension superior to any other book by Padilla, a compelling use of the discourse of adventure to enhance readability and create a unique aesthetic and cast of fascinating characters from different historical quadrants. It is important to note too that, even though this is by far his most ambitious and expansive novel, it resists the temptation of totality almost militantly, by relying, as most of his fiction does, on unreliable narrators and polyphonic perspectives.

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Padilla’s Amphytrion and La gruta del Toscano show the attempt to use the novel to subvert the opposition between literary and commercial fiction so predominant in Mexico. His literary sophistication, vast cosmopolitan archive and unflinching commitment to style are never at odds with the interest of reaching a reading public beyond the confines of the literary community. One could even argue that the contrast between the scarce number of academic and critical texts on his work and the success of his novels in the Spanish-speaking world show the inability of critics to truly recognize his role in the development of the Mexican novel. He not only transcends the obligation to be autochthonous, but also breaks away from the logic that ties literary prestige to commercial failure. His books are published by transnational literary houses (Planeta, Alfaguara and Norma) and he is, in fact, claiming for Spanish-American writers the notion of using the market to provide readers with a learned literature that contravenes the prejudice against commercial fiction. This, of course, has important roots in writers such as Umberto Eco, but doing so from Mexico means upending inherited understandings between the writer and his readers. Padilla’s commitment to literariness is obvious in his most recent novel, El daño no es de ayer (2011, The Harm is Not Yesterday’s), which won the La otra orilla award. The novel moves his fiction forward, to higher literary maturity. It is a very tight, precise novel, with recourse to a cinematic gaze new to his fiction. Focused on a series of stories in a lost desert town, the novel brings back the gothic tone Padilla explored in his earlier fiction to a new level of narrative development. In reading this novel, a person first approaching Padilla’s prose has the opportunity to appreciate the completion of his journey: a world constructed by language and the literary, a claim for the specificity and privilege of literature against the grain of the world itself. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Works Cited Chávez, Ricardo et al. Crack. Instrucciones de uso. Mexico City: Mondadori, 2004. Padilla, Ignacio. Imposibilidad de los cuervos. In Tres bosquejos del mal. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1994. 93–178. —La catedral de los ahogados. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1996. —Si volviesen sus majestades. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1996. —Amphytrion. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2000. —Shadow without a Name. Trans. Peter Bush and Anne McLean. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003. —Espiral de artillería. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2003. —La gruta del toscano. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2006. —El daño no es de ayer. Bogota: Norma, 2011. Stachura, Anne Marie. “Transnational Injustice. The Subversion of Myth in Ignacio Padilla’s Amphytrion.” In Myth and Subversion in the Contemporary Novel. Juan Manuel Losada Goya and Marta Guirao Ochoa, (eds). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 277–86. Unsworth, Barry. “Shadow without a Name.” The New York Times. April 27, 2003. Web.

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Pedro Ángel Palou (Mexico, 1966) Pedro Ángel Palou is one of the most prolific writers in Latin America. Author of over 30 books, most of them novels, he is also a literary chameleon who explores a wide variety of genres: thriller, historical novel, subjective fiction, popular prose, learned literature. Each of his novels is a testament to his deep immersion into his subject matter. In fact, more than a single writer, he may easily be characterized, taking Antonio Tabucchi’s image, as a confederacy of writers. Thus Palou has helped reframe many aspects of contemporary Mexican literature. It is certainly unfortunate that he, along with compatriots Juan Villoro* and Sergio Pitol, is a very important and widely read novelist so far untranslated into English, which has more to do with the vagaries of the publishing world than with the undeniable merit of his work. In any case, reading Palou is one of the most broadening and diverse experiences in contemporary Mexican literature. To read him is to encounter a writer for whom literature is as big as the world itself. It is hard to summarize his massive work, but a reader in search of a compass may divide it into three periods. The first may be called that of “The search for literature” and it may be abridged as the diverse attempts of a young writer to find a voice to suit a precocious and erudite intellectual identity. This includes a wonderfully intense novel on the 1980s Nicaraguan conflict, Como quien se desangra (1991, Like One Who Bleeds); a complex apocalyptic novel, Memoria de los días (1995, Memoir of the Days); a romance novel Bolero (1997); and a comic soccer novel with many references to his friends, El último campeonato mundial (1997, The Last World Cup). In this period, Palou wrote an early masterpiece which put him on the map of Mexican literature, En la alcoba de un mundo (1992, In the Bedroom of the World), based on the life of poet Xavier Villaurrutia. This novel also created an initial bond with the Crack group, since that same year Jorge Volpi* published A pesar del oscuro silencio (Despite the Dark Silence), based on the life of another poet of the Contemporáneos group, Jorge Cuesta. En la alcoba del mundo surpasses the search for a precursor in the national literary tradition by internalizing the myth of the writer in search of his literary voice, which is the process that Palou underwent in the 1990s. His participation in the Crack group was significant, but not as decisive as it was for Volpi, Ignacio Padilla* or Eloy Urroz.* His Crack novels (Memoria de los días and Bolero) are relatively minor works in his corpus and not integral to the Crack project. The first was published by Joaquín Mortiz, prior to the Crack’s move to Nueva Imagen, so it was almost a separate project; while the latter was written a few years prior to its 1997 publication. Moreover, Bolero belongs to a genre—romance novels—not generally practiced by the Crack writers. The only other Crack work in the romance mode was the later Dos novelitas poco edificantes (2003, Two Little Edifying Novels), a diptych by Urroz and Volpi. Still, Palou’s

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participation in the Crack manifesto shows how his work entered a defining period in the late 1990s. He models his section of the manifesto on Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium, using the five ideas developed by Calvino (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity) and the projected sixth (consistency; never written due to Calvino’s death), to propose the full modernization of the Mexican novel as a practice freed from the subordination to the past or the market. In doing so, Palou fundamentally authorizes his development as a writer freed from national burdens and tradition. Subsequently he has written books based on four principles: multiplicity of voices, doubt in opposition to certainty, resistance to autobiographical temptation (something that puts him at odds with Urroz), and the rejection of optimism for imagining a better world. If one reads his proposals carefully, they fully explain Palou’s diverse and prolific work, and the need of a chameleonic writer to annul the temptation of the self in order to voice an infinite number of subjectivities that question the world and open up to imagine possible alternatives. This is why his true masterpiece, Paraíso clausurado (2000, Closed Paradise), started a second period which may be described as “writing from literature,” in which Palou readily assumes a personal translation of Calvino’s credo, in order to construct novels that develop the idea of literature as privileged human language. This period is clearly marked by melancholy, which operates not so much as a raw affect, but as a repository of literary knowledge transmitted in the nooks and crannies of Western literature that he, as a writer, can claim in order to move beyond the imperatives of twentieth century modernism. Still, this narrative vein does not operate from blind faith in literary discourse or specificity. Rather, this variant is engaged in an agonistic confrontation with the literary. Paraíso clausurado’s protagonist, Juan Gavito, is a literature professor with a deep love for his subject, but subsumed in a crisis of melancholy, having lost access to the sublime. His student and the novel’s narrator, Eladio, is left with the task of piecing together the story. We cannot fully access Gavito’s subjectivity, and only do so in an allegorical section of the novel, which really tells the story of Diomedes. We can see clearly in this novel that for Palou literature is the intersection of symbolic and imaginary orders, which shield us from directly confronting the Real of the literary sublime. Thus, in this period, writing from literature is all about approximating a transcendental experience with the literary that is perhaps irreversibly lost. One can see this topic through the lens of eroticism in his novel Qliphoth (2002), through the question of love lost in the diptych composed by Demasiadas vidas (2001, Too Many Lives) and Casa de la magnolia (2004, The Magnolia House), through the collapse of love itself via the question of the affective triangle in Malheridos (2003, Badly Wounded) and through the problem of evil in Quien dice sombra (2005, Who Says Shadow) and El diván del diablo (2005, The Devil’s Couch). In these very prolific years that yielded Palou’s most exceptional work (these are six of his eight best books, together with En la alcoba de un mundo and Pobre patria mía [My Poor Country]), we see him confronting the question of what is literature directly, producing a learned and poetic prose that is also highly readable and seductive. This novelistic period is not altogether

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concluded: La profundidad de la piel (2010, The Depth of the Skin) is another excellent exploration of what love is, and this period’s books are perhaps the best entry into his fictional world. While this period was still developing, Palou began a third narrative period, which is the predominant one at this time. One could term it “After literature,” since it is characterized by a steady exploration of genres and fictional styles typically identified with commercial literature. This is not to say he has become a full-fledged commercial writer, but one can certainly read a sustained effort to bring his highly researched fiction and chameleonic style to a wider audience. This has transformed him from a writer’s writer to one constantly present in Mexico’s best-seller lists (usually moving somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 copies, a massive number in a country where books rarely sell more than a couple thousand copies). This line of writing began with Con la muerte en los puños (2003, With Death in the Fists), a novel about a boxer written in the language of the urban popular-class. This is a departure from his previous highly stylized prose, and one of his more successful: an enjoyable and emotional exploration of the rise and fall of a man in a society defined by broken dreams and economic injustice. Palou had great success with this novel: it was his first with a presence beyond literary circles, and was presented to the public in a boxing arena by one of Mexico’s most important boxers, Ricardo López. Moreover, it won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Mexico’s equivalent to the Pulitzer in fiction. As of 2012, he remains the sole member of the Crack to obtain the award. Currently Palou is developing his writing along two lines. On the one hand, he has become one of Mexico’s most notable writers of historical fiction. His novels detailing the lives of the country’s major historical figures, include: Zapata (2006), Morelos. Morir es nada (2007, Morelos. Dying is Nothing), Cuauhtémoc: la defensa del Quinto Sol (2008, Cuahtemoc: The Defense of the Fifth Sun), Pobre patria mía. La novela de Porfirio Díaz (2010, Poor Country of Mine: The Novel of Porfirio Díaz) and Varón de deseos (2011, Man of Desire) on Juan de Palafox, the seventeenth-century Viceroy of New Spain. His historical fiction has attained important commercial success and is also one of the most interesting subversions of established versions of Mexican history, as we read about Emiliano Zapata’s homosocial relations or about José María Morelos from a woman’s perspective. He has recently begun a new line of learned thrillers, with El dinero del diablo (2009, The Devil’s Money), a murder mystery set in the Vatican that was a finalist in the Planeta-Casamérica Award, and El impostor (2012, The Impostor) a complex spy thriller set in the foundational years of Christianity and focused on Saint Paul. In these books, we can see Palou struggling with one of the fundamental questions of the writer today: how to be faithful to literature and the literary in a world where readers can perhaps only be reached through the market. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

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Works Cited Chávez, Ricardo et al. Crack. Instrucciones de uso. Mexico City: Mondadori, 2004. Palou, Pedro Ángel. Como quien se desangra. Mexico City: Conaculta, 1991. —En la alcoba de un mundo. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992. —Memoria de los días. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1995. —Bolero. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1997. —El último campeonato mundial. Mexico City: Aldus, 1997. —Paraíso clausurado. Barcelona: Muchnik, 2000. —Demasiadas vidas. Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2001. —Qliphoth. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001. —Con la muerte en los puños. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002. —Malheridos. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2003. —Casa de la magnolia. Mexico City: Sudamericana, 2004. —El diván del diablo. Mexico City: Ediciones B, 2005. —Quien dice sombra. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2005. —Zapata. Mexico City: Planeta, 2006. —Morelos. Morir es nada. Mexico City: Planeta, 2007. —Cuauhtémoc. La defensa del Quinto Sol. Mexico City: Planeta, 2008. —El dinero del diablo. Barcelona: Planeta, 2009. —La profundidad de la piel. Bogota: Norma, 2010. —Pobre patria mía. México: Planeta, 2010. —Varón de deseos. Mexico City: Planeta, 2011. —El impostor. Mexico City: Planeta, 2012.

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Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico, 1964) Since the publication of her first novel, Nadie me verá llorar (1999, No One Will See Me Cry, 2003), Rivera Garza has established herself as one of Latin America’s most innovative writers. Her literature confronts linguistic limits, transgresses several genres, and poses metaphysical questions that invite revisiting the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood, Juan Rulfo, Guadalupe Dueñas, and Anne Frank. Every reading of her multifaceted writing represents new challenges, as we encounter mutilated bodies, bearded women, castrated men, morphine addicts, prostitutes and transvestites who speak of identity conflicts and nostalgia, neurological problems, and gender fallacies. In recognition of novels such as No One…, La cresta de Ilión (2002, The Crest of Ilium), and La muerte me da (2007, Death Hits Me) she has received several prestigious international awards, yet her prose successfully manages to remain “unclassified.” Born in the border city of Matamoros, Rivera Garza is a writer of ambivalent citizenship. She writes primarily in Spanish but also in English, between Mexico City, Santa Barbara and San Diego, Jerusalem or France, on issues closely related to feminism and masculinity, ethnography, queer perspectives, transnationality, and otherness. In Mexico, critics tend to associate her with the representatives of the Crack movement, namely Jorge Volpi,* Ignacio Padilla,* Eloy Urroz* and others. She is also associated with other writers born in the 1960s, in and outside of Mexico, such as Mario Bellatin,* Iván Thays,* Xavier Velasco,* Leonardo Valencia,* Álvaro Enrigue,* Enrique Serna,* or Edmundo Paz Soldán.* Along these lines, due to her numerous engagements with history, gender, and identity, her name sometimes appears in connection with Rosa Beltrán, Mayra Santos-Febres,* Ana Clavel, and Ana García Bergua.* The truth, however, is that she has a place of her own: her writings have a trademark, a warranty seal that keeps her at a safe distance from her generation, country and even her own literature. This sense of literary freedom allows her to dialogue with Julio Cortázar and Franz Kafka, David Markson, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. Like many other writers born after 1968, she does not write about Mexico’s eternal identity quest or its endless cycles of oppression (González Boixo 16–18). This is evident from her first collection of short stories, La guerra no importa (1991, War Does Not Matter), to her more recent novels Verde Shangai (2011, Shanghai Green) and El mal de la taiga (2012, Taiga’s Syndrome). Her tendency to transgress first- and third-person narratives, interior monologues, several academic disciplines, fixed genres, and national barriers without a predetermined literary agenda is also evident in her novel Lo anterior (2004, What Lies Before); in the short-story collections Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002, No Clock Tells This) and La frontera más distante (2008, The Outmost Border). Such transgressions are also in her study La Castañeda. Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, México 1910–1930

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(2010, La Castañeda. Suffering Narratives from the General Insane Asylum, Mexico 1910–1930); her four poetry collections, and in the essay collections El disco de Newton (2011, Newton’s Disc) and Dolerse. Textos desde un país herido (2011, In Pain. Texts from a Wounded Country). In every instance Rivera Garza experiments with the content and the form, crafts anticlimactic endings, suggests enigmatic metaphors, and submerges her readers in a fictional stream of consciousness, where she explores fears and emotions, anguish and illusions, irrepressible passions or human contradictions (Samuelson, “Writing” 141). Instead of defining love, for instance, she fictionalizes what happens before this particular feeling becomes normalized in conventional terms. She disintegrates her characters’ gender, pulls them away from reality and allows readers to interpret newly formed dream-like worlds, abstract habits, strange behaviors, and unknown languages. This is how she unveils various possibilities or “suspicions of reality” that in turn trigger ambivalent readings (Herrera 48). Rather than clarifying or explaining a situation, a specific cause, or an unforeseen paradox, her writing, as she admits in an essay, is conceived as “a critical space” that protects its own “secret” (La novela… 14). Christopher Domínguez Michael rightly observes that she employs sex like a “cornerstone” capable of providing support for the edifice of our own phantoms (112). Although he refers specifically to La cresta…, Rivera Garza continually deconstructs and problematizes her characters’ identities throughout her entire oeuvre. In No One…, Joaquín Buitrago’s photographic lens captures the marginal lives of many prostitutes and hopeless individuals who are insane or terminally ill, in the context of Mexico’s Porfirian and subsequent revolutionary years. Although the novel originates from Rivera Garza’s historical research as a doctoral student—her dissertation was published as La Castañeda—the novel does not come across as a historical reconstruction of the Mexican Revolution but as an explicit deconstruction of gender roles, particularly through the portrayal of Matilda Burgos, the protagonist who rebels against women’s assigned passive role. No One… attracts new readers from the moment that an insane Matilda, at the beginning of the story, asks Joaquín, “How does one come to be a photographer of crazy people?” (1). The question becomes more enigmatic as it appears throughout the novel closely related to others like “How does one come to be a photographer of whores?” (7), but, more importantly, as it acquires new meanings with a female protagonist whose turbulent life makes us wonder, “How does a woman go crazy?” (228). The answers around Matilda’s destiny (as a whore or madwoman) and Joaquín (as a photographer of both marginalities) are carefully articulated in No One… with a discourse of silence, whereby every possible answer to the original set of questions is delayed or avoided in order to fictionalize a profound social crisis. The easy answer, after reading the novel, is that Matilda becomes a whore out of necessity and automatically becomes mad when two doctors diagnose her with “moral insanity” (95), after she refuses to sexually please the soldiers who put her in jail. In Joaquín’s case the answer can also be simple. He first photographs whores and then crazy women because he is tied to the memory of his first woman, and seeks his second lover in the

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portraits of the mentally ill, or even because his morphine addiction has paralyzed his professional life. More complex, however, is the metaphorical answer that Rivera Garza intertwines throughout the narrative to transmit the whispers and sighs of a decaying society that relegates its protagonists to the dungeons of prostitution, insanity, or multiple addictions. Considering that the brothel is, by its own nature, a place of “tolerance,” in which the prostitute and her client are free to carry out all sorts of transgressions and forbidden desires within a space that has been created precisely to maintain social order (Foucault, History 4), Rivera Garza allows her protagonist to problematize questions associated with gender and sexual orientation. As a prostitute, Matilda is better known as “La Diablesa” due to her courage, and she becomes sexually and emotionally involved with another prostitute, “La Diamantina.” Together they perform sexual scenes not for their clients’ pleasure but for the other girls who work with them, and they openly laugh at Federico Gamboa for portraying prostitutes as merely passive individuals in his canonical novel Santa (1903). Through the brothel, Rivera Garza explores the ambiguous positioning of gendered subjectivities; the feminine and masculine roles of certain prostitutes and/or clients; the transvestism of Madame Porfiria, the owner of the brothel who loves to dress as a woman; and even Matilda’s androgynous side within a world in which “the real dictatorship is a married couple” (168). Immersed in this context of turbulence and marginalities, and thanks to Matilda’s allegedly “moral insanity,” we enter La Castañeda, whose buildings, hundreds of inhabitants, parks, streets, infirmaries, cells and living quarters, remind us that this type of institution not only represents “the interior” of “the exterior” but also the elaborate architecture of human consciousness and its numerous irregularities (Foucault, Madness 11). The apparently insane women and men who inhabit La Castañeda are kept away from the external world due to “imbecility,” “masturbatory psychosis,” “fright,” “reasoned madness,” “drug addiction,” “hysteria,” and “schizophrenia” (87), but also because of “epilepsy, alcoholism, and neurosyphilis” (87). No One… unveils a world of misery that resembles the one on the other side of confinement. As doctor Eduardo Oligochea walks down the insane asylum, he notices: There are women sleeping together, holding each other in the narrow space of the mattresses with the peaceful expression of those who have finally found an oasis. There are men lying on the floor like a rope with no knots in it, a sheet. The catatonics stare at the beams in the ceiling. Some melancholics are so weak and dispirited that only with difficulty can they make the effort to close their eyes and sleep. The furious, aided by chloroform and sedatives, win their own battles on the plains of dreams, and at least for a few hours can remove the helmet of their violence […] Fluttering rapidly just under the ceilings, the prophecies of the end of the world fly above the impassive heads of the inmates like an owl. There is never peace. (81–2)

Together, these fragments invite us to revisit the original question, how does a woman go crazy? Although Matilda asserts that “sometimes you go crazy from […] not

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being able to remember” (104), in La Castañeda, published 11 years after No One…, Rivera Garza explains that during the Porfirian regime the insane asylum simultaneously served as a refuge, prison, and mental institution in order to house degenerate patients, the elderly, epileptics, agitated or semi-agitated individuals, and criminals. As expected from the initial planning of the asylum, women make up the vast majority of this population. Their own relatives or the police confine them to this space whenever their “devious behavior” and “perverse conduct” threatens society (La Castañeda 115). A priori, Matilda’s profile shows too many signs that confirm her distance from domesticity and, consequently, her undeniable insanity (94–5). Accordingly, it does not matter whether Matilda is crazy or a prostitute. Therefore, all the questions regarding her life can be condensed into one: how does one become marginal, a representative of otherness destined to inhabit the brothel or the insane asylum, conceived as spaces of tolerance to contain illegitimate sexualities and/or abnormal behaviors? Rivera Garza continues questioning the incongruity of gender roles in La cresta…, when an anonymous male doctor is visited by a young and seductive woman, Amparo Dávila, whose most distinctive characteristic is her pronounced hip bone. During that stormy night, the man’s ex-girlfriend, identified as La Traicionada, also shows up at the door. As the novel progresses, these mysterious women develop a close friendship and a Borgesian language of their own, making him feel like a prisoner at home. Aside from the intertextual link between his first visitor and the little-known mid-twentieth century Mexican writer Amparo Dávila, we are left without any clues to solve the enigma of why this woman suddenly confronts his masculinity: “I know your secret… I know that you are a woman” (55, 56). Oscillating between equally ambiguous Ciudad del Norte (most likely San Diego) and Ciudad del Sur (probably Tijuana), the entire novel revolves around this mystery “as a way of questioning identity construction based on sexual gender narratives” (Castellanos 111). From this moment on, we accompany the narrator in his search for the truth or myth behind this blunt accusation about his personal identity. Although he first admits, “I am a man who is frequently misunderstood” (20), he quickly dissipates his gender worries after inspecting himself in front of a mirror: “I had to move several times to see my reflection moving in unison with me, in order to convince myself that it was the same. I touched myself and, with evident relief, I verified that my penis and my testicles were in their place. Amparo Dávila and La Traicionada were trying to fool me.” (63). As proof that gender identities are circumscribed and socially constituted, as Butler famously argues, the doctor confirms his now fragile masculinity by having sex with two of his female co-workers. Even when nothing about them truly interests him—“the women were not beautiful but they weren’t horrible either” (67)—, what matters is that he gains peace of mind, derived from a sexual encounter that defines him as a man and not a woman. Interestingly enough, however, he engages one of them in anal intercourse while the other one introduces an unidentified object, shaped like a candle, into his rectum. To add more ambiguity to the scene, his co-workers are described in terms of their masculine attributes, and his “enormous […] boredom” (67) during his sexual “performance” reiterates his previously stated “lack of manhood” (59). In another attempt to restore his broken identity, the doctor decides to look for the

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real Amparo Dávila in Ciudad del Norte. But the aging writer who seems to have been taken out of a horror film also treats him as if he were a woman. In a painful effort to convince himself that his interlocutor is not appropriately reading the physical signs of his manliness, the narrator silently rebels against her interpretation: I supposed her sight wasn’t very good […] Anyone with normal sight would have noticed that I didn’t have breasts, nor a waist, long hair or painted nails. Anyone with normal sight would have noticed my facial hair, my square shoulders, the narrowness of my hips, the bulge in my groin. Anyone, I want to say, except for Amparo Dávila and her horde of emissaries. They were all blind. Out of their minds, true, but also blind. (85)

This anxious reaffirmation of his gender by what he “is” and what he “has” (Butler, Undoing 42) indirectly reveals Rivera Garza’s own postulates on gender, and how she carries them over to her novelistic practice (Estrada, “Against” 66). As she argues in one of her interviews: gender is, above all, “a performance that varies and enacts itself according to specific negotiations within specific contexts” (Hind 189). Still surrounded by the mystery and uncertainty of his situation, and being trapped in a story of bizarre characters and trancelike moments, the doctor finally accepts: “if, by misfortune, I was indeed a woman, nothing would change. I didn’t have to become nicer or more cruel, more serene or more emotional, more maternal or more authoritarian” (101). The fictionalization of these postulates situates La cresta… within the realm of gender studies, a characteristic of that becomes more transparent when the anonymous character in the novel finally accepts this dilemma: “Silence told me more about my new condition than any discourse from my Emissary,” he points out. “And then, submerged in the thick substance of unspeakable matters, I moved backwards… I suppose women have understood. Men should know that this happens more frequently than what we think.” (101). Given what she exposes in No One… and in La cresta…, it is not surprising to find out that Lo anterior is actually “the story of a woman telling the story of a man who is just a woman” (161, original emphasis). Through the dreams of a deaf-mute or a woman who tries to interpret his dreams and possible words, even if they are merely “echoes, resonances, euphonies, noise” (119), Rivera Garza returns to the novelistic genre in order to deal with a new labyrinth of circularities, secret compartments, and metafiction. This time, the narrative’s metatextual folds transport readers to a world that could very well be the afterlife. As we go from one chapter to the next, we do not know whether the dreamer dreams of his or her interlocutor, or if he actually enters the dreams of a man or a woman who is on the verge of dying at the foot of a gigantic rock, in the middle of a desert. Still, the story tells us that it is an “attempt to communicate” something (174), perhaps one or several love stories that could be real or not, since love, more than being a tangible and concrete feeling might be “always a reflection” (18). The identity of these protagonists remains ambiguous, more so as a doctor tries to decipher “Who is behind the third person?” “Is it a woman or a man?” (38). The gender ambivalence is kept throughout the novel with the masculine and/or feminine

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postures of its main characters; the male and/or female voices that entangle dreams and reality; the attitude of a “nameless” woman who feels the need to rescue a man or herself (72); or the hybrid taste of “salt, [and] sweat” shared by two bodies during sexual intercourse (92). The ambiguity that reflects a close relationship between “voice, body, language, and writing” (Tompkins 145) is emphasized when one of the narrative voices summarizes the story without any references to gender, as a way of highlighting what happens when “a (masculine, feminine, neutral, polymorphic) body identifies another (masculine, feminine, neutral, polymorphic) one and decide (based on barely existing information) to find out what they would be with the interference of the other” (109). Ultimately, Lo anterior’s story is also like others that Rivera Garza fictionalizes in her previous novels, one that orbits around an elaborate process of identity and recognition. As readers, once again we have a gender mystery that awaits resolution: My name is Ulises Ramírez Rubí./(it is nothing else than terror) My name is Man of the Desert./(it is nothing else than terror) My name is Man of the Restaurant in the Corner./(it is nothing else than terror) My name is Body that doesn’t Exist./(it is nothing else than terror) My name is Something that I cannot Forget nor Remember./(it is nothing else than terror) My name is Sixteen Years of Running Away. That Interval. That Silence./(it is nothing else)/(it is terror) My name is Woman who Listens./(it is something else) My name is Woman who Writes./(terror). (169)

By placing her protagonist in the center of these definitions as a man or a woman, implicitly and explicitly Rivera Garza formulates a queer narrative that closely follows the pioneering postulates of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, and Diana Fuss (Estrada, “Asignaciones” 193). In La muerte… she continues to question the masculine and the feminine, or, more precisely, what distinguishes a man from a woman. In this new novelistic scenario, the task of questioning identity formation is carried out by three women, a critic whose name is Cristina Rivera Garza, a detective who investigates homicides, and a news reporter. Their lives connect as they try to resolve the mystery behind the inexplicable death of several castrated men, whose bodies appear to be physically or metaphorically attached to Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems. While the Argentine poet’s literary presence implicitly justifies the construction of a novelistic language that is inevitably poetic, violent, transgressive and fragmented, it also creates the perfect narrative voice to discover new and/or uncertain identities. Immersed in the waters of a mystery and horror story, crafted with equal parts of “the detective genre, the noir fiction, and the thriller” (Samuelson, “Parodia” 469), as readers of La muerte… we must deal with questions like “… isn’t a man without a penis a gutted doll?” (87), “Can a man actually be a woman or vice versa?” (154), or “… who actually isn’t a woman and a man at the same time?” (217). Instead of answering these questions, Rivera Garza rearticulates them throughout the novel—as

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she does in No One…—and simply leaves us facing “an obsessive aesthete who wants to give us a message on the body, the masculine body and the letters of the alphabet” (226). This obsession with gender boundaries fictionalizes writing practices that are, according to her, “life (or death) strategies” (“Cristina” 31). The mutilated bodies present themselves as “androgynous” (137); they lack sexual organs and are mere “fragments” or “pieces” of bodies (169). As their respective masculinities are sliced off with “scrupulous ferocity” (228) and also with “the sharpness of every word” (217), one of the narrators imagines a utopian future (233–4). As a way of reconsidering her most intimate concerns as a fiction writer, in Verde Shangai, Rivera Garza creates a metatextual palimpsest that incorporates stories from her first short-story collection, La guerra no importa, fragments from the essays gathered in El disco de Newton, and several leitmotifs that are present throughout her novelistic work. After surviving a car crash, Marina Espinosa, whose marriage is described as “a true ice hell” (117), abandons her husband Horacio Oligochea and begins a physical and literary adventure to find Xian, her true alter ego. As Marina reads La guerra no importa, we realize that the novel is actually another identity quest that also trespasses other genres. From the very first pages of Verde Shangai we are invited to explore the voice of a woman who “often speaks to herself ” as a way of making sense of her own life (15), and we analyze “a love theory” that proposes silence as the best language to maintain a healthy relationship (64). True to Rivera Garza’s previous gender explorations, in the chapter titled “Retrospect,” the narrator describes sex as a brutal yet normal encounter that fuses parallel instincts, thanks to which: “The man kisses, whispers, caresses./The woman kisses, whispers, caresses./ Everything happens in the present, in the unstoppable violence of the present./ Ejaculation.” (180–1). In this novel made up of fresh and recycled material, Marina tries to unravel the mystery around Xian, the character whose historically charged name unveils the multifaceted portrait of a woman who is “a total disaster in the kitchen” (113) and desires, unlike what is expected of her supposedly passive gender, “something primitive,” “something organic and hard” (114). In her quest to find Xian, Marina also discovers fragments of her own life, written in one of the stories of La guerra no importa. Metatextually, these fragments redefine a convoluted relationship between a woman, her body, and the act of writing, as Marina recognizes herself in the pages that tell her: “One day they invented your body, terrestrial creature, so that you wouldn’t be separated from the asphalt. […]Your body only prevented you from flying or disappearing. But it is like this, through your body, that immense and definitive loneliness can be known. Just in the middle of history, housing within your cells the violent meaning of history; the body is one, just one, and cannot be more” (204). In El mal de la taiga we reconnect with the detective of La muerte…. However this time she is not looking to solve the mystery of mutilated dead men but the disappearance of another woman who leaves her husband to enter La taiga, a selfcontained, indescribable and somehow real place of freedom, one that has its own temperature, flora and fauna, cities and language. The novella that we read is the detective’s diary, through which we discover on several occasions that “it is difficult

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to describe what cannot be imagined” (95). As the detective and her translator walk through La taiga and its bars, “where sexual commerce is exercised” (81), El mal de la taiga speaks of indifference and lack of love, or, more accurately, what happens when a woman who has found a new partner is way beyond lack of affection. After the detective finds the woman who has run away apparently leaving traces behind her, she tells the ex-husband that “La taiga is, in fact, a syndrome. Some people run away from the same thing, knowing that they will not be able to escape. Some people take off like suicides, without thinking of the speed, the end, the afterlife” (113). Leaving us in this state of mind, wondering why someone chooses to escape from any and all emotions, in order to enter a different psychological zone, an internal refuge, or a safe metaphysical space, the detective concludes, in a hybrid scene combining fantasy and reality, “We all have a forest inside, indeed. Kilometers and kilometers of birch trees, fir trees, cedar trees. A gray sky. Those things that don’t change” (117). Through all of these novels, entwined by an explicit exploration of gender and identity, Rivera Garza challenges the normalization of the masculine and the feminine, and fixed definitions of subjectivity. Practicing this type of novelistic writing that alternately and/or simultaneously explores time and death, madness, sexual orientation, and love or lack of emotions; she contributes to present cultural debates. Surpassing the labels that place her as part of one or several generations of writers in Mexico or Latin America, Cristina Rivera Garza recreates contemporary problems that deal with the body and the psyche, history and fiction, social assignments and personal battles that remain undefined. Those problems may be just the beginning of her future novels. Oswaldo Estrada

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Castellanos, Carlos A. “Ambigüedad en la identidad: La cresta de Ilión de Cristina Rivera Garza.” Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 24 (2004): 111–15. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. Diccionario crítico de la literatura mexicana (1955– 2005). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. Estrada, Oswaldo. “Against Representation: Women’s Writing in Contemporary Mexico.” Hispanófila 157 (2009): 63–78. —“Asignaciones de género y tareas de identidad en la narrativa de Cristina Rivera Garza.” Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto… Oswaldo Estrada, ed. Mexico City: Eón, Uiversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UC-Mexicanistas, 2010. 179–201. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. —The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. González Boixo, José Carlos. “Introducción. Del 68 a la generación inexistente.” Tendencias de la narrativa mexicana actual. José Carlos González Boixo, ed. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009. 7–23.

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Hind, Emily. Entrevistas con quince autoras mexicanas. Madrid: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2003. Rivera Garza, Cristina. La cresta de Ilión. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2002. —No One Will See Me Cry. Trans. Andrew Hurley. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2003. —Lo anterior. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2004. —ed. La novela según los novelistas. Mexico City: FCE and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2007. —“Cristina Rivera Garza.” Nuevo Texto Crítico 41–2 (2008): 21–32. —La Castañeda. Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General. México, 1910–1930. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2010. —Verde Shangai. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2011. —El mal de la taiga. Mexico City: Tusquets, 2012. Samuelson, Cheyla. “Writing at Escape Velocity: An Interview with Cristina Rivera Garza.” Confluencia 23.1 (2007): 135–45. —“Parodia y abyección: una reconfiguración de la novela noir en México.” Realidades y fantasias / Realities and Fantasies. In Memoriam Tim McGovern (1965–2006). Sara Poot-Herrera, ed. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and UC-Mexicanistas, 2009. 461–75. Tompkins, Cynthia. “Imágenes trizadas y significados flotantes: Lo anterior de Cristina Rivera Garza.” Hispanófila 152 (2008): 145–56.

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Daniel Sada (Mexico, 1953–2011) The works of Daniel Sada gained international visibility when his novel Casi nunca (Almost Never, its 2012 English translation, which was chosen as one of The New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year) won the 2008 Herralde prize. In the original’s back flap Sada is celebrated by his peers as one of the leading Latin American writers of the last two decades: “A storyteller profoundly close to the essence of man” (Álvaro Mutis); “Sada renewed the Mexican novel” (Juan Villoro*); “Daniel Sada, without doubt, is writing one of the most ambitious works in Spanish” (Roberto Bolaño*); “Daniel Sada will be a revelation for world literature” (Carlos Fuentes). But he was already an established writer, author of one of the key novels of the twentieth century’s second half: Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999, Because It Seems like a Lie the Truth Is Never Known). Sada’s oeuvre crystallizes in this masterpiece, which exhibits such radical heterogeneity that it simultaneously reactivates and updates a Latin American literary genealogy that encompasses various countries, generations and poetics. Producing narrative strategies that reformulate the Neobaroque legacy, the ontological dimension of language, and the convergence of classical and popular currents of Hispanic cultures, Sada joins some of the most prominent twentieth century Latin American novelists: João Guimarães Rosa, José Lezama Lima, and Juan Rulfo, to name those whose masterworks resonate most with his. Unlike younger countrymen like Jorge Volpi* who enjoyed early recognition that included diplomatic appointments, Sada earned his through a gradual but steady production. His first novel, Lampa vida (1980, Bright Life) and his first short-story collection, Juguete de nadie y otras historias (1985, Nobody’s Toy and Other Stories), were praised for their intricate combination of inflections, rhythms and lexicon of northern Mexico, formalized in a virtually versified prose. Winning the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia award for his short-story collection Registro de causantes (1992, Record of Causes) propelled his literary career in Mexico. Critics have highlighted the northern Mexican imaginary as the essential feature of his narrative: the towns and cities of the desert and borderlands, the themes of immigration, drug trade and official corruption, along with the region’s linguistic peculiarities. Considered one of the “desert storytellers” or one of the so-called group of “writers of the north” (Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Eduardo Antonio Parra and Élmer Mendoza)—labels that include writers with very different poetics and imply both exceptionality and marginality vis-à-vis writers born or residing in Mexico’s capital—Sada identified himself as an alternative to the dominant literary field. In various interviews, he insists on his unusual trajectory. His formative readings, he explains for instance, were in the personal library of a schoolteacher in the small town of Sacramento, Coahuila, where he grew up. The teacher’s limited collection offered a

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very classical education: Homer, Virgil, and Dante, and Spanish Golden Age poetry, drama and narrative. He claims that the most modern novel he read until relocating to Mexico City was Cervantes’ Don Quixote of La Mancha, elaborating: That is why, when I arrived to Mexico City at age twenty, from a town with a population of one thousand to a city of millions, my adaptation was very difficult. Because I did not know any contemporary writers, nor modern ones, not even ones from the nineteenth century. Then people would tell me about José Agustín, about the nouveau roman, about things that I knew nothing about. At that time, I did not know about Proust or Kafka. The city was a tremendous shock for me. (Coelho)

Those early readings may explain his baroque style, a prose structured in octosyllabic clauses—the meter of the Spanish medieval ballad and popular Mexican corridos (folk songs)—as in the case of his novels Albedrío (1988, Will) and Una de dos (1994, One of Two), also accounting for his incorporation of sophisticated meters in his later books, taken from Golden Age poetry, such as hendecasyllabic and alexandrine metrical lines. The author-figure constructed by Sada and admired by his critics is fully justified with Porque parece mentira…, the summa of his previous works and without a doubt his most radical novel. Sada was said to have written it during the first hours of dawn each day, over four years, destroying ten different versions of it prior to producing a definitive manuscript (Castañeda H.). The novel’s 602 pages are divided into 15 “periods” or sections, each highlighting different aspects of the multiple plots connecting the 90 characters who inhabit the fictitious town of Remadrín, in the imaginary northern state of Capila. At the story’s center is the brutal electoral fraud orchestrated by Mayor Romeo Pomar, a grotesque and pathetic caricature of the archetypical Latin American dictator. On Election Day, as citizens queue to cast their votes, an armed command steals the ballot boxes in broad daylight. A massive protest ensues, and the demonstrators plan to march to the state capital, but the governor orders their bloody massacre. To cover up the official crime, a conspiracy closes in on Pomar, who is forced to resign and is later killed. To retake control of Remadrín, the governor sends the army to occupy the streets, isolating the town with checkpoints and precipitating a food shortage. The strategy wears the citizens down, who begin moving to nearby towns, prompting an exodus. The protagonists of the novel, the couple Trinidad and Cecilia, leave without news of their sons, who disappeared during the massacre and whose fate remains unknown. The novel begins when a truck loaded with corpses drives through Remadrín to deliver the bodies of those killed in the massacre to their families. Circling through town, it runs into another truck, this one loaded with the stolen ballots of the fraudulent election that were to be burned at the town’s outskirts. Trinidad and Cecilia also desperately circle around Remadrín, searching for their sons with the hope that they escaped the massacre. The novel’s structure is circular, and the massacre functions as the epicenter from which the action unfolds and spreads in the vast desert, as Alejandro Espinoza points out, tracing “a structure that moves from inside out, in which the

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author begins to direct the reading to the margins” (67). Each of the 15 “periods” has a different level of autonomy, and Sada experiments with a variety of composition and narrative techniques, seeking to produce unprecedented combinations. The first period’s narrator is thus very different from the one of the second period, and this disparity only increases with each ensuing period until the very conditions of the narrating act are radically altered. Each narrative voice establishes its own circle whose centrifugal movement ultimately vanquishes its own chosen orbit, a structure making Sada’s baroque style a necessity. The language never alludes directly to characters’ actions: it configures them and the actions with a periphrasis that gradually defines them, granting them discursive density. Sada’s technique seeks in words an oblique experience of the real, producing a linguistic phenomenology that privileges not the subject’s gaze but the very structure of literary language. Consequently, the novelistic imaginary constructs a Mexico that is recognizable but that is symbolically displaced to a discursive other, enunciating an alternative topography: Coahuila becomes “Capila” and Mexico is a country named “Mágico.” In this equation, magic is the crucial element that combines real aspects with unreal ones, producing a fiction that modifies the link between text and referent. These features are present in Sada’s earliest books. A 1987 review of Juguete de nadie y otras historias highlights two of his most important genealogies: Brazilian Guimarães Rosa and Cuban Lezama Lima, authors of the foundational Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) and Paradiso (1966). The review stresses how the “verbal vegetation of João Guimarães Rosa and Lezama Lima have yielded to the solar transparency and the dark sonorities that sparkle in the perfection of [Sada’s] writing” (Noyola 44). Critic Christopher Domínguez Michael calls them Sada’s “most direct masters” (90), while on Casi nunca’s back flap Bolaño states that Sada’s narrative is “comparable only to the work of Lezama,” signaling the difference between Lezama’s tropical setting and the unusual fact that Sada’s baroque emanates “from the desert.” Grande Sertão… and Paradiso not only are genealogical precedents of Porque parece mentira… and most of Sada’s other fiction, but also two of the most complex explorations of Neobaroque language in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Like Sada’s, those novels produced a rupture within their respective traditions that remained virtually unaccounted for by the academic criticism of their time. Understood as anomalies, they were thus overshadowed by the enormous success of the “totalizing”—and highly commercial—novels of the Latin American “Boom,” as in the paradigmatic case of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In contrast to the difficulty posed by Lezama Lima’s and Guimarães Rosa’s novels, critic Pedro Luis Barcia explains that García Márquez’s masterpiece had the “virtue” of “being readable and understood in considerable depth,” without introducing “myths, characters, places, theories, book references, etc.” (480). This “legibility” of certain Boom novels like García Márquez’s and others facilitated the production of an image of Latin American alterity that was attractive for international readers, and not clearly conveyed by the difficult works of Lezama Lima and Guimarães Rosa. Sada’s works, their direct heir, draw from and synthesize their precedents, producing a complex ontology of language that reconfigures Latin America’s cultural and historical difference.

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In the Mexican tradition, Sada’s genealogy begins with Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), although Porque parece mentira… radicalizes Rulfo’s legacy. If Pedro Páramo modernizes literary language by introducing the mythical dimension of death into the realist novel, Sada’s masterpiece is narrated by a voice that no longer recognizes itself or its place of enunciation. Domínguez Michael argues that the two most important themes in Rulfo’s novel are inverted in Sada’s text: the return to Comala is transformed into the abandonment of Remadrín, while the collapse of the patriarch becomes the perpetual disappearance of the son: “If Pedro Páramo dramatized the extermination of the father, half a century later Daniel Sada attests to the endless fugue of the sons.” Domínguez Michael concludes his review by calling Sada’s novel an “enterprise of language at the end and at the beginning” (91). While Pedro Páramo restructured the realist novel into a signifying myth, Porque parece mentira… dissolves myth, transforming all symbolism into a language game that short-circuits traditional narrative techniques. As in José María Arguedas’ The Fox from Up above and the Fox from Down Below, Sada’s entire literary project signals the impossibility of representation. His fiction remains on the surface of language, where the link between form and rhythm defines the structure. In Albedrío, he follows the nomadic lives of a Hungarian troupe that operates a traveling show and is the object of suspicion in a small northern town; in Una de dos, two ingenious, identical twin sisters provoke a comedy of errors that relocates the humor of the Golden Age to another marginal Mexican town; in the short stories of Ese modo que colma (2010. That Manner that Fulfills), he rewrites the famous corrido of Rosita Alvírez, the quintessential character of that Mexican tradition, whose passion for dancing leads to her death; in Casi nunca, an agronomist is torn between his fiancée and his lover, a prostitute who sees in him a means of redemption. The narrative strategies of all these works subordinate all referents: if a colloquial expression is followed by a sophisticated cultural term, this is more than the intersection of two traditions. Words coexist in Sada’s books because they are key elements of his literary language, and not because they represent a certain social stratum, and once in the narrative they begin a movement toward an exterior that separates language from its substratum, as argued by poststructuralist theory. In this sense, Sada’s novels are not about Mexico: they may originate in that country’s linguistic substratum, but they do not represent it. This is also why his novels that abandon the Mexican desert for the modern city do not change in essence his core poetics. In Luces artificiales (2002, Artificial Lights), Ritmo delta (2005, Delta Rhythm), and La duración de los empeños simples (2006, The Duration of Simple Endeavors), language is the main vehicle for exploring reality, even when the stories follow urban characters immersed in the discontents of late capitalism and Mexico’s modern society. In an interview, Sada explains how his narrative technique was in constant reformulation, sometimes in a very unexpected way while writing Porque parece mentira…, articulating a poetics that may apply to all his work: I would go backward and forward constantly. Later I worked using a circular, non-lineal conceptualization of the novel. Then I said: if I have a circle, where is

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the beginning? I thought that it was the center. I began at the center, and then I would move to either side, from one form or another. Then, the versions started to change, and I was also changing as a narrator, as an author. (Güemes)

Sada’s narrative, “the most devilishly difficult of Mexican literature” (Domínguez Michael 90) further opens important fissures in Latin American literary history, since its most important novels appear in the horizon at the end of the twentieth century as disorienting landmarks of modernity, revealing its conditions of (im)possibility. In this sense, Bolaño’s* 2666 and Villoro’s* El testigo (2004, The Witness) are two of the closest contemporary works to Porque parece mentira… . Sada died on November 18, 2011. Hours before, as his widow explained, the media announced that he had won the National Award for the Sciences and the Arts, but Sada was no longer conscious to learn of this recognition. His bibliography includes five collections of short stories, ten novels and three volumes of poetry, some of which have been translated into various languages. His posthumous novel, El lenguaje del juego (2012, The Language of the Game), has already been celebrated as extraordinary, and novelist Francisco Goldman has praised it saying “In barely one hundred pages, just a little more than Pedro Páramo, Sada has bequeathed us his dazzling personal explanation of Mexican violence.” A recent interview announced that this is Sada’s last book of narrative, since he did not finish or authorize for publication any other work in progress. A final volume collecting his essays, book reviews and journalism is forthcoming. As Rachel Nolan states in her review of Almost Never, “If you read only three novelists on Mexico […] choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada” (BR16). Oswaldo Zavala

Works Cited Aguilar Sosa, Yanet. “Daniel Sada aportó por el lenguaje.” El Universal. September 21, 2012. Web. Barcia, Pedro Luis. “Cien años de soledad en la novela hispanoamericana.” Cien años de soledad. Edición conmemorativa. Madrid: Alfaguara, Real Academia Española, 2007. Castañeda H., Eduardo. “O me renuevo o me callo para siempre: entrevista con Daniel Sada.” 5 April, 2001. Punto G 19. Web. Coelho, Oliverio. “El secreto que llegó de México.” La Nación. 15 November, 2008. Web. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. “La lección del maestro.” Letras Libres I. 10 (1999): 90–1. Espinoza, Alejandro. ‘Tradición y ruptura en Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe, de Daniel Sada.’ Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 10.23 (2004): 65–73. Güemes, César. ‘Cuando escribí mi novela no pensé en el mercado: Daniel Sada.’ 1999. La Jornada. February 19, 2006. Web. Nolan, Rachel. ‘Unbridled.’ The New York Times Book Review 22 April 2012. BR16. Noyola, Samuel. ‘Juguete de nadie y otras historias de Daniel Sada.’ Vuelta 122 (1987): 43–4. Sada, Daniel. Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe. Mexico City: Tusquets, 1999.

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Enrique Serna (Mexico, 1959) As writer, journalist, and screenwriter, Enrique Serna has made a name for himself as a versatile and incisive voice that does not hesitate to grab his subject by the horns. While in his third novel, 1995’s El miedo de los animales (Fear of Animals) he sarcastically and harshly dissects the Mexican culture industry and literary establishment, he is equally adept at writing unabashedly about male bisexuality and impotence in his latest work, La sangre erguida (2010, Erect Blood). Perhaps it is this quality that makes Serna so appealing to a larger readership, refreshed by an open and analytic examination of previously held literary and erotic taboos, leading critics such as Vicente Francisco Torres to call him a “vitriolic […] and transcendent writer with a verbal capacity and vision of the world that gains a stronger cohesion with each of his works” (135). Serna’s novelistic production, translated into various languages, can be divided into three rough swatches. First, the episodic fresco novel that aims to capture different yet representative slices of everyday life in Mexico City from the 1970s onwards. These novels—his first, Uno soñaba que era rey (1989, One Dreamt of Being King), Fear of Animals, and Señorita México (1989, Miss Mexico), though initially published as El ocaso de la primera dama (1987, The Decline of the First Lady)—freely intermingle multiple registers, voices, and genres to produce novels rich in content and experimental in style. They also contain a harsh socioeconomic critique that aesthetically reflects the rise and fall of the Mexican economy during the transition from import substitution industrialization to a neoliberal model, perhaps best signified by Miss Mexico’s protagonist. This fluid first-person narrative, evocative of Gustavo Sainz’s 1974 La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (The Princess of the Iron Palace) and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s* La diabla en el espejo (The She-Devil in the Mirror), succeeds in questioning the veracity of testimonio as a genre (Gardner) through a narrative juxtaposition of reported and first-person speech, which encourages the reader to assume the role of a detective and carefully examine how and why the protagonist relates her life. Serna’s novel, furthermore, can also be classified as belonging to a tradition started by Luis Spota’s La estrella vacía (1950, The Empty Star), and perhaps most masterfully represented by Carlos Fuentes in Zona sagrada (1967, Holy Place), which “tries to reflect on the impact of the cinema on the viewing public through the theme of identification and subsequent desire that the medium provokes” (Galindo 35). Similarly, Serna focuses his protagonist Selene Sepúlveda’s narrative development on Angélica María, a popular actress in 1960s “ ‘youth’ movies […] that criticized all types of youthful behavior” (Agustín 39), and is a principal referent in Luis Zapata’s Queer classic, La hermana secreta de Ángelica María (1989, Angélica María’s Secret Sister). What is original and critically important about Serna’s novel is its focus on Mexico’s Lost Decade, a period of economic

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and intellectual stagnation that triggered the end-of-century entry into the open economic and cultural market of neoliberalism. Miss Mexico has also become a necessary foundational text for more recent novels that explore hybridity and fluid identity politics in post–1994 Mexico, such as Xavier Velasco’s* Diablo guardián (2003, Guardian Devil). Serna’s second swatch of novels can be categorized under the broader heading of the New Historical Novel spearheaded by Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme and Alejo Carpentier’s The Harp and the Shadow in the 1970s, which achieved editorial and critical popularity in the early 1990s with Mario Vargas Llosa (most famously with The Feast of the Goat) as templates for newer expressions by younger authors (Pedro Lemebel,* Carmen Boullosa,* Horacio Castellanos Moya,* Cristina Rivera Garza,* Juan Gabriel Vásquez,* amongst others). Serna’s award-winning and voluminous El seductor de la patria (1999, The Nation’s Seducer) focuses on the rise and fall of Antonio López de Santa Anna, whose novelistic life was to serve as the inspiration for a failed telenovela that Serna was contracted to write. It comes as no surprise that he chooses the historical Santa Anna as the principal referent, for the character demonstrates all the “inner fallacies of the human being” (Torres 136) on which the author focuses in his broader production. We can thus read this novel as a reinterpretation of universal themes like greed, corruption, and integrity, a task highlighted again in Ángeles del abismo (2004, Angels of the Abyss), a picaresque which recounts the life of Crisanta Cruz, a young actress who feigns contact with God in seventeenth century Mexico, and Tlacotzin, an indigenous man who struggles with his Catholic faith and his ancestors’ strong spiritual tradition. Like Fear of Animals, the novel focuses on the corruption of individuals within already corrupt institutions. The last category of Serna’s novels can be best described as vignettes of masculine identity and sexuality. These—Fruta verde (2006, Unripe Fruit) and La sangre erguida—focus on the precocious development of male characters as they struggle with their blossoming and at times flailing sexuality, a theme shared with Mexican contemporaries such as Rivera Garza,* Juan Villoro,* Mario Bellatín,* and Ana Clavel. We can read these novels as elaborations of Serna’s focus on Mexican masculinity first presented in his short-story collections Amores de segunda mano (1993, Second-Hand Affairs), El orgasmógrafo (2001, The Orgasmographer), and Giros negros (2008, Dark Turns). While Fruta verde reads at times as an autobiographical bildungsroman with a touch of bisexuality, La sangre erguida delves across geographical and cultural borders as Serna writes about the relationship between three Latin American men and their respective penises in Barcelona. The setting may be reflective of a broader trend among his contemporaries of writing outside national boundaries. The novel shows a geographic break with his previous work, though the ethos of Mexicanness is kept alive by the stereotypical and almost caricature-like macho mechanic turned black market Viagra dealer, Bulmaro Díaz, whose sexuality becomes central to forging a notion of collective Mexican identity. This is also a prevalent theme in Villoro,* Armando Ramírez, Zapata, and José Emilio Pacheco, to name a few. Serna again breaks fresh ground through the unabashed portrayal and discussion of male

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impotence, clearly stressing the importance of the phallus in characterizing Latin male sexuality, a literary venture attempted by precursors who, however, tended to focus on the impotent male as a weak and shamed figure. Serna, however, adopts a less judgmental attitude in detailing the centrality of the phallus. Exploring Serna’s novel production must take into account his nonfiction on literature and sexual cultures, collected mainly in Las caricaturas me hacen llorar (1996, Cartoons Make Me Cry) and Giros negros. In the latter’s “Vejamen de la narrativa difícil” (‘Vexation of Difficult Narrative’) he stresses the need to write concisely and clearly, rejecting literary vanguards and editorial interests that favor experimentation over content. Accessibility is at the core of this poetics, as fiction must shy from snobbery and must instead embrace all sectors of the reading public. In a similar vein, he argues that the writer must “not always invoke a literary tradition, which in any case is already in our blood” (“Lecturas…” [“Readings”] 112), but must instead tell the story in its purest and least erudite form. That said, he affirms that the greatest challenge for contemporary writers is to somehow “place themselves between the poles of tradition and rupture” (“El canon” [“The Canon”] 61). Keeping these literary principles in mind, his reflections on Octavio Paz’s classic The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) come as no surprise, as Serna severs the ontological supremacy often attributed to Paz’s text, and instead encourages an “optimistic approximation that parts from the text towards a change in the status quo” (Venkatesh 27), arguing that “perhaps the most valuable facet of The Labyrinth during these times of anxiety is not so much its correct dissection of historical traumas but its call to transform our nightmare” (“Laberinto…” [“Labyrinth with Exit”] 81). Therein lies the strength of this novelist, not only as an acute critic of society and individual character, but more importantly as a sage Theseus whose carefully laid threads between novels cajoles readers to find a way out of their own labyrinths. Vinodh Venkatesh

Works Cited Agustín, José. La contracultura en México. La historia y el significado de los rebeldes sin causa, los jipitecas, los punks y las bandas. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1996. Gardner, Eli. “The Many Voices of Serna.” The Latin American Review of Books. 1 August 2009. Web. Serna, Enrique. Uno soñaba que era rey. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1989. —Amores de segunda mano. Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1994. —A Fear of Animals. [1995] Trans. Georgina Jiménez Reynoso. Salisbury: Aflame Books, 2008. —Las caricaturas me hacen llorar. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1996. —El seductor de la patria. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1999. —El orgasmógrafo. Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2001. —Ángeles del abismo. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2005.

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—Fruta verde. Mexico City: Planeta, 2006. —Señorita México. Mexico City: Seix Barral, 2009. —La sangre erguida. Mexico City: Seix Barral, 2010. —“Laberinto con salida.” Letras Libres 141 (2010): 80–1. —“Lecturas anticonceptivas.” Letras Libres 154 (2011): 112. —“El canon de los modistas.” Letras Libres 50 (2003): 61. —“Vejamen de la narrativa difícil.” Giros negros. Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2008. 288–96. Torres, Vicente Francisco. “Las novelistas las prefieren gordas.” La Palabra y el Hombre 113 (2000): 135–41. Venkatesh, Vinodh. “Androgyny, Football, and Pedophilia: Rearticulating Mexican Masculinities in the Works of Enrique Serna.” Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 49 (2011): 25–36.

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Eloy Urroz (Mexico, 1967) The work of New York-born Eloy Urroz is unique in contemporary Mexican fiction. Regardless of his affiliation with the Crack group, he has resisted the temptation to participate in the aesthetic lines set forth by its members and has developed a narrative best characterized as highly personal and emotionally invested, one that in different degrees of detail and perfection proliferates through styles and ideas that in some cases vary greatly from book to book. Urroz’s early forays into the novel developed within diverse variations of the Bildungsroman. In Las leyes que el amor elige (1993, The Laws That Love Demands); and the short novel Las plegarias del cuerpo (1994, The Body’s Prayers), his contribution to Tres bosquejos del mal (Three Sketches of Evil), Urroz constructs a poetics of love and eroticism, diverse forms of sentimental education, which, incidentally, correspond well to the explorations of love that characterize his poetry. He seems to have a canon of readings that departs from those developed by his co-authors of Tres bosquejos del mal, Jorge Volpi* and Ignacio Padilla.* In particular, D. H. Lawrence looms large in his work, as Urroz is amply concerned with questions of the body, the corporeal and the erotic, as well as with transgression at the level of plot and, perhaps more importantly, at the level of form. The most important work of this early period is undoubtedly 1996’s Las rémoras, translated into English as The Obstacles (2006). This novel centers on two teenagers, Mexico City-based Ricardo and Baja California resident Elías, who write books about each other’s stories. In this mutual telling Urroz constructs a world ruled by the very moment of falling in love (Ricardo loves the girl next door, Elías loves a prostitute) and its long, complex wake. Stylistically, the novel seems undecided about which tradition it wants to pursue. The use of a fictional town and of the artifice of a scrivener reminds us of a Cervantine tradition updated by writers like García Márquez, while its commitment to romance and the construction of inner life bears a resemblance to a diverse canon that may include Unamuno’s Mist or even Goethe’s Werther. In any case, Urroz’s fiction has, from very early on, created diverse worlds and styles to explore the same obsession: the surrender to love and desire, and the enormous existential implications of such a choice. Las rémoras hence establishes Urroz as an author who translates individual obsessions into generous fictional projects that oscillate between realism and experimentalism. Thusly, Las rémoras intersects straightforward narration with innovative use of page layout, such as his representation of a road trip with the mileage on the page margin. In his contribution to the Crack manifesto he points out that the only thing that unites the participants is a common denominator based on different risks: formal, aesthetic, etc. (216). Unlike other members, who clearly laid out specific ideals for their poetics, Urroz opts for an open-ended statement that does not commit to any

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aesthetic. Even in Herir tu fiera carne (1997, Hurting Your Fierce Flesh), a novelistic diptych with Volpi’s Sanar tu piel amarga (Curing Your Bitter Skin), Urroz opts to shape his romantic discourse through themes and ideas of his previous fiction, rather than fully submitting to the logic of the group. If anything, the diptych seems more attuned to the literary interests of Urroz—sentimental education, love, eroticism— than those of Volpi. Having said this, it is nonetheless important to say that his participation in the Crack did allow Urroz to transcend the Mexican field and achieve, like other members, more recognition for his work abroad. Las rémoras, for instance, was translated by the prestigious Dalkey Archive Press, which has only published two other Mexican novelists: Carlos Fuentes and Fernando del Paso. Even though he remained as an author of the Mexican press Nueva Imagen longer than Volpi,* Padilla* or Pedro Ángel Palou,* he ultimately published with Planeta and Alfaguara, giving him access to transnational circuits. His next novel, Las almas abatidas (2000, Downed Souls) marks an important expansion in his literary ambition and in the architecture of his novels. This is a complex exploration of the subjectivity of its protagonist, a historian named Teodoro Benevendo, relayed by a self-conscious narrative embodied in three voices. While this novel clearly builds on the narrative concerns developed by Las rémoras, it is also true that the use of a polyphonic narrative to tell each section’s story creates a formal affinity to Padilla. Nevertheless, whereas Padilla’s work is ultimately about a subjectivity heavily reliant on literary archives, Urroz opts for a complex subjectivity and a careful concern with the character’s psychology, developing a structure that takes on the risk promised by the Crack manifesto. This approach expands further in Un siglo más de mí (2004, Another Century of Me), an ambitious and sprawling family saga, developed over an expansive geography through events such as Mexico’s Revolution and territories like the Southwestern U.S. and Israel. The main character is Silvana, a woman whose story unfolds in events such as falling in love with a 13-year old, and her perspective is the narrative’s privileged point of view. This novel moves Urroz’s fiction forward in many respects. He creates a female Jewish character whose life and experiences are beyond his comfort zone of male protagonists, aptly balancing the historical with the subjective, taking his narrative to a mode of intellectual exploration of the world that was largely absent from his earlier work. Un siglo más de mí can be properly considered Urroz’s first foray into narrative maturity, in which the emotional concerns of the young writer finally reach a true dialogue with life at large. Urroz’s only other book available in English is 2008’s Fricción, translated into English as Friction (2010), perhaps his most risky, both personally and aesthetically. This is a daring roman-à-clef based on his period as a professor in an American university, transfigured in a story that intersects the life of Eusebio Cardoso, a professor at Millard Fillmore University and Urroz’s highly fictionalized alter ego, along with Matilde, the purported wife of the reader, who seeks information on a Mexican politician called Roberto Soto. While this happens, coincidentally in the fictional town of Las rémoras, Baja California, a carnivalesque army of historical and literary characters that includes Empedocles, Sergio Pitol and Pancho Villa, materializes. This tone is akin to the joyful exploration of Carnival in Pitol’s fiction, and functions through an astonishing level

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of hyperbole. The novel dutifully insults the reader, creates a world of lust and vulgar concupiscence and does not shy from using scatology as its main source of humor. This novel also locates Urroz in the antipodes of other Crack writers. While Padilla and Volpi exercise utter care in producing a fiction as clean as possible, Fricción thrives on imperfection and excess. As such, it is perhaps through this venue that Urroz has translated his personal investment in literature into a truly original literary project. Urroz’s most recent novel, La familia interrumpida (2011, The Interrupted Family), seems to open yet another period in his work. It is concerned with Spanish poet Luis Cernuda and a young Mexican filmmaker called Luis Salerno, who receives an e-mail that ultimately ties him to Cernuda. The book is completely different from Urroz’s previous work: written in short chapters and tight prose, with an economical use of words that breaks decisively with the sprawl of Fricción or Un siglo más de mí. It is an accomplished and highly readable novel that relays his concern with the personal and subjective in its most distilled fashion yet. Here we are perhaps witnessing a new authorial manifestation that gradually moves beyond earlier obsessions and settles more comfortably into recent literary commitments. La familia interrumpida renews Urroz’s genealogies and his prose, and it would not be surprising if this new development led, in his next works, to the writing of a true masterpiece. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Works Cited Urroz, Eloy. Las leyes que el amor elige. Mexico City: Corunda, 1993. —“Las plegarias del cuerpo.” In Tres bosquejos del mal. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1994. 9–92. —Las rémoras. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1996. English Edition: The Obstacles. Trans. Ezra Fitz. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2006. —Herir tu fiera carne. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1997. —Las almas abatidas. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 2000. —Un siglo más de mí. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2004. —Fricción. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2008. —Friction. Trans. Ezra Fitz. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2010. —La familia interrumpida. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2011.

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Xavier Velasco (Mexico, 1964) Xavier Velasco’s rise to fame in the first decade of the twenty-first century is sudden and, to an extent, polemical. Born and raised in Mexico City, Velasco begins his creative career in the booming advertising and print culture of the late 1980s, a profession and experience sarcastically chronicled in the award-winning Diablo guardián (2003, Guardian Devil). Prior to dedicating himself to fiction, he garnered readership in the editorial pages of Mexican news outlets such as Sábado, El Universal and Milenio. He comments that this early trajectory was routine and depressing, as he went from “rock journalism to nocturnal chronicle, from advertising to Hell, and from Hell to the novel” (Adams 40). Velasco’s relatively short writing career is, however, defined by an acute awareness and playful manipulation of several topics, such as the role of women in society, the impact of neoliberal policies, and the cultural effects of globalization, that his broader generation has deftly articulated in recent fiction. Velasco’s novelistic production begins with Diablo…, winner of the 2003 Premio Alfaguara de novela, whose recent winners includes several novelists in this volume, such as Santiago Roncagliolo,* Andrés Neuman* and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.* Like Roncagliolo, the Alfaguara prize is a fortuitous boost to Velasco, as Diablo… garners must-read status amongst readers and academics interested in hybridization, globalization, and border studies. The novel, however, avoids over-indulging in clichés and globalized kitsch, and instead places itself within a clear genealogy of Mexican novels that develop an off-beat feminine narrative voice to issue a strong socio-economic critique of the status quo. There is, as Gabriela Cabello notes, a strong “contempt for the everyday life of the middle class.” Velasco’s novel can therefore be placed in an arc that includes Gustavo Sainz’s 1974 La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (The Princess of the Iron Palace, 1987) and Enrique Serna’s* Señorita México (1989, Miss Mexico). Keeping this gendered quality in mind, Laurent Aubague underlines that Velasco’s narrator is a “female Mexican prototype” for reformulating the contemporary picaresque novel (359). Diablo… narrates the life of Rosalba Rosas Valdivia, rechristened as Violetta Schmidt, a young middle-class girl from Mexico City who must contend with class-conscious parents obsessed with being North American. Velasco brings to the fore questions and issues of nationality and identity under globalization by juxtaposing what the narrator deems to be traditionally or essentially Mexican, and qualities and actions that are a poorly conceived mimicry of the North. Violetta, for example, is harshly critical of and uncompromising in her refusal to dye her hair blonde like the rest of her family, preferring to shave her head and wear wigs. Other issues such as language and the increasingly normative position of Spanglish are present, as Violetta informally philosophizes on the role of language in creating identity.

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Oswaldo Estrada (450) studies the text’s focus on hybridity, identity, and globalization, underlining that though the novel can be read as an example of a globalized subject, we cannot ignore its intrinsic Mexicanness. Thus, the novel invariably reemphasizes aspects of national culture and lexicon in a post-national moment, akin to Arjun Appadurai’s notion of cultural homo- and heterogeneity during globalization (25). Leila Lehnen puts forth an alternative critical reading, stating that Diablo… “forms a part of a group of novels produced in recent years by Latin American writers that, instead of trying to formulate a national identity of their respective countries, relates a process of dissolution of such identity” (143). While this is evident in Violetta’s characterization and narrative chronology, the converse also rings true, as with each appropriation of North American slang, identity, and place comes a tandem reaffirmation of chilango (Mexico City) identity. Though Violetta ventures across national, international (New York, where she prostitutes herself), social, and linguistic boundaries, her Mexicanness is everpresent, a character trait found throughout Velasco’s narrative. In fact, he heavily identifies with that city, commenting, “It is the land of debauchery, where you arrive after behaving very badly and where fiction occurs at all times” (Núñez 38). Not surprisingly a meta-fictional Velasco appears in several of his novels. The shy, conniving loner who begins a parasitic relationship with Violetta in Diablo…, for example, comes from an upper-class family and self-loathingly works in advertising. His affinity for Violetta and the promise he makes to narrate her life story, furthermore, parallels Velasco’s own writing process behind the novel, as his initial inspiration is ignited after picking up a young, beautiful Russian prostitute at 3:30 a.m. in Mexico City (Adams 40). In a similar vein, the young, intrepid, and dastardly protagonist of Éste que ves (2006, The One you Behold), Xavier, grows up in an affluent neighborhood of the capital and attends private schools, just like the author. Xavier reappears in the recent La edad de la punzada (2012, Growing Pains), which can be read as a sequel to Éste que ves. In this latest work, Velasco successfully engages in a lyrical tour of Mexico City, as he showcases a plethora of expressions, slang, and sexually suggestive puns that allow a temporary immersion in its myriad colorful streets. Readers will rejoice at Velasco’s sleights of hand and double meanings characteristic of the speech of Mexican male teenagers, similar to Enrique Serna’s. Though these two novels haven’t garnered critical and/or commercial success similar to Diablo…, they merit a close reading as Velasco invites readers into a cultural and linguistic paradigm often slighted in favor of more transnational fiction. He further examines the indelicate balance between cultural homo- and heterogeneity in El materialismo histérico (2004, Hysterical Materialism), a short-story collection that “oscillate[s] between fractious relationships and unbridled greed” (Goldberg 61), while portraying “intimate relationships as grossly distorted by the logic of consumerism and the pursuit of economic advantage” (Goldberg 59). No less occurs in the hybrid chronicles of urban dens of iniquity of Luna llena en las rocas (2005, Full Moon on the Rocks). Both books focus on the contemporary obsession with pop-psychiatry, hipness, and desire, later developed in the voluminous Puedo explicarlo todo (2010, I Can Explain It All). The meshing of economics to gendered

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and individual practice highlights Velasco’s rumination on the politics of identity in an increasingly globalized society, where everything seemingly has a price. But our understanding of Velasco, and other writers of his generation, is distorted by the desire to fixate literary movements rather than pay attention to each author’s individual traits. In Velasco’s case, the most notable culprit is Carlos Fuentes, who includes him in a group of novelists who, he affirms, will eventually take over the Mexican Republic of Letters: Jorge Volpi,* Ignacio Padilla,* Pedro Ángel Palou,* and Cristina Rivera Garza.* Familiarity with recent Mexican fiction reveals that the above, except Rivera Garza, belong to the self-anointed 1990s Crack movement. Velasco’s inclusion in this group is problematic and anachronistic at best, as he, like Rivera Garza, began to make waves in the literary scene after the appearance of the Crack. Their books, furthermore, are thematically and ideologically distinct from the Crack novels. Velasco’s reaction to this putative membership is unsurprisingly candid: “I am not a part of anything, I am Xavier Velasco” (Tinoco). When pressed further to comment on his recognition by the late pater familias of Mexican literature, Velasco explodes: “I don’t need anybody’s recognition. I have always liked Fuentes’s work, ever since I was an adolescent. I knew that sooner or later these types of questions would surface” (Tinoco). Yet, he has recently become more compliant, commenting after Fuentes’s funeral: “I don’t know where I would be without Fuentes” (“Carlos Fuentes”). Velasco’s popularity comes hand-in-hand with a strong critical disconnect from the literary establishment, as his novels appeal to a general readership more than the literary cognoscenti. Nevertheless, critical reception has begun to change. Thus, recently, Élmer Mendoza, a leading writer, declared that Velasco is an example of “how to write for the mass public without cheapening the value of the text.” In this conjunction of accessibility and quality lies the attraction of Velasco’s narrative. Velasco’s most recent novel is La edad de la punzada (2013, The Awkward Age). Vinodh Venkatesh

Works Cited Adams, Jacqueline. “Xavier Velasco: Guardian Devil.” Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (2005): 40–1. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Aubague, Laurent. “Glissements des normes de la picaresque dans le roman Diablo Guardián, de Xavier Velasco.” Les Littératures d’Amérique latine au XXe siècle: Une Poétique de la transgression? Laurent Aubague, Jean Franco and Alba Lara-Alengrin, (eds). Paris: Harmattan, 2009. 359–76. Cabello, Gabriel. “Una estética para el vacio: Diablo Guardián o la necesidad de la ficción.” Ciberletras 11 (2004). Web. “Carlos Fuentes nos puso en el mapa: Xavier Velasco.” El Universal. 15 May, 2012. Web. Estrada, Oswaldo. “Pactos y querellas de hibridación cultural en Diablo guardián de Xavier Velasco.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 32.3 (2008): 489–506.

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Goldberg, Paul. “The Costco Effect: Globalization and Aggression in Xavier Velasco’s El materialismo histérico.” Confluencia 23.3 (2008): 58–69. Lehnen, Leila. “Entre ángeles y demonios: La fragmentación de la subjetividad contemporánea en Diablo Guardián de Xavier Velasco.” Letras Hispanas 3.2 (2006): 142–57. Mendoza, Élmer. “Xavier Velasco.” El Universal.mx. 6 January, 2011. Web. Tinoco, Paula. “Soy hijo literario de Fuentes. ¿Y qué?” Palabras Malditas. December 2004. Web. Velasco, Xavier. Diablo guardián. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003. —El materialismo histérico: fábulas cutrefactas de avidez y revancha. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2004. —Luna llena en las rocas. Crónicas de antronautas y licántropos. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2005. —Éste que ves. México City: Alfaguara, 2007. —Puedo explicarlo todo. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2010. —La edad de la punzada. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2012.

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Juan Villoro (Mexico, 1956) Juan Villoro is the author of four novels: El disparo de Argón (1991, The Argon Gas Shot), Materia dispuesta (1996, Malleable Matter), El testigo (2004, The Witness), and Arrecife (2012, Reef), the last of which is about to be translated into English. He is also the author of two collections of literary essays: Efectos personales (2000, Personal Effects), De eso se trata (2008, That’s the Idea), two plays; four books of what he calls “imaginary chronicles”, a travel narrative, half a dozen very popular children’s books, a handful of translations ranging from eighteenth century German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to Truman Capote, three short-story collections, and a novella: Llamadas de Ámsterdam (2009, Calls from Amsterdam). This sizable bibliography does not take into account his continuous production as a journalist where he is a weekly contributor to magazines and newspapers published in Mexico and in several Spanish-speaking countries. He has also worked as an academic at various institutions, including the Pompeu Frabra and Princeton University, and makes countless public appearances as a book critic, keynote speaker and even well-loved sports commentator. Although it will be impossible not to mention the intense thematic and technical relationships between these and the rest of his work, this essay concentrates on his four novels. Villoro’s first novel, El disparo de argón takes place in San Lorenzo, a Mexico City neighborhood created by Villoro (see my Historias que regresan, Chapter 1). The fact that San Lorenzo is fictitious allows Villoro to imagine the results of the drastic modernization projects that Mexico City underwent during the late 1970s. San Lorenzo is extremely traditional, its dynamics resemble more those of a small town than those of a section of Latin America’s largest city. Paradoxically this is the consequence of the isolation created by the new grand one-way, six-lane avenues that effectively put an end to the continuity between neighborhoods. Most of the mass transportation buses, infamous for their aggressive driving habits, circulate in those avenues, thus making it hazardous for pedestrians to venture beyond them, and enforcing borders in places where there used to be none. Also, given that the novel takes place in the very last years before NAFTA, there are no Blockbusters or Domino’s in San Lorenzo, and this is perhaps the last novel about contemporary Mexico where no one has a mobile phone: Upon closer examination, San Lorenzo resembles an island; the city surrounds us like a persistent dirty tide that never stops rising; Mexico, needless to say, is one of the few cities where it is possible to get lost, really, forever. I know my neighborhood so well perhaps because I reject the infinite neighborhoods around it. (101)

The only extraordinary feature in San Lorenzo is the Clínica Suárez, an eye hospital that brings outsiders to the neighborhood: “The inside of the hospital is like a deep

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belly, where the time and light of the outside are absolutely ignored: anyway, it is curious that our labors drip out to the island: if a surgical intervention fails, the vagrants who loiter at La Naviera get the news as soon as [Doctor] Suárez himself does” (101–2). The narrator and protagonist is Doctor Fernando Balmes, born and raised in San Lorenzo and, after graduating from the university, part of the hospital staff. This affords him a dual perspective that characterizes the fragments above. Balmes is not only in charge of advancing the plot, but as in the case of every Villoro narrator, he seems just as interested in suspending it momentarily to stray into everything from aphorisms to vignettes to micro essays: Doña Edu founded her political career on the first phone line that was ever installed in the neighborhood. Yes, Eduviges Marín became a cacique thanks to a black phone with a knitted cord, and our way of speaking owes much to the years we spent in her house trying to economize words. When the first telephone-post was raised on Capulines Street, as arbitrary as a miracle, and a man with yellow hard-hat climbed up it to have his picture taken (he stayed up there for a long time as if it were possible to see the ocean from there), we learned that Eduviges Marín was from Aguascalientes (how many times we heard that resounding final “n” in her thennnn). The first phone line happened to be hers and rang when you dialed 21–22–23. Such a memorable number could not be a good omen. And it was not: the man in the yellow hard hat did not even blink when he informed us that this would be our only phone. “And thank God, it is an easy one,” he said as he climbed to his truck with many coiled cables. With that tarot-like impulse that comes over our governments (an image symbolizes an entire class: the Asylum, the Museum, the Telephone), our telephone file was closed with the one at 78bis Capulines Street. Eduviges turned into doña Edu and charged a fee to use the 21–22–23. Her power grew enormously. She knew our lives better than father Vigil Gándara and could stop us from ordering gas for our stoves if she chose to. My father called her Our Lady of Distance as if she were an Aztec goddess. (106–7)

These cameos are woven ably into the main narrative line, a back and forth movement that allows two different interpretations of El disparo…, interpretive possibilities that Ignacio Padilla* deems realist and allegorical. But first and more obviously the novel can be read as a thriller. One of the doctors who work in the Suárez eye clinic is shot. It is soon apparent he was involved in an organ-traffic network that illegally trades corneas in the booming U.S. market. What makes this thriller unique or distinctive, however, is that Balmes bears little resemblance to the tough-guy detective that the vast majority of Mexican noir has borrowed from classic American hard-boiled novels and modified to fit into Mexico City’s and later on to northern landscapes (see Torres). Balmes is every bit as far from these macho sleuths as he is from the intellectual crime solvers that Borges took from the British tradition and rewrote with enormous talent. Balmes is an involuntary

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detective, who happens to witness a crime, which as it unravels, threatens to jeopardize the existence of the Clínica Suárez itself. Furthermore, as the plot unfolds, we learn that despite Balmes’ acute powers of observation, he is a bad detective, who must learn the hard way to confront his own naiveté. This includes everything he once thought about the way power is structured in the hospital, mainly the extent of his professor and employer Doctor Suárez’s knowledge and control over his organization, and, metonymically, the socioeconomic structure of his entire country. The second and more interesting interpretation of the novel arises when it is read as a commentary on the way powerful economic forces are eroding the way of life of his neighborhood and the only place he has worked since he graduated from medical school. Indeed, it is precisely because of the inevitability and monotony of his routines, including the mediocrity of his love life, that he is able to detect even the minutest change as soon as it happens. In the end Doctor Balmes and the tightly organized and apparently controlled Clínica Suárez prove too weak to stem the tides of change that inevitably alter the small-town dynamics that have survived in San Lorenzo. Disregarding the pressure of the criminal group that is in charge of the organ-trafficking, Balmes successfully removes Dr. Suárez’s cataracts and finally dares to leave San Lorenzo with his girlfriend Mónica. But, as Villoro superbly states in the last line of the book: “I stared at her long enough so as to allow Monica’s image to decide for me, and with an emotion where horror already claimed its share, I climbed down the bridge” (336). This marginal horror undermines the possibility of a stupid, melodramatic happy ending. Balmes leaves San Lorenzo, but the rest of the city and the country, the future itself, are all tainted by the brutality of a capitalism that allows the circulation of merchandise but not of citizens, of organs but not of bodies. The horror is the way the global arrives and overwhelms the local. Even San Lorenzo, which had been able to negotiate with twentieth-century industrial modernization and the metamorphoses of Mexico City seems doomed this time. This ruin is central to Villoro’s later novels. In many ways, Materia dispuesta forms a diptych with El disparo… . Both take place in Mexico City, the leviathan that usurped Mexico as a city that could be captured in a single book, such as Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air Is Clear. The new neighborhoods do not share a common history or texture with the rest of the city, for they were built too late, fast, and far from a center that is no longer necessary: not for shopping, nor for advancing an education, nor even for most bureaucratic needs. If San Lorenzo, a traditional neighborhood, was isolated inside the city, Terminal Progreso—the main space in Materia dispuesta—is at the very edge of the city, on the shore of what is left of lake Xochimilco, and is the closest Mexico City ever came to a suburb. Terminal Progreso is no longer the countryside, but it fails to accede to its own urban modernity, lacking the sort of accumulation of antagonisms that in Fuentes’ texts characterizes Mexican modernity. The continuity between the two novels does not stop there: the fatherfigure in El disparo… is an ophthalmologist who goes blind, in Materia dispuesta he is a nationalist architect building in a city plagued by earthquakes. The most salient difference between the two is that while El disparo… is centered in the present, Materia dispuesta, tells a story of the immediate past: 1957–85, the dates

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of the most important earthquakes of the twentieth century (1957 is also the year of the original publication of Where the Air Is Clear). Thus, it must be read as a prequel to the advanced capitalism novels that are prevalent in Villoro’s works. About the main character, the Venezuelan writer José Balza writes: I don’t believe that Mauricio Guardiola has a parallel in Latin American literature. Everything about him is common, vulgar, normal (“your emptiness occupies so much space,” someone tells him). Sweets, lack of initiative, his obscure place in his home, neighborhood, school, career and art color his hours that unfold almost unconsciously. The character never fully understands his own actions [...] An intuitive or blind solidarity (that different accents, or the mechanisms of domestic effects awake in him) pushes him to imitate, follow and practices the behavior of those nearby. (100)

Yet this lack of initiative, this passivity, must in turn be read in the light of the main trope of the novel, which according to Fabio Morabito would be waking up to adult life. Only two characters in the novel manage to wake up: Guardiola and his childhood friend Veronica, who, after spending years in a coma, suddenly regains consciousness and is able to carry on with her life. The rest of the characters, starting with Mauricio’s father, live a sort of permanent adolescence (Morabito 93–4). This contrast between the seemingly dominant active figures and the more passive, but finally more mature ones has been read by Tamara R. Williams, in a seminal essay, as a very important intervention on the traditional discourses on Mexican masculinities, that is from the very knot where gender and nationalism are inextricably tied. The opening scene of the novel affords a very good example: It is hard to even fit together the visual excesses of the scene. There is a charro outfit on the chair, a green, red and white bow tie lies on the velour floor mat next to a pair of Cherokee sandals, the air smells like raw hide, vaguely of saddles. My father’s buttocks are perfect, red, round. Furiously but with exacting tempo, he penetrates lovely Rita, while the earth trembles at 6.3 in the Mercalli scale. His eyes shine with a steely, blind light. (17)

This scene is as fascinating as it is traumatizing. The father, charro-architect Jesús Guardiola, exhibits himself to his son while having sex with one of his many mistresses; at first creating confusion in Mauricio, and then disgust directed towards the models of nationalism and macho masculinity. This novel, as Williams has stated, must be read as one of the more important fictions about the appearance of new structures of feeling in the transition from the social democracy of the “stabilizing development” to the more corporate models imposed after 1968. Not only is the father a failed role model but also his older brother Carlos, his Uncle Roberto-Tizoc, and his friend Pacho: “in sum, all the important men in Mauricio’s life are revealed as mere façades, impotent and doomed to passivity and to the insurmountable infinite dialectic of the patriarchal myth that bounds them” (Williams 360). The final insight to be gleaned from Williams regarding Villoro’s metaphoric use of the ajolote (aquatic lizard), an animal endemic to the waters of the Xochimilco lake, is

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that she rightly points towards La jaula de la melancolía (1985), the groundbreaking book of cultural critique by Roger Bartra as the source text for Villoro. In his study Bartra reminds us that the ajolote has the peculiarity of remaining in a larva stage—it would become a salamander—yet it is able to reproduce sexually. It is, in fact, an animal that never evolves past adolescence. Thus Bartra proposes a “canon of the ajolote” as his main conceptual tool to understand the ideological operation underlying the many discourses on the “essence of the Mexican,” which does not exist, but rather was posited by different apparatuses as a means to control and prevent changes, i.e. to keep the population dormant. (Williams 347–9). In this manner, Bartra becomes the philosophical underpinning of the early Villoro in the very sense that Fuentes’ early novels were in a perpetual dialogue with the essays of Octavio Paz. A brief return to uncle Roberto-Tizoc is in order to link the previous novels with the two Villoro published after his sojourn in Barcelona and his post–2000 oeuvre (see my “Hacia una lectura…”). Roberto-Tizoc insists that he spent years hunting in the semi-arid wilderness that begins two hundred miles north of Mexico City, in a region that marked historically the end of Mesoamerica and the lower reaches of Arid America, and which later is transformed into the frontier between the all-powerful political center and the U.S.-facing industrialized north. This region is crucial in El testigo, that won the Herralde literary prize and marks Villoro’s maturity as a writer. One of the more important critics of his generation, who had been for the most part unenthusiastic to Villoro’s books writes: Making use of the most fundamental myth—Ulysses goes back to Ithaca after twenty years of errancy—Villoro dared present a novelistic image of Mexico in the fashion of the nineteenth century, that is, a fresco that includes the country and the city, the rich and the poor, the cultural elite and its benefactors, the lesser writers, the criminals; the quarrel between the modern and the ancient. (Williams 347–8).

Effectively, the novel begins with Julio Valdivieso’s return to Mexico after spending the last 20 years in Europe, first as a doctoral student and then as a literature professor in Nanterre (a hotbed for Paris’s 1968 student revolts). He married the daughter of one of his Italian professors, with whom he has two children. A sabbatical and a fellowship from the Casa del Poeta (the cultural center in the former house of the poet Ramón López Velarde) afford him the chance to spend a year in Mexico City. But also to pay a personal debt: Valdivieso’s family comes from the very same region as the revered poet yet he has never written anything about him. Additionally, he re-encounters the members of the creative writing workshop of his youth. Soon enough, Valdivieso finds out that López Velarde is much more than “Mexico’s intimate poet.” After the 2000 election won by the Catholic opposition party (PAN) after seven decades of PRI rule, the poet becomes a prize that the reconfigured field of Mexican culture contests hotly. On the one hand, the project intends to make a saint out of the poet, and, on the other, the imperative to read in him an incarnation of (im)pure desire. Things get even more complicated when Televisa—or its nameless equivalent in the novel—decides that alongside with a telenovela based on the Cristero

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War, to turn the beatification process into a major spectacle, causing a strong reaction from some of the project’s original backers. As the novel unfolds, Valdivieso, the witness of a new country which in so many aspects resembles its own past (the Porfiriato), gets more and more enmeshed in this plot where everything seems to converge. His uncle’s hacienda, a main set for the telenovela, houses a major archive of López Velarde documents but, as the plot evolves, it is revealed as the crossroads of the routes for two enemy drug cartels. Last but not least, the soap opera’s star writer has seduced Julio Valdivieso’s wife. The novel’s main character shares several family traits with some of his predecessors. As Chris Andrews perceptively noted: During most of the novel, Julio is a pretty passive character, a witness of his own existence. He is no more of a protagonist than the secondary characters. Yet this passivity gets compensated by his extraordinary sensorial perceptiveness. His sensations entail involuntary memories that instead of metaphysical signs as in Proust, have an almost psychoanalytical function and force him to face unresolved issues. Towards the end, however, Julio starts to leave the role forced on him and eludes the manipulation usually bestowed on witnesses. (203–4)

The ending of the novel is inevitably apocalyptic. The barn where one or more crucial documents written by López Velarde are kept, burns down. Valdivieso abandons everything—his academic career, his middle-class family life—and decides to go live in the desert with a peasant woman and her children. About this final gesture, Oswaldo Zavala wrote: The journey to the fatherland, where solitude allows the subject to act free of the inertia of a collective ideology ... must not be understood as an alternative to our failed modernity. Valdivieso’s wasteland [páramo] is called “Los Cominos” precisely because in it are the remains of the damaged scaffold that the architects of the nation left behind after leaving their work incomplete. There is no place safe from the failure of the nation. And even less safe are the margins where the effects of the neoliberal project become more apparent, and lethal. (241)

One can read this return to the countryside, as the retrograde mirror image of the industrialization of Mexico with its country–city migration that depopulated agrarian Mexico—witness the ghostly town of Comala in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo­. But of course this return is tainted, not pastoral. Thus, Christopher Domínguez is right to ask: With due respect to the dialogical distance that realism establishes between the author and the ideas of his characters, I do not know how conscious Villoro might be of the fact that he wrote an agonically nationalistic novel, where I find more than the portrait of the Mexican countryside artificially wealthy thanks to the money of migrants and drug traffickers, an exercise of very deep and tortured nostalgia for the agrarian, or rather rancher society; illustrated and catholic, a wild bucolic idyll that claims as its own the most persistent form of petty bourgeoisie. (195)

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What the juxtaposition of these two critical positions should show is how the novel’s complexity elicits very diverse readings. Nostalgia, of course, is present, but must be deconstructed by the very consequences of the conservative move of Mexican politics. Instead of a brutal centralized power, the country becomes fragmented and local caciques—who may be politicos, narcos or more frequently a combination of both—rule their feudal kingdoms, tearing apart the certitudes that the PRI regime once offered. Arrecife will be Villoro’s first novel to be translated into English. In this case, the action moves from northern Mexico to the Caribbean-facing state of Quintana Roo, a Yucatan Peninsula backdrop found in his book of chronicles Palmeras de la brisa rápida (1989, Quick Breeze Palms) and the outstanding short story “El extremo fantasma” in La casa pierde (1998, The House Loses). The Mayan Riviera is read as the place where “narcodollars” enter mainstream global capitalism. Thus El Testigo and Arrecife form a second diptych: that of the ruin of neoliberalism. In the former, the north’s heavy industry and cattle ranches are shown as barren and riddled with drug-related violence. In the latter, the south and its “chimney-less industry” is now mere illusion. Both mask the real Mexican economy and the brutal reality, based on crude oil exports, and more and more dependent on cash sent from the U.S. by mostly undocumented workers. Both, moreover, show the miserable failure of the so-called “war on drugs” declared by President Felipe Calderón in a clear dubbing of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” both attempts to justify bitterly contested elections. Once again the main character is an accidental detective, Tony Góngora, a middleaged, less than successful bass player, who has landed a job in a gargantuan resort managed by his friend Mario Müller. The resort is located in a corridor that runs from Cancún to the National Park of Xian Ka’an: The coast had entered its agony. The touristic city did not heed the advice about the risks entailed by building on sand: the wind hit the façades without any way out and went back into the ocean eroding the beach. Every day a slow ship arrived from Santo Domingo carrying sand to patch up the bald spots. The coast slowly devoured itself. The oil platforms and the drainage had polluted the water, putting at risk the second largest coral reef in the world. Only La Pirámide survived, thanks to the risky temptations created by Mario Müller. (42–3)

These risky temptations are what Anadeli Bencomo reads, following Villoro’s cue, as post-tourism: instead of isolating his clientele from the potential risks of a Mexican vacation, Müller creates the sensation of imminent danger, of the constant proximity of violence. The novel begins when the danger ceases to be a spectacle for a group of consumers of media-violence. A scuba diver has been brutally murdered. The murder, in turn, will eventually create a metonymic chain that includes Müller, who is terminally ill, and the dissolution of the utopic vision of the “development pole” or the promise that tourism would bring economic development to this impoverished region. The only

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financial hope is, paradoxically, bankruptcy in order to claim insurance, which means a further flow of capital to the metropolitan corporate offices with no local benefit whatsoever. In one of the first reviews of the novel, Ibsen Martínez points to the important difference that separates Villoro’s new novel from the now sizable number of books that seem occupied with, or rather fascinated by drug violence in Mexico. While the latter can be read as “supply” narratives, Arrecife, whose narrator has tried practically every illegal drug available to him and thus has erased a very good part of his memory, inaugurates, according to Martínez, a fiction of “demand,” a novel that does not show a flashy micro-society where everything lends itself to ethnography, from rituals, to rules, to dialect. The fiction of “demand” is, on the other hand, more ambitious, in that it explores the depth and implication of the metamorphoses produced by the global narcotic market in the whole of the social body, including classes that usually feel immune from violence. It must be added that this sort of fiction, is not really “new” in Latin America, and can be found in Cartas cruzadas (1990, Crossed Letters) by the Colombian novelist and poet Darío Jaramillo Agudelo and later, in a global scale in Roberto Bolaño’s greatest book 2666 (2004). This procedure, indeed, insists on the most important trait of Villoro’s novels: their permanent effort to weave a local tale into an important reflection on the effects that global capitalism has on specific communities. The ending of Arrecife is very much the ending of every one of Villoro’s three previous novels: the main character lives to tell the tale and to escape from the space where his previous life happened, and lives to love and presumably form a family. This not entirely unhappy ending must be read alongside the fact that in every one of Villoro’s major fictions there is always a part of the community that more often than not is secondary to the main plot. It always remains capable, however, of dealing with the circumstances; able to adapt to the newest catastrophe: stoic, not interesting enough to capture the full attention of the narrator, but stubbornly present. Those secondary characters, like the salamanders of Materia dispuesta, are the passive witnesses that in the very end, recognize the crucial change that the community suffered, make a decision and survive the proverbial fire as salamanders, and are, finally, the perennial survivors that his novels privilege. They are not the strong but the sensitive; the ones able to learn from their own painful mistakes. José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra

Works Cited Andrews, Chris. “El testigo de Juan Villoro.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 202–5. Balza, José. “Villoro: Materia dispuesta.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 97–102. Bencomo, Anadeli. “Náufrago y sobrevivientes. Arrecife by Juan Villoro.” Literal: Latin American Voices. 31 (2012). Forthcoming. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. “La vitalidad histórica de los muertos mexicanos: El testigo de Juan Villoro.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 190–6.

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Martínez, Ibsen. “Del lado de la demanda.” Letras Libres, October 2012. Web. Morabito, Fabio. “Materia dispuesta: curarse de adolescencia.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 91–6. Padilla, Ignacio. “Otros motivos de luz.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 87–90. Ruisánchez, José Ramón. “Hacia una lectura ética de El testigo de Juan Villoro.” Literatura Mexicana XIX. 2 (2008). 143–55. —Historias que regresan. Mexico City: FCE-Ibero, 2012. Ruisánchez, José Ramón and Oswaldo Zavala, (eds) Materias dispuestas. Barcelona: Candaya, 2011. Torres, Vicente Francisco. Muertos de papel. Mexico City: CNCA, 2003. Villoro, Juan. El disparo de argón. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1991. —Materia dispuesta. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1997. —El testigo. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004. ­—Arrecife. Barcelona: Anagrama 2011. Williams, Tamara. “Toallas ejemplares: masculinidades, sexualidad y nación en Materia dispuesta.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 337–64. Zavala, Oswaldo. “La mirada exógena: Villoro, López Velarde y la modernidad periférica en El testigo.” In Ruisánchez and Zavala, 227–43.

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Jorge Volpi (Mexico, 1968) Jorge Volpi ranks as a key figure in contemporary Spanish-American narrative. This prominence stems from his approach to fiction as an instrument for understanding the world, his knowledge of philosophical, historical and literary traditions, and his belief in a type of profound and autonomous novel that challenges reality rather than representing it. His literary career began in 1992 with the publication of A pesar del oscuro silencio (In Spite of the Dark Silence), a controversial novella about the Mexican poet Jorge Cuesta. It was 1999, however, before he first achieved international recognition with En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor, 2002). This complex novel about ethics, Nazism, and the construction of the atomic bomb has been translated into 20 languages and sold in more than 40 countries. El fin de la locura (2003, The End of Madness) and 2006’s No será la tierra (Season of Ash, 2009) confirmed his use of the novel as an intellectual vehicle to “call into question life truths” (Regalado) and a venue where fiction overlaps with essay techniques to explore humanistic and scientific disciplines such as history, music, politics, science, and psychoanalysis. In that light, it is not surprising that Volpi’s contributions as a novelist are complemented by his work as an essayist, public intellectual, political analyst, and theorist of contemporary fiction, including Mentiras contagiosas (2008, Contagious Lies) and the polemical Leer la mente (2011, Reading the Mind). These varied interests have been widely reflected in his blog, essays like La imaginación y el poder (1998, Imagination and Power), El insomnio de Bolívar (2009, Bolívar’s Insomnia), and projects shared with fellow members of the Crack, a group of Mexican writers that emerged in 1996. Along with that group, Volpi belongs to a generation of Latin American writers born in the 1960s, with diverse aesthetic projects, but a similar cultural, literary, and educational background, including advanced degrees. Volpi himself studied law at the Universidad Autónoma de México and initially planned to become a lawyer. In the early 1990s, these writers saw their first texts appear with local publishers; hence they were only read in their own country. This first creative period, essential to understanding Volpi’s development as a novelist is characterized by the importance of the Mexican literary tradition. More specifically, his first three novels pay tribute to foundational moments in the poetry and narrative of his country. Published by Joaquín Mortiz, A pesar del oscuro silencio was a dense 112-page allegory about the life, works, and philosophical worldview of Cuesta, an intellectual who committed suicide in 1942 after penning the last stanzas of his metaphysical poem “Song to a mineral god.” On the opening page of the novel, the first-person narrator, a fictional character called Jorge, overhears an informal conversation about the circumstances of Cuesta’s death. After repeating to himself cyclically, “He was named Jorge, like me, and for this his life hurts me twice” (11), the narrator begins a philosophical,

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metaphysical, and spiritual quest that leads him to recreate Cuesta’s life as Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return.” Jorge repeats the chemical and alchemical experiments that the poet undertook, assimilates his obsession of stopping time by suspending dichotomies like masculine/feminine, past/present, and body/soul, and aspires to a superior spiritual state (like Cuesta), where there is no chronology or materiality. Following Cuesta’s poetic principles, Volpi progressively distills language until the novel ends in absolute silence, identified with death and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of Mystical Silence, reflecting the novel’s title. Based on his essay “Jorge Cuesta’s Mastery,” A pesar… is a complex fiction with a strong theoretical background that includes alchemical, philosophical, and scientific approaches. Días de ira (Days of Anger) was a 50-page novella published in a collective project called Tres bosquejos del mal (1994, Three Sketches of Evil), defined by Mexican critics as “the most important generational proposition up to this point” (Cárdenas 34). This three-part volume also included fiction by Eloy Urroz* and Ignacio Padilla.* Volpi defines Días… as, “the most experimental fiction I have written [...] Born out of my intention to experiment with different textures, theories, and literary resources in a very concentrated fiction” (Santiago 28). Combining short monologues, epigrammatic sentences, paragraphs from medical essays, quick dialogues, and metafictional reflections, it aims to challenge traditional reading techniques and subvert fictive conventions like character, time, and space. The novella narrates a surgeon’s obsession with a female patient, a sensual blues singer who destroys his life’s certainties. The erotic triangle is rounded out by a friend of the woman, an obscure writer who is also the author of a work titled “Días de ira,” which is in effect the same text offered to the reader. Echoing Georges Bataille’s Erotism and Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf—the main referents—the novella’s fragmented paragraphs become a metaphorical representation of a human body, which is (de)constructed through satanic, surgical, and erotic rituals in an impossible quest for ultimate meaning. La paz de los sepulcros (1995, The Peace of the Graves), a political novel, was written with a twofold inspiration. It is a tribute to Martín Luis Guzmán’s The Shadow of the Caudillo, the famous example of the “Novel of the Revolution” that uses allegories of light and darkness to analyze events in post-revolutionary Mexico that culminate in the assassination of the presidential candidate Francisco Serrano in 1927. On the other hand, La paz… was inspired by similar events in 1994 Mexico, observed by Volpi from his position as the then secretary of the Mexican attorney general, Diego Valadés. These events include the end of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s term, the Zapatista indigenous rebellion, the economic crisis, and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. After an epigraph from The Shadow of the Caudillo—“only in chaos it is possible to separate light from darkness” (9)—La paz… begins with the morbid description of two corpses in a motel room, one belonging to Alberto Navarro, Mexican minister of justice. The action continues with the investigation conducted by the narrator, journalist Agustín Oropeza. He will end up involved in complex political plots and finally discover the second conspiracy: “the mechanism that was supposed to solve the crime, but whose work would take it indeed to its unavoidable cover-up, its liquidation” (27). Following Michel Foucault’s reflection on the dialectics between

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power and the individual, La paz… concludes pessimistically about the future of Mexican politics: “no crime where power is involved, in one way or another, will ever be completely clarified” (288). Serving against those who later criticized Volpi’s lack of commitment to Mexico, A pesar…, Días…, and la paz… were open tributes not only to founding fathers of the Mexican literary tradition—Guzmán, Cuesta and Elizondo—but also to the three crucial groups they belonged to: Ateneo de la Juventud, Contemporáneos, and the Generación de Medio Siglo. These three groups are essential to understand Mexican cultural identity during the twentieth century, and it is significant that Volpi chooses them as referents for his first works. Even when there were not strong cross-national personal ties among young Spanish-American writers in the early 1990s, their common editorial and literary situations produced parallel group reactions. Although they did not know each other, the Crack writers shared with the SpanishAmerican and Spanish authors of McOndo (1996), and many others born in the 1960s, a new aesthetic approach and theoretical discourse, that consisted of rejecting the mainstream Latin American narrative in the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called Post-boom. The mainstay of this latter movement was on a linear narrative style without narratological experiments, and particularly, the oblivion of magical realism as the false exotic characteristic that had deceptively defined Latin American literature for decades. According to Volpi in various iterations of his history of the movement, these similar reactions thousands of miles apart were signs “of a deep uneasiness within the region.” In 1996 he wrote the “Crack Manifesto” along with Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, and Eloy Urroz. Their declaration decried the stagnant situation in Hispanic narrative, urged writers to put aside magical realist approaches, and underlined the need to redefine both Latin America and its literature. The Manifesto explicitly advocated the return to classics like Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Divine Comedy, and Tristram Shandy and, within the Latin American tradition, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, and Fuentes’ Terra nostra. The text quoted these works, holding them up as paradigms of the “novel with demands and without concessions; demands whose results in the end, are worth the efforts, and concessions that, in the long run, only help to further weaken the panorama of our narrative and discourage honest readers.” It also denigrated “Postboom” fiction from the 1970s and 1980s, defining it as the “cynically superficial and dishonest novel,” and highlighted the need to avoid the meaningless continuations of magical realism that had devaluated the originality of García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. The sphere of dialogue, learning, and criticism created by Volpi’s relationship with the Crack writers, dating back to their high-school years in the mid-80s, was an important part of his personal and intellectual growth. The “Crack Manifesto” was actually a critical opinion about five novels written by his signers, the relevant work of Volpi’s being El temperamento melancólico (The Melancholic Temperament). It marks a progression from his previous endeavors toward a new period that maintains a strong theoretical element, adding a new cosmopolitan approach. If his first three novels were devoted to three important Mexican

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cultural figures, El temperamento… was inspired by the biography, movie career, and cinematic theory of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who had terminal cancer when he filmed his posthumous The Sacrifice. Like Tarkovsky, the fictitious German director Carl Gustav Gruber patiently awaits death as he films his last movie, The Trial, having assembled 12 actors and actresses in a Mexican hacienda. In a similar plot to that of The Sacrifice, the characters represent a family that faces the end of the world while trying to find internal harmony. In practice, however, they constitute a laboratory of human passion, hatred, and resentment or, in Gruber’s words, “a reduced version of how God has us in the world” (151). A polyphonic novel that owes much to Bakhtin’s theories, El temperamento… narrates the filming of a movie that encloses the painting of a picture, with the three works of art converging and thereby submerging the narrative in a melancholic process of vacuity, emptiness, and self-destruction. Gruber is convinced that “only aesthetics makes it possible for man to rescue from obscurity and non-transcendence those few, scarce moments in existence” (68). He transforms into an outrageous Saturn ready to devour his children, driving actors to destruction by making them forget the line between life and art, between truth and representation. Only Renata, the narrator, survives to relate the experience, but will live with a profound feeling of guilt for having taken part in Gruber’s experiment. Forgotten by critics and Volpi scholars, El temperamento… continues an enriching dialogue between Europe and Latin America that confirms Volpi’s idea of Mexico, taken from Octavio Paz and supported all through his works, as an “eccentric West” (“La decadencia…”). It also fits in the description of a Crack novel as fiction that tends towards experimentalism requiring an active reader for its deconstruction, form and function working together to create an ambitious multidisciplinary universe. This approach to El temperamento… frames it as a significant forerunner of Klingsor, Volpi’s first novel published outside of Mexico and the one that would change his career. As happened with works by other Spanish-American writers born in the 1960s like Rodrigo Fresán,* Edmundo Paz Soldán,* Alberto Fuguet,* Santiago Gamboa,* and Mexicans Cristina Rivera Garza* and Mario Bellatin,* among others, Klingsor was published in Spain by the transnational publisher Seix Barral, but Alfaguara, Tusquets, Anagrama, and Lengua de Trapo were also involved in the process. This event helped create a new editorial trend in Spanish-American narrative, and following Roberto Bolaño’s* debut on the international stage, Spanish publishers favored Spanish-American authors with a certain narrative complexity and concern with form. In the prologue to Líneas aéreas (1999, Airlines), one of the anthologies essential to understand this trend, Eduardo Becerra spoke about “the absence of a generational work that would determine the current panorama of Latin American novel and short-story” (xxv). If not the only obligatory reference, Klingsor is surely one of the novels that helped to define that era in the region’s narrative, and may be one of the last great Latin American novels of the twentieth century. In the space of a few years it was translated into 20 languages and sold in 40 different countries. Important Latin American writers like Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Carlos Fuentes gave it a warm reception.

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If not unprecedented, Klingsor is a singular novel in the Latin American context. In fact, Fuentes defined it as a “moral fable of our time” (365). It takes place in Central Europe and the U.S. between 1947 and 1989. Its three leading characters, German mathematician Gustav Links, American Lieutenant Francis Bacon, and Inge, a Russo-German spy, represent the new political panorama after World War II. Bacon is a young scientist whose tumultuous personal life has ruined brilliant professional prospects. He was fired from Princeton after a sex scandal, and his government sent him to post-war Germany in 1947 to investigate Nazi scientists who worked on, and ultimately failed in building the atomic bomb. His specific task consists of identifying Klingsor, a name taken from Wagner’s opera Parsifal. In the novel it is the code name of the scientist in charge of Hitler’s nuclear program, an entity whose “invisibility is an evidence of its presence among us” (168). Bacon attends the Nuremberg trials and then moves to Göttingen, where Gustav Links, the narrator of the novel, shows him the labyrinths of German scientific research while surreptitiously guiding him toward suspecting Werner Heisenberg, one of the German physicists who worked on the Nazi scientific project. Bacon understands the search for Klingsor as a Borgesian metaphysical quest for infinite chaos and evil, “a riddle expressly directed against him” (140), rather than a logical process. The novel’s main contribution lies in its narrative technique, a discourse structured to reflect the paradigm shift from Newtonian to quantum physics. It demonstrates a universal change from objectivity to subjectivity, from reason to probability, from order to chaos, providing a philosophical background that permeates all narrative levels: mythological (in Wagner’s opera the perfect universe depicted at the beginning is shattered by a violent act perpetrated by Klingsor, the evil character), generic (Klingsor is initially categorized as a traditional mystery novel until Bacon’s search becomes an impossible metaphysical quest), ethical (from an enlightened eighteenthcentury concept of science to its connections with evil, murder, and destruction in the 1940s), and narrative (the reader will have to decide subjectively about Heisenberg’s involvement in Hitler’s projects and the obscure intentions of Links, the narrator). Cabrera Infante defined Klingsor as a “German novel written in Spanish” (Volpi 1999), and there are implicit connections within its pages to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. None of its characters or scenarios is overtly Latin American, a detail which sparked a debate between exponents of localism and cosmopolitanism. Some critics considered the novel a betrayal of Mexican tradition. Coria stated, for example, that “it is impossible to see that a Mexican writer is talking to a Mexican audience, as many of the topics reflect a European-style sorrow. The serious implication is the impersonality of the writing. His novel could have been written in Europe, South America or any other place” (Coria apud Ávila). However, it is also possible to trace the origins of Klingsor to Borges’ short stories like “Deutsches Requiem” or “Death and the Compass”; novels like José Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos (You will Die Far from Here) Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, Abel Posse’s Los demonios ocultos (The Hidden Demons), and other works by Latin American writers who, after Borges, found a concrete manifestation of the abstract notion of evil in the ideals of Nazism.

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Although apparently representing a break with Volpi’s previous works, Klingsor is indeed the result of a long learning process that owes a lot to A pesar…’s philosophical depth, Días…’s narratological experiment, La paz…’s approach to power and politics, and the polyphonic multidisciplinary structure in El temperamento…. After the success of Klingsor, Volpi’s work quickly entered a new stage thanks to its translations and the resulting access to an international market. Beyond this popular acceptance, his œuvre was thoroughly studied in the academic world. At a personal level, this new stage included engaging public opinion in a more intense way, along with his appointment to diplomatic positions. In 2001 he was named cultural attaché of the Mexican embassy in Paris, and during this time he wrote El fin…, a Foucauldian novel about the complex relations between intellectuals and power. His political essays La imaginación… and La Guerra y las palabras (2004, War and the Words) treat the same topics as the novel. El fin…’s main character, Aníbal Quevedo, is a Mexican psychoanalyst who wakes up one morning in May of 1968 in Paris and is dragged, almost involuntarily, to the scene of the street riots. There he will meet two antagonistic women: the young and incorruptible dreamer Claire, personifying bright revolutionary ideals, and his Mexican secretary, the realistic, practical, and ultra-Catholic Josefa. The vision of Paris also fluctuates from the ideal metaphysical escape in Cortázar’s Hopscotch to the cruel city, uncomfortable for Latin American immigrants, depicted in novels by Bryce Echenique, Bolaño, and other Spanish Americans. Fuentes defined El fin… as a “brilliant Cervantine parody” (2004) and Quevedo, described as a twentieth-century Alonso Quijano, embodies Don Quixote’s dilemma of being torn between freedom and power, reality and dream, anarchy and system, freedom of expression and its political limits. After trying to understand the May protests, Quevedo travels from France to Latin America to experience Mexico’s Tlatelolco massacre first hand, to become Fidel Castro’s psychoanalyst, and to witness Chile’s coup d’etat in September, 1973. Originally portrayed as a “boundless knight errant” (309), Quevedo’s trip evolves into a regressive experience in which he ends up home, in Mexico. At the end of the novel, like Alonso Quijano, he has been cured from his revolutionary foolishness, but suffers from a contradictory sanity, which is even worse than his previous madness. While Claire, an ideal Dulcinea, decides to keep on fighting for freedom, Aníbal admits that, “we are not the same as before, Claire, when we were young and we believed in revolution. Now, let’s look forward and preserve our fight, we need to be realistic” (462). As in La paz…, Aníbal’s suicide reminds the reader that any successful revolution leads to the institutionalization of power. In this inversion of revolutionary utopias, the end of madness implies accepting, paradoxically, the need to accept power as a survival tactic. In a 2009 interview, Volpi confessed that, “Aníbal Quevedo represents everything I do not want to be, that is the way I felt when I was writing about him […] He is my negative alter ego” (Regalado). Psychoanalysis would be the main topic in Volpi’s subsequent novel La tejedora de sombras (2012, The Weaver of Shadows), a well-researched narrative of the tragic life of American psychologist Christiana Morgan. It describes her sessions with Carl Gustav Jung and her inability to find a total

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explanation for the spiritual and physical attraction that gradually destroyed her, until she drowned at a beach in the Virgin Islands in 1967. Season of Ash eventually joined Klingsor and El fin… to create what Volpi called the Trilogy of the twentieth Century, a group of novels focused on historical moments: World War II, the 1968 movements in Paris, and the fall of the Soviet system in 1989. Defined by Volpi as “the most pessimistic novel I’ve written” (García) and exposed to similar debates between champions of localism and cosmopolitism as were his previous novels, Season of Ash constitutes a chronicle of the end of the Cold War. It analyzes the fall of the Soviet Union beginning with the Chernobyl disaster, a metaphor for the obscurantism, inefficiency, and authoritarianism that had characterized that union for decades: “a city in miniature, an example of order and progress that was self-sufficient; a perfect system erected in a place that didn’t appear in any map—a genuine utopia, proof of Communism’s vigor” (5), that in the space of a few hours would end up transformed into “the final legacy of Communism” (12). In a structure shared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace—both conceived as detailed narrations of the total collapse of a Russian historical period—the plot focuses on the life of three female characters who struggle in a world ruled by men. Oksana, a young Russian girl who can only find solace in music, writing, and the poems of Anna Akhmatova, is struggling against her father, Arkadi, who is the incarnation of the political, social, and economic contradictions of post-Soviet Russia. The American girl named Allison Moore is a former member of Greenpeace struggling against her brother-in-law Jack Wells, who is an example of the corrupt capitalist self-made man. The final woman, Éva Halász, is a specialist in artificial intelligence who cannot find a balance between her professional success and her personal spleen. Geographically distant, the three plots come together in the figure of narrator Yuri Chernishevski, a former Soviet soldier who researches the past of both Arkadi and Jack, interviews their wives, and ends up killing Éva by accident after seducing her. A novel involving the twenty-first-century globalized world, Season of Ash takes place in Zaire, Hungary, Germany, the Soviet Union, Palestine, the U.S., and Mexico. Its complex plot lies beneath a neutral and computerized tone, not far from Orwell’s 1984 and Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is a dystopic fiction that proves that the apparent influence of political, economic, military, scientific, and computer systems cannot hide the fact that the history of man is, after all, a history of love, hate, and passion. At this point Volpi has explored other genres and subgenres such as the essay, chronicle, and cultural journalism, offering his opinions about socio-political and cultural issues and becoming a representative voice of Spanish-American literature. He completes his narrative production with four novellas written without the intense and extended research process that characterize his other works. He defined them with the musical term divertimentos or divertissements, “novels with a shorter breadth, satirical or focused in a particular genre, that help me to rest between one long novel and the next” (Aguirre). In a recent Spanish edition titled Días de ira. Tres narraciones en tierra de nadie he also considered them middle-distance fictions, texts that, “exceed the limits of the short-story, but also maintains a drastic concentration of narrative materials that defies the absence of limits in regular novels” (11).

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His novels are now widely known in both the Hispanic and non-Hispanic worlds. Overall, Volpi seems to have a unique niche in Latin American literature of the twenty-first century, in light of factors such as his knowledge of European and Hispanic literary traditions, the conception of literature as a point of departure for criticism, his challenge and denial of absolute dogmas, and universal thematic lines like power in all its versions, human relations, and knowledge. He presents literary narrative as something closely associated with other humanistic and scientific disciplines like physics, computer science, philosophy, music, psychoanalysis, cinematography, and art. His view of culture is not circumscribed by nationalistic or geographic delimitations, and he approaches fiction as a vehicle of knowledge capable of formulating hypotheses that other genres or disciplines cannot. His obsession with the novel as a formal and autonomous entity, his openness to experimental techniques, and his ability to communicate a thought-provoking message also contribute to this uniqueness. The use of allegorical language, closely related to philosophical and metaphysical representations in his novels, and a fruitful dialogue with critics and academics from Spain, Latin America, and the United States have contributed to the personalized placement of his writings within the Latin American narrative. Among his contemporaries, Volpi has established himself as an important theorist of Latin American narrative, challenging in his novels and essays stereotypical assumptions of the meaning of being a Latin American and a writer. Now younger novelists in turn seem to be challenging the Crack, McOndo, and all the proposals of this generation (the 2010 Granta anthology, focused on Latin American writers born in the 1970s, accused them of “interrupting or interfering collectively in the literary tradition”). From a critical standpoint, the moment has come to judge these aesthetic proposals that have begun to occupy, using Pierre Bordieu’s terms, their own literary field. Time will tell. [Robert Goebel and Elizabeth Wilson helped with suggestions and stylistic corrections for the final version of this text]. Tomás Regalado López

Works Cited Aguirre Romero, Joaquín María and Yolanda Delgado Batista. “Jorge Volpi. Las respuestas absolutas son siempre mentiras.” Espéculo March–July 2009. Web. Ávila, Antonio O. “La nueva generación Crack de narrativa mexicana irrumpe en el panorama europeo.” El País 19 April, 2000. Web. Becerra, Eduardo, ed. Líneas aéreas. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 1999. Cárdenas, Noé. “Tres bosquejos del mal.” El Semanario (Novedades) 5 December, 1994. 34. Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, and Jorge Volpi. “Crack Manifiesto.” Trans. Celia Bortolin and Scott Miller. Dalkey Archives. Web. Fuentes, Carlos. La Gran Novela Latinoamericana. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2011.

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—“Cosecha cultural 2003.” El País 31 January, 2004. Web. García, Luis. “Creo que la literatura latinoamericana posee una tradición muy poderosa.” Literaturas 2006. Web. Regalado López, Tomás. “La novela es un instrumento para poner en cuestión las verdades de la vida.” Letralia 20 February, 2011. Web. Santiago, Francisco. “Coinciden tres malignos.” Reforma 5 October, 1994: 28. Volpi, Jorge. A pesar del oscuro silencio. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1992. —“Días de ira.” In Eloy Urroz et al. Tres bosquejos del mal. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1994. 179–229. —La paz de los sepulcros. Mexico City: Aldus, 1995. —El temperamento melancólico. Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1996. —En busca de Klingsor. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. —El fin de la locura. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2003. —Season of Ash. A Novel in Three Acts. Trans. Alfred J. MacAdam. Rochester: Open Letter, 2009. —Días de ira. Tres narraciones en tierra de nadie. Madrid: Páginas de espuma, 2011. —“La decadencia de Occidente.” El País. 6 March, 2011. Web.

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Heriberto Yépez (Mexico, 1974) Yépez is one of the most active and protean writers of his generation. He is noted for the radicalism (feigned or real) of his poetry, novels, and essays. He carries something of an aura (or a halo) as a pioneer blogger, installation artist, psychotherapist, ethnopoet, and above all novelist who breaks the boundaries of genre. As a professor of Critical Theory, he has been uniquely focused on deciphering the spectacle of our times (or of our space, as he would have it). And while the border between Mexico and the U.S. may be the primary focus of his meditations, as El imperio de la neomemoria (2007a, The Empire of Neomemory) makes clear, Yépez is watching us from Tijuana, where he was born. To his capacity for hard work and shrewd sense of opportunity, Yépez adds a habit of self-purification, denouncing with liturgical regularity the wickedness of a distant Babylon: Mexico City, whose literary cliques fabricate as many distortions and corruptions as television does, or political power. Affecting an insular purity, Yépez is quick to impugn the morality of some of his colleagues by firing off volleys of indignant articles, open letters, and emails; outbursts that seek, in imitation of Charles Olson, his favorite writer, to condense the meaning of the world onto a postcard. But Yépez the sniper would not be very interesting, if he weren’t the author of an oeuvre that is both sizable and significant. Perhaps the best introduction to this oeuvre for new readers would be Tijuanologías (2006b), a two-part novelistic essay that stands out for its terse efficacy of style—unusual for a writer whose prose tends to be cumbersome. Part intellectual chronicle, part veiled autobiography, Tijuanologías lacks his habitual theoretical jargon. But this doesn’t imply a deviation from his central obsession with the frontier as the supreme observatory of postmodernity, the infernal paradise of hybridity founded by the invasion of Ricardo Flores Magón’s revolutionary followers in 1911, the treasure cave that awaits behind the door of every cantina and brothel. This short book testifies to the continuity of a genre that is, as José Gaos has noted, typically Hispano-American: the essay of national interrogation. In Contra la tele-visión (2008b, Against Tele-Vision), Yépez claims that Mexican thought, from Octavio Paz to Carlos Monsiváis via Jorge Portilla, is only really interesting as psycho-history. This is the tradition to which Yépez, too, belongs. And in his remarkable case, the nation is Tijuana: a place that Yépez, both a destroyer and a maker of myths, strips of the folksiness and other misapprehensions produced by the cheap intellectual tourism many of us have been guilty of—indulging in occasional flâneries along Avenida Revolución, that 1980s version of Amsterdam’s red-light district for Boris metropolitans. After leading us, Virgil-like, through the real dens and dives of his land, Yépez pours scorn on tourists, creatures equipped with barely an elementary spark of appreciation; and scolds Monsiváis and the novelists José

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Agustín and Juan Villoro* for having imagined that this was multiculturalism. No, says Yépez, the poet and etymologist: Tijuana is way beyond that. It is the original Waste Land, a cosmic scrapyard, a link (and by no means the weakest) in the chain of serial production. Yépez dislikes Chicanos, and his Tijuana is Chicanophobic. He sees no need to correct the image of the pachuco presented in Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, however hostile he is to this writer on other fronts. To a Tijuana man (painted by Yépez as a supreme ironist), the Chicano for all his metamorphoses has not managed to rise above the pathos so accurately identified by Paz. And yet this pathos is brandished by many Chicanos as a positive trait, with an identity-building, mythopoetic reach. In the light of Tijuanologías, his polished but never complacent vision of the frontier city, I’d now expect Yépez to find the nerve to write a Critique of Chicano Reason, the book for which he is surely predestined. Yépez is a nationalist, then, but I’m not sure how “postnational” his nationalism may be. His take on Tijuana—politically correct and theoretically à la page when saluting it as the apostolic seat of mutation, hybridity, remixes, and remakes—sets up a paradoxically rigid border between that city and the North American empire. Tijuana is made to seem inassimilable, as in his recent novel, Al otro lado (2008a, To the Other Side). It emerges as profoundly immune to Americanization, the nightmare against which books like El imperio de la neomemoria have been written for practically 200 years. Resisting assimilation, Tijuana fans the author’s nationalism to ever more vehement heights—or so it seems from Mexico’s collaborationist highlands. Yépez reminds us that the empire’s first and oldest enemy was Mexico, leading to the theft of half her territory in 1847. At best, argues Yépez, the U.S. is Quixotic and Mexico Sanchoesque. He fantasizes about a Mexican resistance within the U.S., dreaming of an unlikely wetback with a bomb. I prefer in him the poet to the novelist: the poet who traveled from the miseries of the artist as a young dog, in early poems that were at once melomaniacal and humble, toward the vivid excitement reflected by a handful of poems in El órgano de la risa (2008c, The Organ of Laughter). In “Vida del Diábolo” (Life of the Diabolo), “Epístola del Manco” (The Amputee’s Epistle), and the pair of “autobiographies” that follow, Yépez suggests his own persona better than in any of the novels. But still he insists, being a man of our time, that prose fiction is the higher form of expression. From El matasellos (2004, The Postmark), a harmless rhetorical frolic, to Al otro lado, I find nothing but the didactic reiteration of a universe that contracts when subjected to the narrative rules reluctantly accepted by Yépez. In A.B.U.R.T.O. (2005), the thinly novelized story of the man (Mario Aburto Martínez) who killed presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana, Yépez proves unable to generate the artistic power necessary to recreate the inner drama of a mind both trite and demonic, like that of his supposed solitary gunman. The novel winds up as a caricature, an uncritical repository of all the journalistic, ideological, and esoteric clichés that accumulated during the annus horribilis of 1994. And if we’re going to dream, then I’d rather Mario Aburto’s ordeal were related some day by a new Norman Mailer, not a new Philip K. Dick.

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Al otro lado is more subdued, far from the addictive irascibility of the apocalyptic mode, closer to the sobriety of 41 clósets (2005a, 41 Closets), a gay love story well served by its barely-contained lyricism. Al otro lado is set in a washed-out city devoid of Tijuana’s landmarks. It tells the story of El Tiburón, the Shark, a drug addict as well as a kind of mutant, who tries to get across the border. Our antihero does not reach his goal, since he is made to disintegrate, literally, in the air. Other characters in the novel are insubstantial: their only purpose is to set up the elementary narrative conditions for the protagonist to disappear in a puff of smoke, like a signal to warn us of the criminal, post-proletarian horror of life in the “waste land.” Yépez does well to infantilize certain details, as when he grants sentience to cars and cell phones, and gives a moving account of the dog that dies, horribly burned by the desert sun, following its master. But the absence of conceptual play and the dilution of autobiographical content makes this novel far less dramatic than Tijuanologías, the essay that inspired his most brilliant insights—chiefly the conception of the frontier as an “embezzled ontology,” the blind spot of the grand narrative of capitalism as he perceives it. El imperio de la neomemoria constitutes a departure. In this streamlined biography of Charles Olson (1910–70), Yépez approaches his subject’s letters, poems, and essays (especially Call Me Ishmael, the complex, bitter study of Melville published in 1947) as a kind of Sumerian tablet through which it might be possible to decode the U.S. This is the real spur, one feels, to the writing of this convoluted jumble of a book. Yépez remains faithful to Adorno in believing that theoretical obscurity, farfetched terminology, and uninhibited neologism decorate a thought, while shielding it from the objections of logic. The best of Yépez is certainly not to be found in the blather that consumes whole pages of El imperio de la neomemoria. The book’s central thesis is that the North American empire—like its great creation, television, and the other screens television has spawned—is omnipresent and omniscient. A culture industry yoked to a military-industrial complex, it requisitions space by disguising it as historical time, and sets up control mechanisms that have reified humanity more and more, with ominous consequences. There’s nothing here that can’t be got by sitting through The Matrix, or, for greater depth, by studying the Frankfurt School and its critical theory. El imperio de la neomemoria abounds in intelligence and sensitivity, but such qualities are overshadowed by typical Frankfurtian table-thumping. Convinced that liberal democracy is really a sly refinement of totalitarianism, this line declares, with Yépez, that “Hollywood is nothing but post-Nazi propaganda,” or that “the reordering of memory is fascist.” If I didn’t think that the real subject of El imperio de la neomemoria is Olson, I wouldn’t see much difference between this book and the repetitive apocalyptic fantasies emanating from U.S. academics. By identifying himself with Olson, by reading and rereading him, Yépez brings about the detachment of figure from background, in a perceptual operation that can be traced back to the very first work of his that I read, Ensayos para un desconcierto y alguna crítica ficción (2001; Essays for a Disarray and Some Critical Fiction). This is the book with the memorable (and necessarily succinct) history of aphorisms in Mexico; the one where he claims that our

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own pre-Socratics were the Guatemalan writers Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Augusto Monterroso. I also like the way in which Yépez, who sometimes writes in English, examines another literary galaxy: that comprising the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the cloudy minds of Black Mountain College, and the antics of the penultimate avantgarde, including, but only as propagandistic outriders, the Beats. In contrast to the gushing unreserved with which the preceding generation of Tijuanans fell for this batch of writers, gurus, and patriarchal performance artists, he regards them coolly as his classical horizon: that explains not only the fecundity of his reading of Olson, but also the nonchalance with which he depicts the titanic clash between Jerome Rothenberg and María Sabina, or the last days of Allen Ginsberg. Yépez believes—and here we glimpse his shamanic side—in the curative, hypnotic, and sacred properties of language. He is not the first poet to believe in this, nor will he be the last. The frontiersman revels in the company of translators and mediums. Olson, for Yépez, is an enemy as well as a master, and this adds an extra layer of density to El imperio de la neomemoria. With the help of psychoanalytic and antiOedipal concepts, the author exposes his subject as an ideologue of the empire, a bard celebrating plunders and abuses; while this seems reprehensible to Yépez, it has escaped the notice of the naïve countercultural left in the U.S. Olson’s voyage to Mexico, in 1951, provides a neat opportunity to round off the account of a poet obsessed with outdoing Pound but incapable of grasping Mayan wisdom, such as, in Yépez’s example, quincunx theory. If the Beats are, here, the Ancient Greeks, the Indians, nomadic or imperial, stand in for Telamones, and this returns us by way of a further paradox to the thinker José Vasconcelos. Without subscribing to “indigenism” as such—the literature currently produced under that name, by Subcomandante Marcos perhaps, must surely strike him as base orthography, vulgar outpourings—Yépez takes refuge in romantic nostalgia for the originary otherness the West has lost. Here lie the secrets of the Great Pyramid, good Sancho. Yépez is against Enlightenment, an anti-liberal. He is also a Marxist in the only sense in which it is still possible to be one, in my view: by replacing Marx with Guy Debord, and casting the imperium of the spectacle in the role of classic capitalism. Or by traveling courtesy of Freud, from Marxism to Buddhism in the tracks of Erich Fromm, that great simpleton who is never mentioned on anyone’s résumé these days. Like the reactionary old aristocrat, Joseph de Maistre, Yépez considers the unity of Western civilization illusory. In fact, we dwell in an “oasis of the gibbet,” a “last imaginary scaffold” where the technological guillotine chops off not our heads but our souls. “Neomemory” is just the latest avatar of the alienation discovered long ago by the young Marx. Consumed on a planetary level, it equates with the “phoco” that drugs the would-be traveler in Al otro lado. As one who entertains a number of the superstitions Heriberto Yépez denounces, I can only take off my hat to his scholarly passion—his most recent work is an adaptation of two theater works by Oscar Wilde, with the updated title La Mirada de un prisionero: una reflexión sobre la videovigilancia y la videovigilancia electrónica en el espacio teatral (2012, A Prisoner’s Gaze: A Comment on Video Vigilance and

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Electronic Video Vigilance in Theatrical Space)—and bow to the exalted state in which he moves. He cuts a singular figure, considering that Mexican literature is notoriously uninterested in ideas. I don’t mind adding that I myself am fascinated by the Frankfurt crew, in that I think they may be half right—and half is enough to drive anybody crazy.1 Christopher Domínguez Michael

Works Cited Yépez, Heriberto. Ensayos para un desconcierto y alguna crítica ficción. Tijuana: Fondo Literario de Baja California, Mexico, 2001. —Babellebab: Non-Poetry on the End of Translation. Sausalito, CA: Duration Press, 2003. —El matasellos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004. —41 clósets. Mexico City: Conaculta, 2005. —A.B.U.R.T.O. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005. —Here Is Tijuana!, with Fiamma Montezemolo and Rene Peralta. London: Black Dog Pub., 2006. —Tijuanologías. Mexico City: Umbral, 2006. —El imperio de la neomemoria. Mexico City: Almadía, Mexico, 2007. —Wars. Threesomes, Drafts & Mothers. New York: Factory School, 2007. —Al otro lado. Mexico City: Planeta, 2008. —Contra la tele-visión. Mexico City: Tumbona, 2008. —El órgano de la risa y otros diábolos. Mexico City: Conaculta, 2008. —La Mirada de un prisionero: una reflexión sobre la videovigilancia y la videovigilancia electrónica en el espacio teatral. Mexico City: Editorial La Mirada de Godot, 2012.

Translated by Lorna Scott Fox. Earlier versions were published in Review 43. 1 (2010), 41–5; and the author’s Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (1955–2010) (2012).

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Central America Introduction The literary tradition in Central America is strong, including such world eminences as the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and, more recently, Ernesto Cardenal, and the Guatemalan short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, exiled in Mexico most of his life. In the 1980s, the best-known Central American writers were perhaps the Salvadorans Roque Dalton and Manilo Argueta, and the Nicaraguan, Claribel Alegría. All three are writers of political protest of an earlier type, exploring the grim condition that led to war and/ or ­dictatorship in the region, and taking decided, if not uncomplicated, positions in favor of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua and other leftist insurgent forces in the region. Today, the best-known Central American writer is the Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya, who along with Rey Rosa is renewing the area’s prose fiction. Castellanos Moya is a visibly erudite writer, aware of literary histories and genres, freely alluding to other writers both in and outside of Spanish-language writing, such as, famously, the Austrian Thomas Bernhard. As always between writers of adjacent eras, there are commonalities. Alegría is no naïf and is in many ways a highly literary and learned writer. Castellanos Moya experienced political persecution in El Salvador in the 2000s such that he had to seek refuge in the United States in Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum program. His explicit political values and allegiances are not far from those of Alegría. But, as a writer, he is more consciously innovative and speculative. Interestingly, this does not mean he is ahistorical. Indeed, in Tyrant Memory (2008) he goes back into El Salvador’s complicated political history, in this case the overthrow of the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez dictatorship in 1944, and links this regime to other authoritarian governments worldwide. For a world readership that had grown used to seeing Central American locales both exoticized and pathologized, and had often yielded to simplistic stereotypes of the region and its people, the supple talent of Castellanos Moya has served as a bracing surprise. An emphasis on history is also seen in some of the region’s writers not included in this book, for the reasons outlined in our general introduction. The Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez Mercado (b. 1942), the longtime foreign minister of the revolutionary Sandinista government during the 1980s, continued his literary career as a novelist after the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990. Notably, in A Thousand Deaths Plus One (2004), Ramírez was more sympathetic to the Miskito people and

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Anglophones on Nicaragua’s east coast than the Sandinista government had been when in power. An interest in the recent or even the deep past, though, does not mean a reductive adherence to entities outside the imagination. The Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa writes tales profoundly informed by his nation’s Indigenous heritage and the folklore and oral memory of its people, but also writes in a deliberately literary and open-ended fashion. This makes him different from contemporaries who have been more heralded worldwide. Even though in age and femoral provenance Rigoberta Menchú would qualify for inclusion in this book, the testimonio genre in which she writes—not to mention the problematic nature of “authorship” and “fiction” in her case—renders the work of the Quiché activist, while of great discursive interest, outside of this volume’s focus and field of coverage. From the other end of the spectrum, as it were, Francisco Goldman and David Unger, both of Guatemalan background, are not included. Both were brought up entirely in the U.S. and write in English, with late and not consistent reception in the Spanish-speaking world, meaning that, although Guatemalan themes crucially inform their fiction (and in Goldman’s case very visible nonfiction), they are not Spanish-American writers who write for Spanish Americans, as defined by this volume’s criteria. Closer to most of our criteria would be Dante Liano (b. 1948) and Adolfo Méndez Vides (b. 1956), both excellent prose writers who are well known in Guatemala. Liano attracts some attention in Spain, and in Italy, where he has lived and taught for three decades. The four novels Liano has published so far cover a wide range of topics, from El lugar de la quietud (1990), in which the worlds of a grandson and his grandfather are united by political terror; El hombre de Montserrat (1994) and its use of civil war as a testimonial center to show the relations between bureaucracy and guerrillas; El misterio de San Andrés (1994), which demolishes stereotypes about indigenous peoples; to El hijo de casa (2004) and its criticism of societal assumptions (it is based on a 1952 case about an orphan [hijo de casa in Guatemalan Spanish] who murdered most of the family that adopted him. These novels’ denunciatory nature is not devoid of humor, a characteristic best found in Liano’s complete short stories (2007), in which the influence of the late Guatemalan master Monterroso is evident. In this regard a strong argument could be made for the greater importance that short stories have in small countries, and José Mejía’s anthology Los centroamericanos (2002), which does not really reflect the actual state of the art by including writers from much earlier generations. The novels of “Méndez Vides” (the name under which he publishes) deal with a recent Guatemalan past that is no less violent than the one Liano portrays and that Rey Rosa subtly sublimates. His first novel, Las catacumbas (1987) concentrates that violence on the upper classes’ indifference toward the lower ones, thereby reopening a wound still ignored in Guatemala. Las murallas (1998), an award-winning novel like his first one, narrates the struggles of two Guatemalans in New York City, while questioning the nature of feelings through the protagonist Ramiro’s view of compassion. If Liano dealt with the earlier Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, as had Asturias before him, in La lluvia (2007) Méndez Vides employs the last days of Jacobo

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Arbenz (ousted in a coup d’état engineered by the CIA) to textualize daily betrayals not always allied to power. Like Liano, Méndez Vides is also an accomplished short-story writer, but both are authors still understudied or slighted in English-language Latin Americanism. As opposed to concentrating on a strictly Central American subject matter some of the region’s recent writers, like Carlos Cortés, leap into the maw of world popular culture, as in his short-story collection La última aventura de Batman (2011, Batman’s Last Adventure). Even when he writes about Costa Rican subjects, as he often does, his fast-paced, often insistent narrative style makes clear his singular iteration of a postmodern modality. Other contemporaries such as the Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon are overtly self-reflexive in their style, although not in a way as to annul the possibility of historical reference or ethical meaning. Halfon, whose only novel thus far, El boxeador polaco (2008) was translated in 2012 as The Polish Boxer, has the ability to manifest a cosmopolitan reach yet maintain a heartfelt and convincing evocation of personal relationship and individual conscience, has made him a deservedly popular writer who has a wide academic and nonacademic readership. In the novels of the Costa Rican, Dorelia Barahona, self-consciousness similarly is neither paralytic nor esoteric. Though Barahona is a professor of philosophy, and her fiction is often prone to excurses on moral dilemmas or on the search for meaning in life, her prose is luxuriantly plotted and her novels are full not only of incident and adventure but of entire social panoramas replete with what the North American critic Lionel Trilling once termed “the hum and buzz of implication.” It might be expected given Costa Rica’s far less turbulent recent political history, that Cortés and Barahona would emerge from there. But what is notable is that the existence of relatively stable and, in all but the case of Honduras, unquestionably democratically elected governments during the past two decades (including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front in El Salvador, former revolutionary movements now operating in a pluralistic electoral context) has seemed to give a wider base to the literary world. Flourishing newspaper review sections such as those in the Guatemalan Prensa Libre or the Costa Rican La Nación testify to an ever more vigorous public cultural sphere, albeit existing side by side with coverage of politics, social unrest, and drug wars. Honduras, the most politically turbulent state in the region during the past decade, which underwent a political crisis in 2009 when the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya was not internationally recognized as taking place in a constitutional fashion, has not had its writers receive international exposure recently the way its neighbors have (although Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras). The Honduran writer Javier Abril Espinoza is best known for his poetry, although he has also published fiction. The relative obscurity of Panamanian writers is a bit more difficult to discern; the most promising current figures, Annabel Miguelena and José Luis Rodríguez Pittí, are very young and have time to emerge. One should not here forget Belize, the former British Honduras, which though largely an Anglophone country has Spanish as one of its four official languages and has produced Spanish-language writers such as those presented by Victor Manuel Durán in his 2007 Anthology of Belizean Literature. An

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increasing area of attention in Central American literature are cases like those of minority writing in the countries concerned, such as the Costa Rican Afro-Caribbean Quince Duncan, born too early to be included in this book, who writes in both Spanish and English. Central Americans of indigenous, mestizo, and migrant background are all actively contributing to the region’s literature and giving a much more varied sense of social and imaginative totality. There are also many young writers in these countries who show promise of future emergence, and who will one day follow in the steps of the contemporary writers included in this book. Drug-related gang warfare (Central America has in effect exported many gang rivalries northward to Mexico and the U.S.) and the impact of neoliberal economic policies mean that Central America still has profound problems in the twenty-first century. Yet with the influence of globalization, as manifested in the aftermath of the CAFTA free trade agreement, and the reality, in the knowledge-centered twentyfirst century, that the small size of the Central American countries is no longer the disadvantage it was in the era of the unified nation-state, Central American literature will probably change and grow in the twenty-first century as much as any in Latin America. The leap from the generation of Castellanos Moya to the one immediately after (several of whom are included here) will potentially be as quantum and exciting as that from the era of Castellanos Moya and his contemporaries. Nicholas Birns

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Dorelia Barahona (Costa Rica, 1959) Dorelia Barahona Riera was born in Madrid, to a Costa Rican father and a Spanish mother. Although she is a citizen of both countries, she has lived most of her life in Costa Rica. She obtained her degree in Philosophy and Art from Costa Rica’s Universidad Nacional, and continued her studies in Mexico City and Madrid. She has written poetry, essays, novels, short stories and television scripts. She has also worked in the theater and has exhibited her art works in Europe and Central America. Currently, she is a Professor of Philosophy in the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, where she teaches writing classes and coordinates her country’s Ministry of Culture and Youth Program of Support for the Literary Arts. Her first novel De qué manera te olvido (How Can I Forget You), received, in 1989, the Juan Rulfo Award granted to the best first novel by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Arts Institute) of Mexico. The novel was published by Mexico’s Editorial ERA in 1990, Editorial Costa Rica in 2003, and in 2007 by Editorial Piedra Santa in Guatemala. De qué manera te olvido tells the story of three school friends—Claudia, María, and Leda—from youth to adulthood in a linear manner, with a traditional omniscient narrator. The three friends first appear to represent contradictory aspects of the same character. However, later their lives become more clearly distinguished as they take independent life-paths.: Leda, the most adventurous and neurotic of the three, dies. Claudia, the working professional, ends up alone. María chooses a traditional lifestyle which she finds frustrating. This is a bildungsroman distinguished by the manner in which it uses settings and well-known international songs and music styles to establish the time periods through which the narrative unfolds. Barahona’s second novel Retrato de mujer en terraza (Portrait of a Woman on a Terrace) was published in Madrid (1995) by Editorial Verbum and, later, by Editorial de la Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica (2003). It is a love story built out of a series of portraits. In the world of the novel—which is set in the tropics—actions depend on sensuality, pleasure, and fantasy. The novel also contrasts the perils of progress with nature, which is presented as protective. Moreover, even though Retrato de mujer borrows from the detective genre, it is never simply a typical thriller. The plot of the novel is likely based on the author’s family history, perhaps explaining why the narrative voice is partially autobiographical in mode. Unlike Barahona’s first novel, in addition to depicting the protagonists’ search for a clear identity, Retrato de mujer explores social problems such as corruption. Nevertheless, the novel’s structural unity is lost in the narration of isolated facts without any apparent relation to the main argument. Among these unrelated facts one can cite references, perhaps ironic, to James Bond. However, the novel presents the search for freedom and happiness as part of its structure. Barahona’s third novel, Los deseos del mundo (2006, The Desires of the World), narrates the encounter between a group of older writers (Iván Orosco, Vega, Julio

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Tales y Betania) who, as the basis for their friendship, share a passion for literature. It is written in a postmodern style. The play of writing is not in the syntax or in the use of words, but rather in the handling of structures which renders the relationship among fiction, reality, and metafiction, ambiguous. In this manner, the novel constructs a “real” world stretched on the counterpoint of a narrative polyphony. The characters of Los deseos del mundo are writers creating realities that are also fictions. The most ambitious and formally polished of all her novels is probably La ruta de las esferas (2007, The Route of the Spheres). In principle, the novel is presented as a documentary investigation that attempts to reconstruct episodes of Costa Rica’s history. Among the many topics the novel deals with are the execution by firing squad of William Walker and Juanito Mora (Juan Rafael Mora Porras), and the revolt of the miners of Abangares, part of the 1911 rebellion against Minor Keith’s Costa Rica Pacific Gold Mining Company Limited. Barahona uses these historical events as the ground on which to base her fictional experimentation. As is the case with all her previous novels, La ruta de las esferas has an omniscient narrator, even though the plot, this time, is not presented chronologically. Rather, the narrative material is constructed out of the scraps of Costa Rica’s official history, on which Barahona threads other historical, as well as fictional, stories, characters and circumstances. In this manner, the novel joins marginal people, mystics, aristocrats, thieves, humble workers, pioneers of industrial modernity, heroes and antiheroes, politicians, healers, coffee growers, and American interventionists. Through this motley crew, Barahona establishes the precedents of the Costa Rican nation. Milagros sueltos (2008, Loose Miracles), is actually the first collective novel written in Costa Rica, and was coordinated and promoted by Barahona. In this text, a procession to the Church of the Virgen de Los Ángeles in Cartago is depicted by seven authors: Pedro Pablo Viñuales, Janina Bonilla, Víctor Valdelomar, Catalina Murillo, Jaime Ordóñez, Floria Bertsch and Barahona. The main plot details the loss and recovery of the statue of the Virgen de Los Ángeles, though, in the telling, other apparently unrelated stories supplement it. The text is, arguably, too long, but the appendix titled “Correos colectivos de La Mesa de Palabras” (“Collective Postings of the Table of Words”), which is a record of the messages the real-life authors sent each other in order to create and organize the novel, provides Milagros sueltos with welcomed postmodern freshness. Although almost all her novels have female protagonists, Barahona has not emphasized the role of women in society or other feminist topics. The reason for this de-emphasis is that the characters are described as being trapped in their own existential concerns and, therefore, as detached from the outside world. This tendency in her work is connected with the larger Central American literary field in which authors, such as Jacinta Escudos,* avoid dealing with the region’s history of war and violence by writing about introspective characters, such as the drug addicted writer in Escudos’s A-B Sudario (A-B Shroud), who experiences an intense interior life-anddeath struggle. However, Barahona’s (and Escudos’s) novels can be contrasted with

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Manlio Argueta’s politically committed novels, such as One Day in Life (1980), or the effect-driven writing of Horacio Castellanos Moya,* despite the large differences between these two authors in terms of technique and production. Perhaps Barahona’s exemplifies a very personal mode of writing that refuses to pander to the market for texts about Central America’s violence (and its aftermath), like some novelists from the 1980s. Instead, one could argue that her writing reflects the present distance of Costa Rican writers from the topics and writing techniques characteristic of the rest of Central America. It is, perhaps, in her short fiction, such as the stories included in Noche de Bodas (1994, Wedding Night) and La Señorita Florencia y otros relatos (2003, Miss Florencia and Other Stories), where the author best succeeds in depicting her problematic fictional world. Be that as it may, both her short fiction and her novels represent the complexity of human relations, and even though she works with commonplace characters—patriarchal mama’s boys, the unhappy wife, the old maid—she does so from a perspective enriched and ramified within ambiguous and enigmatic spaces. María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra

Works Cited Barahona Riera, Dorelia. De qué manera te olvido. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1990. —Noche de Bodas. San Jose: Editorial R.E.I., 1994. —De qué manera te olvido. San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 2003. —Retrato de mujer en terraza. 1995. San Jose: EUNED, 2003. —La Señorita Florencia y otros relatos. San Jose: Ediciones Perro Azul, 2003. —Los deseos del mundo. San Jose: Alfaguara, 2006. —De qué manera te olvido. Guatemala City: Editorial Piedra Santa, 2007. —La ruta de las esferas. San Jose: Editorial Norma, 2007. —Milagros Sueltos. Novela colectiva. San Jose: Editorial Lumbre, 2008.

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Horacio Castellanos Moya (Honduras, 1957) Three elements characterize the novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya: The story is usually told from the perspective of highly subjective voices that guide the reader, but that cannot necessarily be trusted. The world described is Central America, particularly El Salvador and its neighbors, in the second half of the twentieth century and especially the post-civil war period starting in the 1990s. His vision of this world and period is so disillusioned that Beatriz Cortez (2000) has even spoken of an “aesthetics of cynicism” in his fiction. The disenchantment of the novels’ narrators, the male ones in particular, is far from sounding passive or resigned; it often tips into an aggressive, macho, and contemptuous stance toward their world. Yet this aggression can be read above all as a response to a reality marked by war, suffering, and violence, and neither religion, democratic ethics, or political utopias seem capable of providing the basis of a functioning social coexistence. Moya’s characters, and his narrators, are failing in a violent world—but they battle against that failure through the act of narrating, driven by an intuition, if not a belief, that only by telling stories can they survive. All Moya’s protagonists are faced with failure: at the end of Tirana memoria (2008; Tyrant Memory, 2011), politician Pericles Aragón looks back without illusions at the corruption and violence marking the history of his homeland El Salvador; at the close of Donde no estén ustedes (2003, Where You Are Not), journalist Pepe Pindonga is forced to stay silent if he wants to stay alive. Similarly, on the last pages of El arma en el hombre (2001; The Weapon in Man) the contract killer known as RoboCop wakes up as the prisoner of a U.S. secret service and has to utilize his knowledge to save his life; and at the end of La diabla en el espejo (2000; The She-Devil in the Mirror, 2009), narrator Laura reflects on her former life of luxury from the perspective of an insane asylum. The voices that speak to the readers (Moya calls himself “an auditory writer” as opposed to a “visual” one; quote in Ortiz Wallner, 2006, 9) are always the voices of losers who cannot find a place in the Central American societies of recent decades. Tellingly, Moya’s fiction focuses not on the phases of military conflict themselves, but on the disorienting aftermath of revolution and civil war. The setting is rarely the countryside, the jungle, or nature, but rather the city, its labyrinth, its fragmented society. His characters, their identities broken and their memories damaged, often find themselves forced to choose between using violence themselves or becoming its victims if they are to survive. And that is what they want: to survive. In Anglo-American and European literatures, the existential importance of the survival motif has—for obvious historical reasons—declined over the last two or three decades. The threat of violent death holds sway primarily in genre fiction, especially as a stereotype used to generate a framework of suspense. But this is not the case for Central American literatures, in which “bare life” (Agamben) has a very different

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status. To live and to survive is evidently so remarkable there that almost all Moya’s fiction culminates in the motif of sheer existence or are constructed around it. What to the Western bourgeois reader may seem, at first glance, like “failure” acquires a quite different meaning within a Central American context: when violence and murder are ever-present, survival becomes a sign of hope, “failure” a victory over hostile circumstances. This is why Donde…, for example, closes not with the death of the ex-diplomat Alberto Aragón, but with the survival of the investigator Pindonga. Pindonga is commissioned to find out how Aragón died and succeeds in that task, but he is well enough versed in the art of living and surviving to ration carefully the information that he passes on to his employers. In this sense, Moya’s works carry enormously valuable knowledge—knowledge about how to survive in societies traumatized by the violence of civil war, and about the damage inflicted on the individual in the battle for survival. Moya’s readers experience this psychological damage with great immediacy, because it is often the narrators themselves who have suffered. This is most obvious in Insensatez (2004; Senselessness 2011), where the survivors of the genocidal attacks on the Maya-Quiché simply find no language for their testimony, while the narrator suffers from a pathological persecution complex. There is a long literary tradition behind this construction of highly subjective narrative voices that seem to reassure themselves of their very existence through their simulated orality: in The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade, too, secures her survival by empowering herself to keep telling stories (see Buschmann 2009; 2011, 240). Although most of Moya’s texts are set in El Salvador, he was born on November 21, 1957, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where he also spent his early childhood. His father Crescencio “Chencho” Castellanos Rivas, a writer and radio announcer, came from a left-wing Salvadoran family, his mother Ruth Moya from a conservative Honduran one. In the late 1970s, Moya acquired his first experience in journalism in El Salvador while studying literature and, for a short time, history at York University in Toronto. He returned in 1980, when the civil war broke out in earnest, to support the guerrillas of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional). He was a press agent for the fighters (especially in Costa Rica and Mexico) until 1984, but then turned away from the revolutionaries in disillusion. In the years that followed, he worked in Mexico as an editor and correspondent for various Latin American and Mexican agencies and newspapers, including Agencia Latinoamericana de Servicios Especiales de Información (Alasei). 1989 saw the publication of his first novel, La diáspora, for which he was awarded the Universidad de El Salvador’s Premio Nacional de Novela. La diáspora portrays a group of revolutionaries in Mexican exile who lose their faith in the revolution after the cowardly murder of the commandant Ana María—here Moya is clearly alluding to the murder of FPL commandant Melinda Anaya Montes in April 1983. The fighters now feel they bear the mark of Cain, like “orphans” transformed from “immaculate angels of the revolution” into common criminals (La diáspora, 113). Thematically, the novel breaks with the ideological optimism of left-leaning Central American literature since the 1960s; formally, the tentative manner of its telling, from several different narrative viewpoints, breaks with the key stylistic gesture of the testimonio genre (see Mackenbach 2008). Even at this early stage, Moya’s writing

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is distinctive in “not simply taking politics as its theme, but processing politics by literary means” (Ortiz Wallner 2009, 191). With the end of the civil war imminent, Moya returned to El Salvador in 1991. There he contributed to the construction of a free press as an editor and author. He published two volumes of short stories, as well as literary and political essays in which, among other things, he articulated his hope and belief that literature can be part of the nation-building process: “If the Left wants to renew itself, it will have to understand that fiction is a rich source for the knowledge and vision of the nation, and that literature […] does not describe the country but invents it” (Moya 1993, 67). However, the attempt to build a free press beyond left and right was unsuccessful: “We were trying to be in the middle in a society where there was no middle ground. And three or four months later, I wrote Dance with Snakes, and that was a kind of amazing experience, because there was not a plan for that story. It was as if suddenly I discovered a hard disk in my brain and I wrote it in two or three weeks” (Moya quoted in Martin 2009). Indeed, Moya’s second novel Baile con serpientes (1996; Dance with Snakes, 2009) reads like the record of a nightmare, intertwining realistic passages with fantastic ones. In his neighborhood on the edge of town, unemployed sociologist Eduardo Sosa spies on the homeless man Jacinto Bustillo, who lives in an old Chevrolet. Increasingly obsessed by Bustillo, Sosa kills him, adopts his identity, and takes up residence in the Chevrolet—along with four snakes, with which he talks, smokes drugs, and has sex. The snakes want to avenge Bustillo’s wrecked life. Sosa finally agrees to free them, whereupon they kill dozens of people and spread terror through the city. This psychotic fantasy of destruction is narrated from three viewpoints: the investigating police officer Lito Handal, the journalist Rita Mena (both characters will reappear in future novels), and most importantly Eduardo Sosa himself, who manages to escape from the situation at the very last minute and resumes his old identity. As in many later novels, Moya here draws on Elias Canetti’s view of “the writer as a ‘custodian of metamorphoses,’ […] as someone who has to be able to metamorphose himself into the people of his time, no matter how weak, miserable, or dark they are” (Moya, quoted in Cárdenas 2008, 4). If Dance… used fantasy to package its criticism of the desperate social situation in San Salvador, Moya’s next novel tackled the subject more explicitly. In El asco. Thomas Bernhard en El Salvador (1997, Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador), the narrator, a journalist named Moya, receives a visit from his friend Edgardo Vega, who has lived happily in Canadian exile for 18 years and is only in San Salvador for a funeral. As the two men talk, Vega works himself up into a tirade of revulsion and disgust that leaves no sphere of life unscathed. From the food (greasy) to the beer (made with dirty water), to the gun and violence fetishism of the men, to the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of the political elites—like the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard, who would hold up a mirror to his compatriots through unbridled rants, Moya presents a merciless reckoning with the postrevolutionary politics and culture of his homeland. That reckoning hit a nerve among the powerful, and Moya had to leave El Salvador after receiving death threats. Despite the occasional job in journalism

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in the subsequent years—in Mexico he worked as editor-in-chief of the magazine Milenio Semanal (2001/2), in Guatemala for El Periódico de Guatemala (2003)—his profile was now mainly as a fiction author. From the late 1990s he published a novel every two to three years, after 2001 often with the renowned Spanish and Mexican house Tusquets. Thanks in part to the translations of his works (for example, in France, Germany, Italy, and the U.S.), today he is not only El Salvador’s most important writer, but an “indispensable reference point for understanding the Central American literature of the past twenty years” (Ortiz Wallner 2009, 191). Like many authors of the region, he depends on grants, publishers, and readers outside Central America for both economic and political reasons, and lives in exile: in Germany during 2004 and 2006, and since 2007 mainly in the U.S. (since 2010 as a university professor). After this brief survey, let us look in more detail at two of Moya’s most important novels, Tyrant Memory and Senselessness. Tyrant Memory describes the three months in spring 1944 when El Salvador liberated itself from the dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The ousting of the despot is narrated not from the perspective of the rebel officers or intellectuals, but from that of an upper-class woman with no interest in politics. This is the first strand of the narrative: the journal of Haydée Aragón, whose husband Pericles has been imprisoned yet again on the dictator’s orders. Pericles was once a member of the government himself, but now he writes critical newspaper articles and has been jailed several times. However, this detention is different than usual. Haydée is no longer allowed to drive to the police station every day with her picnic basket; then Pericles is thrown into the city jail with the common criminals. This time he seems to be in genuine danger. Haydée is unsure how to interpret the political rumblings in the city until she hears the radio announcing a military coup by liberal officers—and the announcement just happens to be read by her son Clemen, who works at the radio station. When the coup collapses, extreme danger threatens both Pericles, who is suspected of participation, and Clemen, who is on the run. A chronicle of civil resistance now emerges from the diary of the apolitical Haydée. Under the cloak of ladies’ get-togethers, she organizes demonstrations with her friends and plans campaigns to help the imprisoned. Having always taken her cue from the men around her on political matters, Haydée now becomes part of the peaceful protests that—uniquely in El Salvador’s history—finally result in the resignation of the dictator. Out of a political victory won by democratic means, narrated in the voice of an apolitical woman, Moya unfolds a very distinct, feminine view of events—devoid of theory and ideology, but open, humane, and willing to learn. Parallel to Haydée’s journal runs another story, told as a gripping road movie: the story of her runaway son Clemen, who is trying to reach the border with his cousin Jimmy, an air force officer. The two cousins could hardly be more different: one is a conscientious U.S.-trained soldier, the other a light-footed drunkard with a talent for acting, whom even the mortally dangerous situation cannot restrain from flirtations and risky acts of bravado. This strand of the narrative is bursting with verbal humor and situation comedies, such as when Jimmy and Clemen, disguised as a priest and

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his sacristan, have their papers checked by soldiers on the train and are asked to give confession to one of the officers. Tyrant Memory would be an inappropriately optimistic book about twentiethcentury Latin America if the narrative ended in May 1944. At that point, the dictator resigns, the political prisoners are released, Clemen and Jimmy return home safely, and a new government takes power to general jubilation. However, a short second part of the novel (less than a sixth of the total length) is set in 1973, and shows the widower Pericles in conversation with his old friends, looking back at his life and his failed political ideals. The reader realizes that the peaceful revolution was a happy exception, a special case in the history of a country where violence has now become everyday. This is also Tyrant Memory’s tenor when it sets out the prehistory of the novels Donde …, Desmoronamiento (2006, Falling to Pieces) or La sirvienta y el luchador (2011, The Maid and the Boxer), in which Moya traces the complex fortunes of the Aragón family during the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. The cycle is his emerging literary project: a fragmentary chronicle of Central America, pieced together from many different novels and stories that contribute shards of the history of the isthmus; the Aragón family stands for the traditional upper class that is gradually losing its influence. In Donde… Alberto Aragón, one of Pericles’ cousins, soliloquizes about his life while he drinks himself to death in Mexican exile in the early 1980s, exhausted by his political side-changing in El Salvador’s civil wars. The circumstances of Alberto’s death are investigated by the journalist Pindonga, whose girlfriend Mena and the policeman observing him, Handal, featured in Dance… . The same Aragón family reappears in Desmoronamiento, as a faraway Salvadoran counterpart to the upper-class Honduras family Brossa, whose materfamilias Doña Lena tries in vain to stop her daughter Esther marrying the now older Clemen Aragón, whom the reader encountered as a young womanizer in Tyrant Memory. In La sirvienta… two other peripheral characters from Tyrant Memory become protagonists and narrators: Haydée’s domestic help María Elena, and the secret policeman Vikingo. On the first day of María’s job as a maid for Alberto Aragón’s son Albertico, she arrives to find his apartment empty. She fears he may have been kidnapped by the military due to the civil war and sets off in search of him, asking for help from her acquaintance Vikingo. Only at the end of La sirvienta… do we discover the solution to a mystery left open in Donde…: how Albertico Aragón died. Moya’s interweaving of fragmentary perspectives on reality, which even together amount only to a puzzle, is also exemplified by the connections between The She-Devil… and El arma…. The She-Devil… is the monologue of a young woman from the Salvadoran upper class who makes her confessions when thrown off course by the unsolved murder of her best friend Olga María; in a kind of mirroring effect, El arma… narrates the everyday life of the former elite soldier RoboCop when, thrown off course by the peace agreement in El Salvador and lacking any peacetime qualifications, he offers his services to various clients as a contract killer. Among other things, he carries out the murder of Olga María that policeman Handal in The She-Devil… will fail to solve.

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La diáspora, El asco, and Senselessness form a third series of novels, linked by the important role played in them by homodiegetic narrators who are journalists and clearly reference the author’s own biography. Its universally valid theme, genocide, and its nightmarish and compelling construction make Senselessness, listed as one of NPR’s “best foreign fiction” titles in 2008, particularly striking. The novel is about the massacres of the Guatemalan Indians whose remote settlement areas were used by the guerrillas as retreats during the civil war, with the result that General Efraín Rios Montt had whole villages annihilated in the early 1980s. After the war, the Catholic Church organized interviews with survivors of the massacres. The result was the 1998 report Guatemala—Nunca Más, which included the meticulous documentation of 9,000 murders committed by the military. Two days after the report was presented the bishop responsible for it, Monsignor Gerardi Conedera, was murdered. The military had secured themselves a general amnesty before resigning in 1996, but they evidently found this kind of official memory work too threatening. The narrator protagonist of Senselessness is an unnamed Salvadoran journalist forced by his critical reporting to go underground. Now, in late 1997, a friend gets him an apparently lucrative job: he is commissioned to copy-edit the 500 nearly print-ready pages of selected testimonies by the indigenous survivors, earning $5,000 in three months. Instead, however, he receives 1,100 pages of unsorted witness statements. His sanity is compromised not only by the text’s overwhelming volume, but by the inconceivable brutality of the events that it portrays. This is one of the meanings of the novel’s title. To the fear that drove him out of El Salvador is now added his fear of the military secret service, whose agents could kill him for his participation in the Bishop’s project. When he discovers after a sexual encounter that his lover is the girlfriend of a former military officer, he flees in panic. The last chapter is set at Carnival time in a presumably German city, where the narrator learns of the publication of the report he helped to create—and of the murder of Gerardi Conedera. Senselessness in fact tells of the creation of two books. One is the documentation of Guatemala—Nunca Más; here, the novel addresses the hinge point where documents become a story, namely the editing of previously translated and selected testimonies. This is a powerful demonstration of how supposedly authentic material becomes literary through selection and arrangement. Secondly, parts of Senselessness tell the story of its own genesis, for in an attempt to contain his growing paranoia, the narrator jots down in his notebook those sentences from the documents that particularly fascinate him, whether because of their very distinctive poetry or because of the unbelievably cruel events that they describe. He plans to create a novel out of these fragments, and in the crucial sixth of the twelve chapters he reflects on the form that this novel, an autotherapeutic project of writing against fear, might take: he imagines the story, enriched with typical elements of magical realism, of an indigenous registrar who refuses to hand over his village’s register of the dead, is killed for his obstinacy, and now speaks to his friends from beyond the grave. But intradiegetically neither of the two book projects is completed smoothly; in neither case is there closure. The editor flees before Guatemala—Nunca Más goes to press, and Senselessness is precisely not the narrative of that dead registrar, but the story of a white man writing. The

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narrator has discarded his plan, for the simple reason that “nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing another novel about murdered indigenous peoples” (Senselessness, 62). So is Senselessness not, after all, a novel about genocide, “about murdered indigenous peoples”? It is and it isn’t. It isn’t by refusing to describe the genocide in a mimetic or objectifying mode. It is in having the reader feel the destructive force of the violence suffered (similar to Fernando Vallejo in Our Lady of the Assassins or stories by Rodríguez Rey Rosa*), even if this force only strikes the narrator out of linguistically simple and urgent testimonies. The narrator’s anxiety and his attempts to escape from it through sex and alcohol reflect the savage force of the violent events, but from a narrow, subjective viewpoint. That viewpoint’s subjectivity makes it credible, and because the fear is based only on rumors and hints about the genocide, along with scraps of sentences from the testimonies, it infects the reader as well. The immediacy and ubiquity of the civil-war violence reader (“We all know who are the assassins!” Senselessness, 141) corresponds to a narrative perspective that brings the impact of violence and its mortal danger closer and closer. This is reinforced by the narrator’s recognition that the quoted words of the indigenous witnesses bear a special aesthetic value. He puts a sentence by an indigenous woman—“Three days I am crying, crying I am wanting to see him” (Senselessness, 20)—on a par with the poetry of a César Vallejo, and certainly, in Spanish the sentence follows the metrical form of an octosílabo. In this aestheticizing perspective on the testimonio, we discern an attempt to immobilize through reason something that without its special linguistic form would be inconceivable and would make the “senselessness,” the lack of meaning, unbearable: “It is the witness statements’ poetic dimension that enables them to describe the indescribable suffering of the victims” (Grinberg Pla 2007, 99). The power of the indigenous people’s own words is valued, but so is literature’s power to make the unsayable sayable. Or as Natasha Wimmer puts it: “Castellanos Moya has turned anxiety into an art form [...] and redeemed paranoia as a positive indicator of rot” (2008). We might also conceive of the novel as a whole, and the barely 500 words of testimonial fragments it includes, as the physical and semantic condensation of what was once an enormous corpus. Seen this way, the novel represents in nuce the archive of the indigenous collective oral knowledge and feeds that knowledge into new epistemological contexts. More than that, Senselessness models how the archive comes into being, and how it is used or, rather, deployed. The narrator not only demonstrates the transformation of indigenous people’s oral witness statements into written text through the labor of, especially, North Americans and Europeans; he also explicitly discusses the manipulation of the statements’ form and content in the course of such work. Senselessness shows, then, how a testimony is “made” as artifact. In this process, the novel’s multiple recourse to the testimonio genre is significant. It plays a role not only on the level of histoire or story, with the Indians’ statements, but also on that of discours or plot, in the breathless, fictitiously oral form of the narrator’s voice. From the very first page Senselessness insists metatextually that the events in Guatemala cannot be recorded, understood, or communicated through the categories of enlightened rationality alone—which is why the novel’s first sentence also sounds

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grammatically awry. That is the second layer of meaning in the title, suggesting that the narration of events exceeding the conceivable is itself a nonsensical, unreasonable undertaking, outside of any edifice of rules. Underlining this fragility of narration, the double tale of text-making remains unresolved (the narrator finishes neither his editorial work nor his novel), and not one of the survivors’ testimonies is recorded or summarized in full. For the same reason, the repeated key phrase “I am not complete in the mind” can itself not be “complete,” that is, grammatically correct. Senselessness exemplifies something that is also true of many other works by Moya: storytelling itself, even if it rests on unstable foundations, is a precondition for both individual survival and continued social existence. Concretely, in Senselessness that means the therapeutic social project of allowing the surviving Indians to speak out about their experiences, with the dual aim of helping them individually and enhancing their collective audibility and visibility as citizens with their own history. The novel first simply recounts this process of survival storytelling, then reduplicates it through the motif of the narrator’s notebook: if the Indios spoke to relieve their suffering, the narrator now writes to resist his traumatic experience of reading and to grapple with it through reason. This novel’s material is genocide—yet its account is neither of the killing nor of the dead, but rather of the survivors and the damage they have suffered. Like many texts about the destruction of the European Jews, again something barely accessible to rational understanding and aesthetic representation, Senselessness chooses literature’s preferred expedient: speaking less of the traumatic event itself than of its consequences, and doing so from the perspective of the survivors. But in Senselessness and other novels by Moya there is an additional dimension, in that narrating for survival can itself become a life-threatening act. This jeopardy is articulated in some of the testimonials; the Bishop’s death corroborates it; and the narrator himself senses it when, at the start of the novel, he makes a conscious commitment to the job by stepping over the threshold to his office and, near the end, escapes from the junta’s henchmen by jumping out the window. Whether they address society after civil war, like the Aragón cycle, or society after genocide, like Senselessness, Moya’s books do not offer a single, readable truth. Rather, they “unmask the process and dynamics of the construction of memory, which is always incomplete and fragmentary” (Ortiz Wallner 2012, 141). That challenges the reader, but it also very skillfully makes him or her an accomplice in the unresolvable narrative of Central American reality. Castellanos Moya’s most recent novel is El sueño del retorno (2013, The Dream of Returning). Albrecht Buschmann

Works Cited Buschmann, Albrecht. “Scherezade en América Central: introducción a la obra narrativa de Horacio Castellanos Moya.” Cultura. Revista de la Secretaría de Cultura de El Salvador 101 (2009). 115–26.

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—“Vuelve Scherezade: sobrevivir y convivir en Tirana memoria de Horacio Castellanos Moya.” Trans(it)Areas. Convivencias en Centroamérica y el Caribe. Ottmar Ette, Werner Mackenbach, Gesine Müller, and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (eds). Berlin, Edition Tranvía, 2011. 231–41. Cárdenas, Mauro Javier. “The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview.” Quarterlyconversation.com. 2008. Web. Castellanos Moya, Horacio. La diáspora. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1989. —Recuento de incertidumbres. Cultura y transición en El Salvador. San Salvador: Ediciones tendencias, 1993. —El asco. Thomas Bernhard en El Salvador. San Salvador: Ediciones Arcoiris, 1997. —El arma en el hombre. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores México, 2001. —Donde no estén ustedes. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2003. —Desmoronamiento. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2006. —Senselessness. Trans. Katherine Silver. New York: New Directions, 2008. —Dance with Snakes. Trans. Lee Paula Springer. Emeryville: Biblioasis, 2009. —The She-devil in the Mirror. Trans. Katherine Silver. New York: New Directions, 2009. —La sirvienta y el luchador. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2011. —Tyrant Memory. Trans. Katherine Silver. New York: New Directions, 2011. Cortez, Beatriz. “Estética del cinismo: la ficción centroamericana de posguerra.” http:// sololiteratura.com/hor/horestetica.htm. Web. Grinberg, Pla, Valeria. “(Un-)möglichkeiten der Erinnerung: der Genozid an den Maya in Horacio Castellanos Moyas Roman Insensatez.” Literaturen des Bürgerkriegs. Anja Bandau, Albrecht Buschmann, and Isabella von Treskow (eds). Berlin: Trafo-Verlag, 2007. 91–104. Mackenbach, Werner, ed. Hacia una Historia de las Literaturas Centroamericanas (I). Intersecciones y transgressiones: Propuestas para una historiografía literaria en Centroamerica. Guatemala, 2008. Martin, Nate. “The Ghost of San Salvador.” Stopsmiling (14 December, 2009). Web. Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra. “Überleben ist ein Guanako-Gen.” LiteraturNachrichten 88 (2006). 7–9. —“El arte de ficcionar en Horacio Castellanos Moya.” Cultura. Revista de la Secretaría de Literatura de El Salvador 101 (2009). 191–202. —El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en Centroamérica. Madrid: Vervuert, 2012. Wimmer, Natasha. “Novelist From Another Planet: On Horacio Castellanos Moya.” The Nation (14 December, 2008). Web.

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Carlos Cortés (Costa Rica, 1962) Perhaps more than any other novelist of his generation, Carlos Cortés Zúñiga has gone out of his way to dialog and negotiate, polemically and productively, with his own nonfiction and the larger concern of most novelists included in this volume: how does the literature of his native country, Central America and Spanish America, achieve the proper exchange between atavistic literary traditions and the Western literature paradigms that still and unavoidably define the continent’s fiction. This is a tension that informs his novels, in which any selfconscious digression departs from the novelist’s sense of greater duty to his craft than to his own importance. Numerous essays collected in La invención de Costa Rica y otras invenciones (2003, The Invention of Costa Rica and Other Inventions), which includes the seminal “La literatura latinoamericana no existe” (83–92, Latin American Literature Does not Exist); and the 2007 hybrid “novel within a novel about the novel and Costa Rican novels,” La gran novela perdida: historia personal de la narrativa costarrisible (The Great Lost Novel. A Personal History of “Costarisible” Narrative), now in a revised and enlarged 2010 edition, reveal a subtle and informed essayist and, more importantly, a conscientious novelist constantly in search of analytical and self-begotten models for his fiction. That search, which he continues to detail in presentations throughout the Americas, came to novelistic fruition mainly in 1999’s Cruz de olvido (Cross of Oblivion), whose second edition was published in Spain in 2008 after its publication in Mexico by Alfaguara, a marketing development addressed for some of his contemporaries in this book. Cruz de olvido’s renewal of the Spanish-American “political” novel at the turn of the century made Cortés part of a group of novelists, many also included in this book, whose search for literary renewal, and having second thoughts about revolutionary ideals, are in keeping with the recent paradigms for the contemporary Spanish-American novel. The year Cortés was born his father died, and as the son still states in recent interviews, finding out that Eddy Cortés was actually murdered started an uneasy relation with fiction, although that horrible event does not appear as autobiography in his novels and short stories, the most recent of which were collected in La última Aventura de Batman (2010, Batman’s Last Adventure). Hip, funny, allusive, hyperbolic, full of no holds barred speech and popular culture, as well as local references relayed with profane language, Cruz de olvido starts with the protagonist Martín Amador’s search in San Jose for the killers of his son Jaime, possibly one of seven young people at the Cross of Alajuelita. Amador, a journalist who had joined the Sandinista revolution, comes back to his country and embarks on his search with the aid of “El Maestro,” his former journalism mentor, and of the dubious President of the Republic, the “Proconsul,” both of whom are also narrators. The journey is really a descent into a Costa Rican hell, and during his subterranean passage through

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the “hidden” underworld of San Jose (including murdering the transvestite lover of the country’s attorney general) Amador meets his generational cohort: judges, politicians, and key figures in the world of communication. What they also have in common, besides drinking at all the bars at which they stop, is their deep disappointment at the loss of the revolutionary ideals expressed at the beginning of the novel. Cruz de olvido, the most extensive novel Cortés has published after his novella Encendiendo un cigarillo con la punta del otro (1986, Lighting a Cigarette with the Tip of Another), famously begins with the statement “Nothing has happened in Costa Rica since the Big Bang” (11). The conceptual charge of that affirmation and the attendant intricacies of what his search reveals are teased out in the novel’s 22 chapters. Cortés has stated that each chapter “demanded a different writer,” and thus his novel’s long gestation. There is also a testimonial tenor to the more political chapters, but their gist is tempered by irreverent and direct humor, which may not endear the novelist to progressive foreign observers of Spanish-American revolutionary movements, even when they have not had the direct authority that Amador’s ten-year experience in the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua had given him. It is no surprise then that, as Cruz de olvido progresses and the plot becomes more inconclusive, that Amador’s and his friends’ disappointment (and perhaps guilt) extends to politics, literature, the family and their partners. In chapter XV, set in 1992, a suspect denies any involvement in the killing of the transvestite, spilling the beans to the President and Amador about the upper echelon of the country’s politics, adding “One always keeps some things under the rug. You do also, right? When you helped the contras, Violeta [Chamorro], UNO [United Nicaraguan Opposition], Nicaragua, liberty. Proudly […] I did not kill Chola, President. They are setting me up […] Buddy of mine; it has been more than twenty years of struggle to get to where I am” (290). This political disappointment, which in other chapters is presented as an ideological beating, has an aesthetic connection, especially in the chapters in which Amador reminisces about what he could have done literarily. He considers his arrival at the city’s Plaza de la Cultura “the first station in the stages of my cross of death” (161), and mentions what would have been worth keeping of Spanish-American literature, with winks to the cognoscenti of SpanishAmerican literary history: “Darío’s liver, Vallejo’s heart, Neruda’s humility—that’s a joke—García Márquez’ mustache, the vanity of Octavio Paz, Cortázar’s beard, Borges’ eyes, Sábato’s wrath, Pepe [José] Donoso’s neurosis, Monterroso’s stature, Carlos Fuentes’ hyperbole… let’s not go on, please, let’s stop.” (162). Regarding family and his partners, Amador was really estranged from his son, his two ex-wives, and his dead lover, Comandante Laura (25–7), who lived in a San Jose neighborhood known for safeguarding Salvadoran guerrillas . Cruz de olvido is not self-spoiling about its climax, and it subtly makes readers temper the truth about the killing of Jaime by alluding to the fact that his mother has lost all contact with reality, and has to be put in a home. If Cortés’ most important novel to date provides an end of the century image of commitment and ideological struggles that places him at the forefront of the mash up of political novels by younger South American novelists like Alejandro Zambra,*

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Patricio Pron,* Pola Oloixarac,* and some closer in age to him like Arturo Fontaine,* or fellow Central Americans Horacio Castellanos Moya* and Rodrigo Rey Rosa.* Like theirs, Cortés’ nostalgia does not spring from a pathological nihilism based on present victimology, as in older novelists like Diamela Eltit,* but from an ironic castigat ridendo mores that engages empirical history differently. Ricardo Blanco, aka “Babyface,” and well-known in the city’s homosexual “gay-to,” engages the President in a discussion about the country’s past and says: “History. History. Fuck it! You journalists fill your mouths with that word as if it were just a matter of words. History. For God’s sake, what history? Buddy, Costa Rica does not have any.” (117). Ultimately, Amador realizes that after his search it may be time, again, to abandon his “metaphysical alcoholism” (405), and that the Cross of Alajuelita is very different from the one he knew when he was a happy child (464), a “cross” that is representative of the country he understands less than himself. At one point in Cruz de olvido Amador is looking for Ricardo Pacheco, an apocryphal Costa Rican writer who has written a “lost novel” titled “Los costarrisibles,” loosely the “costarisibles” or “costaridiculous.” The connection with La gran novela perdida is obvious, and now that an updated and corrected edition has been published of that novel hybrid it is no exaggeration to state that Cortés has published the most sensible and thoroughly honest self-analysis by any of the novelists included in this book. Less evasive than several repetitive essays on the novel by Jorge Volpi,* and certainly not unnecessarily avant-gardist like César Aira*’s obsessively fragmentary nonfiction on the genre, La gran novela perdida is direct yet equally ambitious in content, and another of its lasting values is the constant praise for earlier women novelists in Central America. The mixing of history and fiction in a strictly literary sense is purposefully enhanced by reserving the fiction for commentary on numerous authors and their works. The marrow, called “La gran novela perdida” (37–182) is made up of ten “encounters” with authors, critics, publishers, including Eduardo Becerra (119–27) and Augusto Monterroso (163–77). These meetings are partially factual, and Cortés employs them to expound on just about every Central and Latin American author of importance or unjustly forgotten, with frequently humorous asides and a few disjointed comments about his countrymen. That part of his hybrid novel, the longest, is preceded by a very brief note on what it means to write about Costa Rican literature and its generally nationalist and sentimental history, adding a narrated chronology covering the years 1975–2009. Initially discussing about 15 years of narrative production, Cortés subsequently aims to “novelize” an answer to how his country’s novels relate to the Central American novel in general. Although his discussion is a bit diffuse, he also aims to show how the changes undergone by the genre are related to the crisis of the nation-state and the transformation of his country’s culture, a goal that takes off from La invención de Costa Rica, especially the longest essay “La invención de otra literatura” (43–120, The Invention of Another Literature), which includes the much-quoted “La literatura latinoamericana no existe.” What keeps all this together is that Cortés relays the avatars of that historical literary condition by turning his ideas into a metafictional essay in which he is a protagonist, making La gran novela perdida an individual

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generational statement, not a strict or restrictive poetics, since the text does not have the collective conditioning or limitations of those found in McOndo or the Crack group. Ultimately, La gran novela perdida is a hypothetical fiction of what the Costa Rican novel could have been and was not. The Annex (185–270), composed of 11 brief essays and reviews of his contemporaries, and bio-bibliographical notes, shows that what was “lost” is really within fiction itself, particularly when Cortés speaks of Rodrigo Soto (b. 1962) and his novel El nudo (2004, The Knot). Cruz de olvido’s Comandante Laura has nothing to do with Tanda de cuatro con Laura (2002, A Round of Four with Laura), but both novels share the fascination with unknown dark spaces that Cortés’ narrators know very well. That those spaces are related to History could be traced to Cortés’ work as a journalist for 20 years and to his ongoing attention to the relations among communication, culture, and society, as attested in his early brief essay La cultura mediada. Elementos para el debate sobre cultura, sociedad y comunicación (1995). Thus, in Tanda de… the Young protagonist, an orphan called Andrés, is fascinated by the apartments, basements, halls, and rooms in the building that houses the Cine Rex, one of San Jose’s magisterial movie houses from the 1950s. Those spaces trigger a dual narrative, the decadence of the families who owned the movie houses; and Andrés’ own story, which begins when Alejandra, the woman with whom he falls in love, comes to buy drugs to the house-video clubbunker he shares with his friend Korea. Forced to leave, they wander around San Jose meeting foreigners and Costa Ricans from other times and mentality. The first of Tanda de… ends with the Rex’s destruction by fire and its owner’s death. But Andrés’ story remains open, since he is still looking for Alejandra. In this novel the nostalgia is not for a political national sense but for the culture of movie houses that no longer exist. Just as in Cruz de olvido Amador finds different guides, in Tanda de… Andrés finds in Curling a guide to the nooks and crannies, even “museums” of the Cine Rex, which include objects that belonged to the films projected there decades before. That the basement leads to “a humid warehouse poorly lit by emergency lights and invaded by a sewer-like smell” (48) is just one symbol of what lies underneath the new San Jose. Many of the movie house’s rooms are now devoted to video games or pornography, signs of the decadence of film culture, and of the deep imprint it leaves on its fans. Cortés employs Andrés’ pilgrimage to recreate the history of San Jose and its neighborhoods, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Like in Cruz de olvido, history is not pleasant in Tanda de…, since it reveals dysfunction at almost every human level. Beyond, or related to film culture, is the novel’s circular structure, since the first chapter relates the end of the story, which is the continuation of the twenty-second chapter. Amador and Andrés wander through San Jose like the protagonists of urban novels by many Spanish-American novelists born between 1950 and 1963, as Rojas has examined. In the final analysis Cruz de olvido and Tanda de… are also metaphors for the inevitable end of two related but different sociocultural worlds that are not necessarily specific to Costa Rica and extend to similarly “minor” Spanish-American countries that are running on memories or grimmer truths. The three novels that are most representative of Cortés’ development and his present

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view of the genre all deal with experiences that defy summary, since they happily swirl from police procedural to bildungsroman, from novel of manners to historical novel, from parody to love story. All of them also tend to make extended stops at what could be called the new novelization of politics; and it is at those sojourns that the more explanation there is, the more positively confusing the novels become. Cortés’ place in the development of the contemporary Spanish-American novel is parallel to his view of the role of translation in Costa Rica, and by extension, in the rest of Central America: “Most translators who are part of this network do so as a personal endeavor, just like in the twentieth century, without institutional support of any kind, as a sub product of their own academic or aesthetic experiences […] because of their interest in bringing to light authors who are unknown in the regional area” (136). In a 1999 interview with Aurelia Dobles for San Jose’s La Nación Cortés said that “In the eighties, when my generation began to write, we were intoxicated by the great Latin American novel and thought that the smallest phrase had to invoke the total novel.” Cortés’ novelistic gestures are a positive solution to the burden of that past, because by laying waste to linear narration, understating thematic coherence (especially in La gran novela perdida), subverting psychological plausibility (in Tanda de cuatro con Laura), and just about everything you may encounter in a novel, as in Cruz de olvido, he is saying that the novel today has to be anarchic by default, if it is going to be exhilirating and make sense for readers who have read a lot of novels or see politics at the root of any fiction. In 2013 he earned Central America’s most prestigious award for the genre, Guatemala’s Premio Mario Monteforte Toledo, for a novel tentatively titled “El corazón de la noche” (The Heart of the Night). According to press reports and the author’s statements, that novel would close the cycle started with Cruz de olvido and continued in La última aventura de Batman with an “anti-saga” modeled on some intimate autobiographical events, and with the form of another nocturnal flânerie that ends in agony. Those who have not read many novels will find Carlos Cortés’ multiple narratological preferences close to maddening, but always strangely moving, and not much more could be asked of the genre at this stage of its development. Will H. Corral

Works Cited Cortés, Carlos. Encendiendo un cigarrillo con la punta del otro. Heredia: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional, 1986. —La cultura mediada. Elementos para el debate sobre cultura, sociedad y comunicación. San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 1994. —Cruz de olvido. 1998. Madrid: Veintisiete Letras, 2008. —Tanda de cuatro con Laura. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002. —La invención de Costa Rica y otras invenciones. San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 2003. —La gran novela perdida. Historia personal de la narrativa costarrisible. San Jose: Uruk Editores, 2010.

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—“Centroamérica: traductores sin traducciones.” La traducción literaria en América Latina. Gabriela Adamo, ed. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2012. 113–39. Dobles, Aurelia. “El lado siniestro de Costa Rica.” La Nación. Áncora. April 8, 2007. Web. Rojas, Margarita. La ciudad y la noche. La narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea. San Jose: Farben, 2006.

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Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador, 1961) Jacinta Escudos’s impact on writing has been in experimental and fragmentary modes, characterized by dialogue with contemporary technology and social networks, as exemplified by her official blog: Jacintario (http://jescudos.wordpress.com). Critics have classified her writing as testimonial, post-war (Villalta 1998), and as representing an aesthetic of cynicism (Cortez 2009). In “Los inclasificables: escritores salvadoreños hoy” (The Unclassifiable: Salvadoran Writers Today), Escudos describes her own work through the term “literature of truth” (143). Although Escudos has been included in at least 15 anthologies of Latin American and Central American narrative, most of her work remains unpublished. In fact, even some of the works that have received national acclaim took long to be published. For instance, her short story collection Crónicas para sentimentales (Chronicles for Sentimental Readers), the 2001 winner of the First Place in the X Juegos Florales of El Salvador, was only published nine years later. As with other writers in this book, such delays can speak to some evasion of literary commodification or to the arbitrary fortune of dealing with publishers. Escudos had better luck with her third novel, A-B-Sudario (2003, A-B Shroud), which won in 2003, the First Central American “Mario Monteforte” Novel Award, organized by the Guatemalan branch of Editorial Alfaguara, which published it that year. In general the reception of Escudos’s writings has been positive (Cortez, Palma). For instance, she was named one of the 25 “secret” writers deserving of greater recognition by the 2011 Guadalajara book fair. Nevertheless, she maintains her distance from critics, as evidenced in “Los inclasificables…” (137). Her early short-story collection Contra-corriente (1993, Against the Grain), deals with topics such as war, violence as a way of life, the questioning of the modern family, and postwar frustrations and anomie. Her next short collection, Cuentos Sucios (1997, Dirty Stories) can be classified as transitional, since it begins to leave behind the description of the war’s aftermath, and starts to examine the creation of new spaces and new subaltern, marginal, strange, and perverted subjects who question traditional notions of normality (Schroeder). In these stories, irony and cynicism replace the earlier critical and dramatic point of view characteristic of her earlier collection. The stories’ female characters, like those of the novels, have difficulties with their sexuality: they cannot enjoy the company of men; they prefer to escape by distancing themselves from relationships, substituting these with fantasies or engaging in masochism. Escudos’s first short novel, Apuntes de una historia de amor que no fue (1987, Notes for a Love Story that Never Happened) has been considered by Nilda Villalta as a testimonial novel that narrates different events from the civil war using the truncated love story between the bourgeois Eva Martínez and the guerrilla Rafael as narrative thread. The text plays with techniques associated with memoirs

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and testimonial prose. It is composed out of apparently temporally and spatially unrelated, but generically defined, fragments: passages from a diary, paragraphs from letters, bits of posters and advertisements—functioning as narrated photographs— and, towards the end of the novel, descriptions that remind one of clips from a documentary. The novel ends with Eva, the protagonist, dying from an accidental shot to the head. The topic of love frustrated in tragically conflicted environments is also found in Escudos’s stories. Crónicas para sentimentales (2010) and El diablo sabe mi nombre (2008,The Devil Knows My Name), which additionally deals with topics such as the crisis of Christian identity and the end of the world. A-B- Sudario, in particular its protagonist, also illustrates a key trait of Escudos’s narratives: the rejection of family roots often through the exposure of the often hateful competitiveness between mothers and daughters. This latter topic has been present since Cuentos Sucios and Contra-corriente, and figures the larger difficulty for women in achieving happiness, pleasure, or joy, often manifested in isolation and social phobia combined with pride. These gendered differences have also been found (Palma) in her first full-length novel El desencanto (2001, The Disenchantment). In A-B- Sudario, Cayetana is a writer who imagines four fictional potential lovers who maintain a platonic relationship with her, despite the drugs and alcohol she consumes. At first, the reader is led to believe that it is Homero (one of the lovers) who creates Cayetana and reads about her (as a literary character) to his friends. However, as the novel unfolds, one comes to the realization that it is Cayetana who is the author, facing writer’s block and loneliness. Cayetana’s crisis, that is, of the author within the diegesis and the protagonist of the novel being read, in addition to the character’s arrogance, leads her to create these lovers with which she tries to fool the readers within the fictional narrative. The real-life reader reads the novel that within the text is written by Cayetana. A-B Sudario is an exercise in metafictional gaming. In this novel, the protagonist is an anti-hero who does not elicit the reader’s sympathy. Nevertheless, there are moments when the narrative presents her in tender terms, making constant allusions to extraterrestrials and to a discourse about guilt and self-abandonment. In A-B- Sudario, Cayetana looks at herself in the mirror and sees a decoupling, a bifurcation. She feels deeply divided internally, and the novel shows that she is both a good, childish woman, and, at the same time, an aggressive, abominable, monster. The good side of Cayetana is the girl who developed in an environment of moral rules and norms that made her feel excluded and discriminated and excluded. The adult and monstrous Cayetana tries to overcome this sense of marginalization, but, despite her strength and aggressiveness, fails. Escudos’s immediately preceding short-story collection, El diablo sabe mi nombre, deals, among other topics, with the question of belief in God’s existence and the proximity of the end of the world. The title’s story alludes directly to the Devil, the Holy Spirit, trees and serpents. In A-B- Sudario, at least two of the names of the potential boyfriends are of Biblical origin: Fariseo (Pharisee) y Pablo Apóstol (Apostle Paul). And the title sudario (shroud) brings to mind that of Jesus. It is significant that the novel does not deal with the economic basis of its characters’ lives. Although

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Cayetana never publishes—instead burning her texts—she always has money to pay for her house on the beach, food, and abundant drugs. Despite the protagonist’s having four lovers, who are also friends, she has no stable relationship with any of them. Although Escudos’s plot borrows from Mike Figgis’s well-known film Leaving Las Vegas (1995), eroticism is not central to the novel’s narrative. But Cayetana resembles Ben Sanderson, the protagonist of Figgis’s film, in her self-destructive and ultimately fatal behavior. Nevertheless, this circumstance—Cayetana’s self-destructiveness—is not presented from an explicitly feminist perspective but as a more universal human drama. Escudos is an author who occupies a prominent position in contemporary Central American literature, as attested by the inclusion of her work in various international anthologies. Back in El Salvador since 2009, she writes a biweekly column, “Gabinete Caligari” (Caligari’s Cabinet) for Séptimo Sentido, the Sunday supplement of El Salvador’s La Prensa Gráfica. She is also the Latin American editor of the blog Future Challenges. Actively engaged in multiple fields of writing, including literary workshops, Escudos will no doubt be heard more from in the future. María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra

Works Cited Cortez, Beatriz. Estética del cinismo. Pasión y desencanto en la literatura centroamericana de posguerra. Guatemala City: F&G Editores, 2009. —“El desencanto de Jacinta Escudos y la búsqueda fallida del placer”. ISTMO. November 2012. Web Escudos, Jacinta. Apuntes de una historia de amor que no fue (novela corta). San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1987. —Contra-corriente. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993. —Cuentos sucios. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 1997. —El desencanto. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 2001. —A-B- Sudario. Guatemala City: Alfaguara, 2003. —“Los inclasificables: escritores salvadoreños hoy.” Karl Kohut, y Werner Mackenbach, (eds) Literaturas centroamericanas hoy. Desde la dolorosa cintura de América. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005. 137–46. —El Diablo sabe mi nombre. San Jose: Uruk Editores, 2008. —Crónicas para sentimentales. Guatemala City: F&G Editores, 2010. Kohut, Karl y Mackenbach, Werner (eds) Literaturas centroamericanas hoy. Desde la dolorosa cintura de América. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005. Palma, Milagros. “El espacio privado y las normativas de género en El desencanto de Jacinta Escudos.” In Les espaces des écritures hispaniques et hispano-américaines au XXIe siècle. Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo and Marie-Alexandra Barataud Limoges (eds): PULIM, 2012. 131–44. Schroeder, Regina. “Monólogos en la madrugada: la obra narrativa de Jacinta Escudos.” Revista Tatuana. Nov. 2012. P. 8. Web. Villalta, Nilda C. “Historias prohibidas, historias de guerra: el testimonio de Jacinta Escudos desde El Salvador.” 1998 Meeting of LASA. October 2012. Web

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Rodrigo Rey Rosa (Guatemala, 1958) “All writers tend to be Borges,” says the contemporary Spanish poet Pere Gimferrer, who then adds, “all those who think about literature when writing” (12). The prolific narrative production, especially the novels, of Rodrigo Rey Rosa fulfills in two distinct manners this statement by Gimferrer, who until a few years ago was Rey Rosa’s editor at Seix Barral. On the one hand, the quotation takes note of the many connections between Rey Rosa’s narrative and Borges’s aesthetics and texts. On the other, Gimferrer’s quote notes one of the characteristics of Rey Rosa’s writing: an awareness of the text as construction and materiality as a testimony to of the permanence and survival of literature. Unlike most Guatemalan and, more generally, Central American writers since the 1990s, Rey Rosa’s work has been published by major Spanish presses. When he was represented by the Carmen Balcells literary agency, his stories and novels were published by Seix Barral and Anagrama. In 2010, after he began to be represented by the Andrew Wylie agency, he has been published in Spanish by the transnational book publisher Alfaguara. The series of books from 1992’s novella Cárcel de árboles (The Pelcari Project, 1997) to Los sordos (2012, The Deaf) confirms Rey Rosa’s desire to invent his own tradition, in the manner postulated by Borges in his well-known essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” Underlying Rey Rosa’s work is an attempt to reinvent the novelistic genre. The 12 novels he has published make up a mosaic of forms and genre transgressions. A first group of novels—Cárcel de árboles, El salvador de buques (1992, The Ship Savior), and most recently Severina (2011)—can be described as displacements of fantastic and science fiction narratives, reminding one of both Borges and Bioy Casares. In Severina we enter a bookish world through the description of scenes, dialogs and characters as peculiar as the bookseller madly in love with Ana Severina Bruguera; a book thief, her inseparable companion; Otto Blanco, a grandfather; and Ahmed, a Maghrebi book merchant. The bookseller’s obsession with Ana Severina is the narrative frame for a voyage through an imaginary library of every possible book, perhaps because it could be read as a tribute to Borges and Bowles. This game of mirrors, in which identities can only be expressed obliquely, brings to mind the theme of the double already explored in La orilla africana. Severina not only returns to Rey Rosa’s earlier novels but once again makes literature the center of his writing. A second group, including 1996’s El cojo bueno (The Good Cripple, 2004), Que me maten si… (1997, Let Them Kill Me If…), Piedras encantadas (2001, Enchanted Stones) and Caballeriza (2007, Stable), play with detective and noir genres. Others develop the travel or intimate genres, including epistolary forms, as is the case in La orilla africana (1999, The African Shore) and El tren a Travancore. Cartas indias (2000, The Train to Travancore. Hindu Letters) is closer to autobiography and auto-fiction, as is El material humano (2009,

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Human Matter). Caballeriza, published ten years after El cojo bueno, returns to the novel of intrigue and suspense and to the accurate recreation of a rural world. But Caballeriza does so from within a patriarch’s estate, whose birthday brings together various characters. The celebration is disrupted by the accident that ends the life of his most expensive horse. Beyond the in crescendo suspense achieved with a minimalist and transparent language, this novel stands out within Rey Rosa’s narrative for proposing a double dimension: the metafiction of the narrator-character-writer, and the self-referential nature of the novel to be written on commission, which the readers have in their hands. This is a multipurpose resource that Rey Rosa employs insistently in subsequent novels, perhaps exemplarily in El material humano. An additional group, for instance Lo que soñó Sebastián (1994, What Sebastian Dreamt) and, more recently, Los sordos, are realist narratives, though ones characterized by ambiguity in focalization, including play with criollista (local Hispanic) and indigenist perspectives. Rey Rosa’s novels form an open-ended mosaic of forms and hybridities that delineate a delicate and precise exploration through diverse linguistic and imaginative spatial territories. His use of varied locales and settings—Guatemala City, Tangier, an unnamed city in Colombia, New York, Paris, London, Madras, the south of India, the Pacific coast of Guatemala, and the Petén jungle—is more than mere description. Instead, the presence of diverse settings serves to relativize borders, be these national, regional, or continental. Thus, Rey Rosa’s narrative is eccentric within a post-national globalized scenario, both in the context of the Guatemalan literary canon, as well as regarding the dominant modes of writing in Central America. One can, thus, consider him the most universal and cosmopolitan of contemporary Guatemalan writers. He practices what critics have called a “writing without fixed address” (Ortiz Wallner). This is an aspect of his writing that Roberto Bolaño* had already noted in 2000: “That’s how I like to imagine him, with no fixed address, fearless, checking in to cheap hotels, sitting at bus stations in the tropics or in chaotic airports with his laptop or a blue notebook into which his curiosity—his entomologist’s boldness—calmly unspools” (151–2). Considered one of the most unique Hispanophone voices in contemporary literature, he is frequently associated with his contemporaries Bolaño* and Horacio Castellanos Moya*. However, there is no doubt that Rey Rosa’s literary relation with the North American author, traveler, and composer Paul Bowles (1910–99) is a counterpart to his previously mentioned ongoing dialogue with Borges. In several interviews (Guerrero, Posadas, Durante), he evokes his apprenticeship with his master Bowles as being as much about literary form as about the ethics of writing: “In addition to the lessons of precision and clarity found in his texts, and what I could learn by translating them, through him I realized that it was possible to organize one’s existence, one’s life, around the practice of writing” (Posadas). Bowles was, in fact, the translator into English of The Pelcari Project and the young Rey Rosa’s first short stories, which were published as The Beggar´s Knife (1985) and Dust on her Tongue (1989). He also welcomed Rey Rosa in Tangier during the early 1980s, when the latter participated in one of the creative writing workshops offered by the former.

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Thanks to this encounter and the relationship it helped establish he was named Bowles’s literary executor after his death in 1999. Traces of the North American’s influence are found throughout Rey Rosa’s works. Some of these are explicit, for instance in El material humano, in which Bowles is the main character in one of the anguished protagonist’s dreams. Others are less obvious, though far from imperceptible: “I maintain a constant dialogue with Bowles. He was an interlocutor whose words enriched me greatly; and I continue talking with him in imagination and, even more so, in my books” (Durante 6). Throughout his narrative, Rey Rosa, like Borges and Bowles, develops a particular relationship with dreams. According to the Guatemalan, both writers “saw in dreams a sort of antecedent to the creative aesthetic act” (Guerrero 104). Gimferrer, in his preface to La orilla africana, points out the centrality of dreams to the novelist’s writing: “In effect, we have the sensation of ethereality by means of a writing simplified to the maximum, in which no word is unnecessary … almost as if one were living a dream” (Gimferrer, “Prefacio,” 9). Already the title Lo que soñó Sebastián points out the centrality of dreams in many of Rey Rosa’s works. As mentioned above, this is a short novel written in a realist vein. (Some critics, such as Flores, have even described it as social realist.) It is true that Lo que soñó Sebastián deals with corruption, decadence and the imminent destruction of the environment of the Petén jungle, but, rather than social realist, it is closer to what could be called an oneiric realism with echoes of an ambiguous criollista (local Hispanic) gaze. This combination of the oneiric and regionalism reminds one of other Guatemalan writers, such as Virgilio Rodríguez Macal (1916–64) and Carlos Navarrete (b. 1931). This is a novel that presents a world of hunters, fortune hunters, foreign and Guatemalan tourists, as well as the inhabitants of the Petén, who struggle for survival in a world that appears to have its laws imposed by a dying nature. Sebastián, the protagonist, attempts to preserve his enormous land holding in the heart of the Petén, as well as the archeological site Punta Caracol. Nevertheless, his mission—perhaps misguidedly civilizing—fails. Furthermore, in a moment, somewhere in-between reality and dream, Sebastián ends up a victim of the violence prevalent in the Petén jungle. The visual force of the passage probably led the novelist to develop it into a screenplay, written with poet Robert Fitterman, and, then, to direct a movie version of the novel which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2004. Rey Rosa’s film work serves as an example of the importance he gives to artistic collaboration. For instance, the Salvadoran photographer Guillermo Escalón is the cinematographer of Lo que soño Sebastián; and Spanish artist Miquel Barceló, who designed the book covers of La orilla africana and El cojo bueno, has a cameo in the movie. In 2004, Rey Rosa received the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Guatemala “Miguel Ángel Asturias” (The Miguel Ángel Asturias National Book Award). The honor was, to a degree, polemical, since the previous year the Maya-K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak´aba had refused it in protest over the ideas expressed by Asturias in his university dissertation “Sociología guatemalteca: el problema social del indio” (1923, “Guatemalan Sociology: The Problem of the Indian”); a racist document which discriminated against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. Rey Rosa opted to use

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the money to establish the Premio de Literatura Indígena B’atz’, an award that has as its objective promoting literature written in the diverse indigenous languages of Guatemala. As part of the award, the winning texts would be disseminated in both their original version and in Spanish translation. The links with the indigenous world of Guatemala are also explored in his novels. Que me maten si…, which has interrelated stories set in Guatemala, London and Paris, deals with the legacy of the dirty war that shocked the country by including one of the most brutal events narrated by Rigoberta Menchú in her testimonial text I, Rigoberta Menchú (1982). The search for the evidence of a massacre committed against the indigenous population leads three characters—Ernesto, Emilia and Lucien Leigh—to the mountains of the Quiché region, one of the most affected by the armed conflict which took place between 1960 and 1996. Open ended, as all of Rey Rosa’s novels, Que me maten si … turns its gaze onto a group of orphans, victims of the system of corruption and impunity which has taken root in the country with the implementation of democracy. In the novel, this system is represented by the character of the retired army officer Pedro Morán. Helplessness and orphanhood, as metaphors for the failure of the state and the absence of one able and willing to guarantee a decent life for its citizens, is also present in Piedras encantadas. In this novel, street children and gang members are presented as the refuse of a profoundly violent society lacking any sense of solidarity. Los sordos deals differently with the juxtaposition between urban and rural, Hispanic and indigenous, Guatemala. The novel thus constructs a literary geography of the country: from the city, surrounded by imposing volcanoes, through the Hispanic east, to the indigenous communities settled among impenetrable mountains. By means of the motif of disappearance—of a deaf indigenous boy and of Clara, the daughter of a rich old man from Guatemala City—the novel narrates a plural country. Through Cayetano, Clara’s young and naive bodyguard, the reader gets to know the country’s daily violence and the failure of the state’s legal system. But the novel also presents the answers to these problems adopted by the indigenous population and their authorities, based on their own traditions and their understanding of justice. Even in his “Preliminary Note” to the novel, Rey Rosa warns us that his investigation of the millenary Maya system of justice is, at best, rudimentary. Los sordos combines diverse stylistic resources and registers used in earlier texts by the novelist: paratexts, epistolary, dialogues, interior monologues. But, also, despite it being his longest novel to date, Los sordos makes constructive use of silence. As Gimferrer writes in his previously cited preface: the novel “sharpens silence until it becomes transparent” (9). Gustavo Guerrero, referring to an earlier Rey Rosa novel, La orilla africana, makes the point clear: “The sobriety of his writing … gives us the measure of his ethical and aesthetic rigor. I believe that no one in Spanish America had previously managed to write such a transparent yet disturbing novel.” (103). Conciseness and condensation are characteristic of the totality of Rey Rosa’s narrative and give his writings exceptional coherence. As Luis C. Cano notes, Rey Rosa’s narrative tends to “examine diverse writings, both in their internal nature, as in their function as an instrument of social investigation” (389). This is why it does not

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surprise the reader that another topic explored in his fiction is that of violence and the possibility and limitation implicit in narrating it: “I’ve been interested in narrating violence beginning with my first stories. It’s not that I am particularly violent. I believe there is mental or interior violence in everyone” (Posadas). El material humano is a first-person narrative about the visits of a Guatemalan writer to the newly discovered National Police Archive, better known as “The Island.” The narrator-writer is interested in the discovery of the Archive, since he has nothing else to write about, as he states in the “Introduction.” Once installed in the Archive, the issue of reading and writing the void and horror of repression will be proposed by means of the pre-texts to fiction: index cards, notebooks, and reports. These pre-texts become the fuses that attempt to ignite the search for a meaning that appears inexistent or, in Gerald Prince’s terminology, disnarrated. The narrator’s research—constantly interrupted and narrated in the fragmentary forms previously mentioned—talks indirectly about Guatemala’s historical experience throughout the twentieth century. This archival research into the past is transfigured into an investigation into the destiny of the present. The original inquiry into the life of the hundreds of individuals registered in the archive’s index files, and the parallel investigation into his own and his family’s future, lead the protagonist to discover the fact that any human being, including an artist, can be persecuted. In El material humano, literature shows the plurality of options it has to relate to life and violence. This is the grimace of a writing which originates in a context of dislocation and despair. The novels of Rey Rosa constitute a meta-literary reflection on the impossibility of existence and, finally, force the reader to face the paradox of literature’s own existence. Alexandra Ortiz Wallner

Works Cited Bolaño, Roberto. Between Parentheses. Trans. Natasha Winner. New York: New Directions, 2011. Cano, Luis C., “Cárcel de árboles de Rodrigo Rey Rosa y la meta-ciencia-ficción.” Revista Iberoamericana, LXXVIII. 238–9 (January–June 2012). 389–403. Durante, Erica. “«Empiezo a escribir escribiendo» Un arsenal de escritura: Rodrigo Rey Rosa entre Borges y Bioy.” Revue Recto/Verso 2 (2007), 1–8. Flores, Ronald. “The Enigmatic Drifter.” The Latin American Review of Books 64 (2008). Web. Gimferrer, Pere. “Prefacio.” Rodrigo Rey Rosa. La orilla africana. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999, 9–12. Guerrero, Gustavo. “Conversación con Rodrigo Rey Rosa.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 624 (2002). 103–8. Ortiz Wallner, Alexandra. El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en Centroamérica. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012. Posadas, Claudia. “Una escritura sin precipitaciones. Entrevista a Rodrigo Rey Rosa.” Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios 29 (2005). Web.

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Rey Rosa, Rodrigo. The Beggar´s Knife. Trans. Paul Bowles. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1985. —Dust on her Tongue. Trans. Paul Bowles. London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1989. —Cárcel de árboles/El salvador de buques. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992. —Lo que soñó Sebastián. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1994. —El cojo bueno. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996. —Que me maten si... Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1997. —La orilla africana. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. —Piedras encantadas. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2001. —El tren a Travancore (Cartas indias). Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002. —Caballeriza. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2006. —El material humano. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009. —Severina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011. —Los sordos. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2012.

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Hispanophone Caribbean Introduction Though the Spanish-speaking Caribbean has produced superb writers, its literature, as a totality, is not as well known in the English-speaking world as it should be. The Caribbean has been the source of much of the most fertile postcolonial writing and criticism in French and English literatures, as writers like Édouard Glissant and Aimé Cesaire, Derek Walcott and Kamau Braithwaite have been acclaimed not just as representatives of their region but as emblems of the best in world writing as such. Despite such cultural presences as, in a former generation, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Fernando Ortiz, and more recently Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Roberto Fernández Retamar, the Spanish Caribbean, in terms of exporting critical paradigms to the broader world, has arguably not quite kept pace. This is perhaps because decolonization took place very differently in the Spanish Caribbean than, especially, in the Anglophone, where most colonies were granted independence in the 1960s. The Dominican Republic was independent by the 1820s (though briefly reoccupied by Spain in the 1860s), Cuba only became independent because of war, and Puerto Rico is, some might argue, still in a colonial situation. In addition, there is the Cuban Revolution, which, over a half-century after its convulsive effect, still reverberates across the region. Cuba, under the longtime authoritarian role of the Castro family, has seen its still-powerful influence divide between an émigré community of various waves and dispensations and a set of writers who continue to tolerate these difficult conditions of their homeland. Cuba has had historically the most high-literary tradition of the Spanish Caribbean, a symbolist poet such as José María de Heredia became famous and widely influential in France, José Marti is still a hemispheric hero for his poems and manifestos, for all sides of the political spectrum, and in the second half of the twentieth century highly inventive writers such as Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante combined revolutionary politics with literary experimentation. The Cuban Revolution changed this in both its convulsive impact and its political mandates, but the tradition is reemerging, and not only among exiles or émigrés. The Cuban-born science-fiction writer Daina Chaviano is one of the most respected in that genre worldwide, while the acclaimed poet Antonio Rodríguez Salvador also has written notable fiction. Cuban exiles from various waves of migrations from Castro’s regime have constructed substantially to U.S. literature, as in the gay-oriented writing

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of the late Reinaldo Arenas, the engrossing memoirs of Carlos Eire and the religiously themed poetry of Belkis Cuza Malé (widow of Heberto Padilla, Castro’s most famous literary target of repression). Contemporary Cuban writing has gained a fillip recently in the wide popularity of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Leonardo Padura; other writers such as those included in this volume will be new discoveries for many Anglophone readers. Karla Suárez writes realistic narratives of Cuban society through to the “Special Period” of the 1990s after the Soviet collapse. Suárez now lives outside Cuba, as does Zoé Valdés, also included here; Antonio José Ponte and Ena Lucía Portela join Gutiérrez in remaining in Cuba, although both are obviously critical of many aspects of Cuban life and do not endorse the regime, still holding firm with renewed financial infusions from its new geopolitical backer, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Wendy Guerra, born in 1970 and still living in Cuba at this time, should be added to the authors mentioned above. Author of three novels, 2006’s Todos se van (Everyone Leaves, 2012), which caused her to be ostracized in Cuba and is now available in other languages, Nunca fui primera dama (2008, I Was Never First Lady) and perhaps her best work so far, the nonfiction novel Posar desnuda en La Habana. Anaïs Nin en Cuba (2011, Posing Naked in Havana. Anaïs Nin in Cuba). Venezuelan cultural aspects (for instance in their shared love of baseball) resemble those of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. But Venezuela’s continental location and its large size and population make it more advisable to treat under another rubric. Still, in addition to the novelists we include here, authors like Israel Centeno and Rubi Guerra, both born in 1958, enjoy wide popularity in Venezuela. Centeno, author of eight novels, the most recent of which is Bajo las hojas (2010, Under the Leaves), has moved from realist to “postmodern” novels, frequently parodying both subgenres. Some critics see his novels as composing an “Exile cycle,” which for them starts with Exilio en Bowery (1997, Exile in the Bowery), which portrays a New York City as a Lovecraft who grew up in Caracas’ ghettos would see it, and ends with Bajo las hojas, which relates the life of a writer initially exiled in London to undertake an unidentified project that leads to other spectral encounters. Guerra, another “cult” novelist in Venezuela, is the author of El discrete enemigo (2001, The Discreet Enemy), whose eight chapters describe a journalist who is gathering information for a tourist article and winds up enmeshed in a world of drugs, sex, and violence. Guerra, author of six short-story collections and an expert in the genre, has written one of the most respected Venezuelan short novels in recent times, La tarea del testigo (2007, 2012, The Witness’s Task), which imaginatively recreates the last days of the mythical short-form (poetry included) master José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890–1930), who died in Switzerland. But Venezuela, like Ecuador, is perhaps a land of short-story writers, and its best novelists were born in the early 1940s and before. Colombia, far less identified with the Caribbean than its eastern neighbor, does have a fairly sizable Caribbean coastline and, of course, possessed much more when it governed what is now Panama. Of the three major Spanish-speaking nations of the Caribbean considered here, the Dominican Republic has made the most literary news recently. This is because of the lingering effects of the traumatic dictatorship of

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Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, which has made as much of an impact on literature as any dictatorship of the recent past in Latin America, right wing or left wing. The impact of the Trujillato did not just end with Trujillo’s overthrow in 1961, as his more canny and cautious ideological heir, Joaquín Balaguer, managed through both legal and extralegal means to hold onto power, with some interruptions, until 1996. Balaguer, wonderfully portrayed in the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterwork The Feast of the Goat (centered on the complex transcontinental consequences of the Trujillo overthrow), also represented the aftermath of the Trujillato that lingers in the work of Junot Díaz, born several years after the dictator’s overthrow. Still, his novel shows the traumatic persistence of dictatorial power in cultural and family life and argues for new models of masculinity and literary culture to counter those repressive values. Pedro Antonio Valdez, Díaz’s near contemporary, uses the theme of popular music to vitally display the containing tensions and conflicts in a country that, as it emerges into a stable democracy and sees its US Diaspora become more populous and influential, is positioned to make more literary noise in the twenty-first century. Indeed, to this end, Rita Indiana Hernández takes the widening general interest of her generation of Spanish-American writers in popular culture further than most by being a successful merengue singer as well as a novelist. Present Dominican literature also has room for quirkier writers such as Pedro Peix (b. 1952), whose fragmentary short novels from the eighties are collected with his short stories in El amor es el placer de la maldad (2006, Love Is the Pleasure of Malice). Puerto Rican émigré literature is far more noticed in the U.S., even in academia, than Puerto Rican writers who have stayed ‘home’. Perhaps this is because Puerto Ricans in the U.S. can be treated much like other immigrants, contributing to the melting pot, whereas Puerto Rican writers on the island bring to mind the stillunresolved political status of Puerto Rico. As independence is not popular and statehood not viable in the current U.S. political configuration, the island’s anomalous status as an Estado Libre Asociado of the U.S. remains a quandary. Like Cuba if on a far smaller scale, Puerto Rican literature has a certain belletristic, aesthetic heritage (and some notable visitors who buttressed this, like the Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez), of which a writer like Rosario Ferré is arguably, in both genealogical and figurative terms, a legatee. Luis Rafael Sánchez’s work continued this literary tradition in a more vernacular and colloquial vein, while Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá pioneered a sophisticated urban topography in his essays and fiction, and Ana Lydia Vega wrote from a viewpoint of committed feminism and political radicalism. The Puerto Rican writers included here, of a younger generation than these, combine a public mission with a spirit of fun and nuance. Luis López Nieves, as newspaper columnist, university lecturer, and above all novelist, has grounded his fiction in the institutional matrix of Puerto Rico while imaginatively reaching out to the recent and deep past for analogy and example. Mayra Montero (born in Cuba, but living in Puerto Rico since the 1960s) is more opulent and self-reflexive as a writer but like López Nieves is active as a journalist and commentator. Though fundamentally a part of Puerto Rican literary culture, Montero’s subjects—such as her positioning of Haiti as other—are fundamentally Cuban. There are many other younger Puerto

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Rican writers who could be included in this volume, like Mayra Calvani, a fantasy writer, who might be the Chaviano of Puerto Rican literature. Judith Ortiz Cofer has spent most of her life in the U.S. and writes in English, though like Díaz she is widely known in the Spanish-speaking world, one of our criteria for inclusion. Other migrant writers, like Esmeralda Santiago, Miguel Piñero, and the Nuyorican poets, are both born too early and are too essentially a part of U.S. literary culture to be included here. Yet, they have enjoyed a critical reception that our book intends to complement. The Caribbean also has many interstitial and minority cultural spaces: the language and art of the indigenous people is a major theme in Puerto Rican culture, while the proximity to Haiti of the Dominican Republic has led to racial and cultural discrimination of a drastic sort; the African diaspora is also prominent in Cuba, as the poetry of Nicolás Guillén makes clear, but not much of those conditions is thematized in the general chronological demarcation of our novelists. The novelistic and archeological work of Marcio Veloz Maggiolo in the Dominican Republic also shows the continuing impact the effacement of indigenous Taíno culture has on the region’s sense of rupture. The presence of migrant communities such as the Cuban-Chinese testifies to the demographic diversity of the islands, while Montero and Jiménez are but two examples of how Puerto Rico has served as a “third space”, between the U.S. and the Spanish-speaking world. In turn, many of the other islands of the Caribbean were originally colonized by Spain, have many Spanish place-names and surnames, and Spanish has contributed to local hybrid languages such as the Papiamento spoken on the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. One sees why it is a Caribbean critic, the Cuban Ortiz, who coined the term “transculturation” as popularized by the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, which has become so foundational in explaining cultural hybridity in the Americas. All the same, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have very different literary cultures, and this heterogeneity perhaps explains why the Spanish Caribbean does not have a unified image the way its Anglophone and Francophone equivalents do. Regardless of this, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean look to build on their literary strengths in the upcoming decades and, hopefully, to be fully appreciated in the English-speaking world. Nicholas Birns

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Juan Carlos Chirinos (Venezuela, 1967) Regardless of the degree of one’s relationship with literature, when a novel’s title starts with the phrase “the bad boy counts to one hundred,” one will most likely covetously reach out for the tome. Intense curiosity may set in when one learns it is a purloined title: “The good girl counts to one hundred and bows out / The bad girl counts to one hundred and bows out / The poetess counts to one hundred and bows out,” reads the eccentric and visually heightened poetry of Ana Enriqueta Terán, source of Chirinos’s own capricious title. Enigmatic literary innuendos are just the inception of the pressing allure of Chirinos’s first novel, El niño malo cuenta hasta diez y se retira (2010). Originally published in 2004 in Venezuela, El niño malo… was a finalist amongst 203 novels from 18 countries in the XIVth annual awarding of the very prestigious Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize. The 2010 re-print in Spain by the prominent Ediciones Escalera (which is recovering classic Spanish-American novels and criticism) may answer to various circumstances: the current shortage of major printing venues and the animosity towards contemporary literature and literary criticism in Venezuela, a possible aim to reach a new audience, the author’s desire for certain stylistic changes to the text itself, and, perhaps more tantalizing, Chirinos’s move from Venezuela to Spain. Similar to Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez,* Chirinos arrived to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Salamanca and found himself embracing Spain as a new fatherland: “What began in 1997 as an academic ‘excursion’ became a kind of immigration experience and now seems to have turned into a non-disguisable exile,” he says in an interview (Blitzer). Like many expatriates, especially the more adamant ones, Chirinos filters acknowledgements to the homeland throughout his oeuvre, whether these be linguistic markers or obscure references to places only some Venezuelans would likely recognize. The connection is inevitable, yet what seems to be his sense of double belonging to Spain and Venezuela extends beyond national borders to particular cities of residence and spaces of existence. His writing, likewise, extends beyond the duality of fact and fiction to realms of relative exoticism. Besides novels, Chirinos has a profusion of short stories, including “To Almost Say the Same Thing” which was a finalist at the 2009 Juan Rulfo International Contest, and “Homer Zapping,” winner of the XIVth Biennial Literary Contest José Antonio Ramos Sucre. Chirinos has also assembled a collection of historical biographies, ranging from Alexander the Great to Olympia, to Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda and Albert Einstein. Chirinos’s novels, far beyond pursuing the leitmotifs of origin, immigration and unfolded identities, are lyrical treasures that at times read like musical scores, complete with crescendi, riffs and the occasional segue. El niño malo…, Nochebosque (2011, Nightwood), and Gemelas (2013, Twin Girls), are oneiric

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excursions to lands of puzzling fantasies, enfolding chimeras and fictitious realities, of a here and there that transmutes itself on every page. Kafkaesque animals accompany the reader in each novel: dogs, bears, wolves, lions and tropical birds seem to have an eerily intimate relationship with the characters in each of Chirinos’s novels. In Gemelas, of which the novelist has published advances in digital media or spoken in interviews (Roche Rodríguez), a voracious lion feeds on an unsuspecting jogger while an ABBA song continues to play in the victim’s walkman. A picture of the beast in action ends up on the runner’s cell phone, perhaps as an afterthought to the novel’s theme of beauty and death as twin sisters. On an equally unfathomable initial note, the first scene of Nochebosque has a cannibalistic aura which transports the reader to an out-of-body experience that liberates the mind to roam and think: “The less body, the more plenitude, the major contemplation.” These wanderings were already latent in the short story “Reading the Cats” (1997; 2008), where a magician in training fails to maintain the necessary degree of ethics with his clients, and proceeds to seduce them with his readings and predictions. The magician’s session with the exquisite Natalie prematurely dissolves into the reality of the Parapsychology Institute classroom, where his classmates and teacher stare at him as he makes out with a skull thinking it is the object of desire from his mirage. The magician’s instructor acknowledges that he is not quite ready to practice yet, and he then simply steps out of the Institute and into the streets of the city. The story closes with a dedication to don Juan Manuel, the fourteenth-century Spanish nobleman and writer, whose The Book of Count Lucanor and Patronio (1575), one of the earliest prose works in Castilian Spanish, illustrates moral tales based on Spanish and Arabic sources. Patronio is the teacher and the young Count seeks his advice, parallel to the young magician in “Reading the Cats” who desires to follow his instructor’s advice for his test, yet incoherently fails to respect the caveats of the practice. Nochebosque’s intertextuality is not with respect to medieval Spanish texts, but rather with fairy tales. Critics (Arribas) have called this novel a Little Red Riding Hood in the fantastic genre, a terror story that is also a phantasmagoric fable à la Stephen King. Here Paula Sorsky, an aspiring chef, delves deeper and deeper into a world that she likes, yet which terrifies her over and above. She takes a summer childcare job with a family at a chalet on a snowy mountain, on the borders of Saint Guinefort forest. The forest seems to have a life of its own, replete with gothic elements and dark childhood terrors: wolves, forbidden houses, sinuous figures and a quality of doom. Osip, the Dickensian orphan Paula cares for, shares his secret fairy’s ointment with Paula, giving her entry into flights of obscurity. The decadent, and at times hedonistic, journeys are best described through passages from Venezuelan Eugenio Montejo’s poetry, particularly in Terredad, scattered in both Nochebosque and El niño malo…: “In the forest, where it is a sin to speak, to stroll, to not have roots, not have branches, what can a man do? Solitude is not enough to deceive the wind, a door is not built from any skin, nails never work for a bird’s nest. And the wind knows this.” Nochebosque simply is itself; it is a tour de force that exhausts the reader through constant suspense from the very beginning. In yet

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another purloined title, Chirinos plays with and renders homage to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). The U.S. edition of 1937 contained an introduction by T. S. Eliot, who proclaimed that: “To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” The subtle bridge between the epic poetic spirit of the modernist Nightwood and the exquisite fury of Nochebosque allows the reader to transcend linguistic signs and be immersed in the pleasures of sights, sounds and sensations. The possibility of such ephemeral enigmas had, once again, already been established, this time in El niño malo… . Filled with music and film—think Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bette Midler—this earlier novel is a story that the canonical Venezuelan author, critic and promoter of contemporary novelists, José Balza, classified as one of such humor and cruelty that it parallels people’s secret, yet frequent, taste for evil. The bow towards the abandoned fatherland appears through yet another Montejo poem, in which a lost Caracas offers no traces of childhood. Two wanderlust-possessed Venezuelans end up at different times in a snowy village (“The Town”) of a faraway northern country. D. Jota crashes his snowmobile and is saved by a shepherdess named Fanny, who takes him into her home. There he meets Fanny’s grandmother Derdriu, who had likewise taken in another Venezuelan, decades ago— Eugenio, who was Fanny’s estranged grandfather. Derdriu spends her days watching American films and dancing constantly, regardless of what she is occupied with throughout the day. D. Jota is infatuated with Fanny, who is clearly reminiscent of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880) in the Swiss Alps. There seems to be potential for a fleeting romance between the tropical D. Jota and the brawny and independent Fanny, but D. Jota’s delirious intentions and brutal attitude bring devastation to the quiet hamlet. Like the poetess in Terán’s poem, it is D. Jota who epitomizes the bad boy: “I was only an accident, a legendary adventure in that community of woodcutters, another story that Svevo will tell the astonished residents, always incredulous and naïve in ‘The Town.’ I am the bad boy who counts to one hundred and bows out.” In a twisted turn of events, D. Jota abandons an injured Fanny, leaving her to die in the snow, and proceeds to pillage Derdriu’s house, taking a valuable necklace, nude photos of the grandmother circa 1938, and a stack of $1000 bills with him. Although grotesque, D. Jota’s actions are emblematic of the Venezuelan choro, a delinquent or bandit with no remorse—a truly bad boy. As El niño malo… closes, the choro is transported back to the tropics, to his space of drugs, exquisite cadavers and illicit sexual imaginaries. Chirinos’s growing body of works—albeit varied, rich and intense—underlines the writer’s passion for history, literature and scholarly digressions with a large purpose. A key to understanding and fully enjoying his novels and short stories is to seek out the clues to their intertextualities—whether these are stolen titles, direct reproductions, nods at particular writers or ludic disclaimers. Part of Chirinos’s brilliance lies in his humble indebtedness to writers and other cultural figures of interest. When he emotes “I am grateful to all,” he gently inserts himself in the pantheon of his personal literary icons. Elda Stanco

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Works Cited Arribas, Alicia G. “Chirinos convierte el cuento de Caperucita en la novela gótica ‘Nochebosque’.” El Economista.es. 2 October, 2011. Web. Blitzer, Jonathan. “Beyond the Realms of Fiction: An Interview with Juan Carlos Chirinos.” Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature. Web. Chirinos, Juan Carlos. El niño malo cuenta hasta diez y se retira. Caracas: Norma, 2004. —El niño malo cuenta hasta diez y se retira. Madrid: Ediciones Escalera, 2010. —Gemelas. Madrid: Casa de Cartón, 2013. —“Homero haciendo zapping.” Nueva cuentística venezolana: breve inmersión. Hispanoamérica 33.97 (April 2004): 76–8. —“Leerse los gatos.” Confluencia. 23.2 (Spring 2008): 177–80. —Nochebosque. Madrid: Casa de Cartón, 2011. Eliot, T. S. Introduction. Nightwood. By Djuna Barnes. New York: New Directions, 1946. Montejo, Eugenio. Terredad. Barcelona: Sibila Ediciones, 2009. Roche Rodríguez, Michelle. “Juan Carlos Chirinos libera sus lobos.” El Nacional. 24 September 2011. Web. Terán, Ana Enriqueta. The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out: Selected Poems by Ana Enriqueta Terán. Trans. Marcel Smith. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Cuba, 1950) The publication (outside of Cuba) of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy: A Novel in Stories (1988), a book that includes three short novels, Marooned in No-Man’s Land, Nothing to Do and Essence of Me, was the foundational moment of “dirty realism” as a literary style and theme as well as the author’s celebrity. The books that followed it, most of which have attracted academic and especially journalistic attention, make up the Central Havana Cycle (El rey de la Habana [The King of Havana], 1999; Animal tropical, 2000 [Tropical Animal, 2003]; El insaciable hombre araña, 2002 [The Insatiable Spiderman, 2005]; and Carne de Perro [Dog Meat], 2003), not only did not diminish that initial literary surprise, but rather continued to feed it, to the point of reiteration, as I will explain, below. All of these books and even those that followed and preceded them during Gutiérrez’s career are written with a stylistic strength, an absolute absence of modesty, a certain tone of rage that is barely (or not at all) disguised, and a deliberate distancing from the themes and rhetoric that had characterized the Cuban narrative since the Revolution (1959). As with other social and political changes in different places and times in the world and as with other processes of ideological-social reconstruction in transformations like those which took place in Cuba, literature usually accompanies the process from a positive point of view. The narrative of the Cuban Revolution did so with examples like Miguel Cossío Woodward’s Sacchario (1970) and La próxima mujer y el último combate (1971, The Next Woman and the Last Battle), by Manuel Cofiño López. Gutiérrez not only did not add his work to that constructivist national literature, but rather, by ignoring it, he barraged it from within. Far from being “positive role models,” his characters live at the margin of any patriotic discourse, and find joy in surviving in Cuba, more specifically, in Havana, as the Revolution’s truly marginalized. In an unedited interview with this essay’s author, Gutiérrez describes his own process in the following manner; and it is worth reproducing at least three parts of his description, starting with: The Cuba that came to be in 1959 was an extraordinarily heroic Cuba. Full of dignity, patriotism, and pride. I was a player, participant and one among millions of that heroism’s protagonists from the time I was 16. When I quit selling ice cream, I did my military service, and I worked in construction, and I was a journalist. For 26 years I was a journalist. First, in radio and television and later for the National Information Agency; the news organization for Communist Party’s Central Committee. After that, I worked at Bohemia, the Communist Party magazine. That is to say, I was up to my ass in heroism! Up to my ass with being a hero, with being in the trenches with a machete in my hand! I’m a human being, not a computer, and I had the right to get fed up with it, like I got fed up with my wives and got divorced, like I got fed up with a neighbor and told him to go to hell

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and broke off the friendship … I couldn’t take it anymore! It’s by sheer coincidence that I’m living in Cuba’s most populated area—Central Havana—full of violence and aggression like no one could imagine. And I’m beginning to get to know this whole life I had no idea about.

Even if everything Gutiérrez says above finds expression in his novels, in the same interview he affirms that representing his own reality was more complicated: I lived in another world: at conferences, in the Convention Center, I traveled to the Soviet Union, to East Germany, I studied Marxism-Leninism. Living in that neighborhood, things happened in my personal life and I suddenly found myself alone, on the rooftop. I was left with a mix of fury, aggression, and depression. And then, my escapes were sex, promiscuity, alcohol, smoking. I was smoking a lot, to the extent that it was affecting my health, and if I’m not already dead, it’s a fluke, because I also could have gotten AIDS, but luckily, I didn’t ever get sick. For three, four, five years, I lived a double life, one of them as a marginal anti-hero. My salary at Bohemia was the equivalent of the price of 30 eggs. I’m talking about the Special Period: a full-blown crisis. I was the great journalist, the one who made the most money, with a degree from the University of Havana, and if I bought 30 eggs, there went a month’s salary. I had thoughts of suicide. I had a beam up here, and measured out a rope to hang myself with; an internal loneliness, a rage, a terrible disappointment with my life, with my ideas, with what I had done. I felt cheated, and I started to feel sorry for myself.

It is not surprising, then, that Gutiérrez continues to say: My reaction was just that, to lead a double life. At Bohemia I was writing whatever little thing they asked me for, nonsense that I would write off the top of my head because I knew the tricks of the trade well. And at some point I started to write and I wrote the first tale from Dirty Havana Trilogy. I practically didn’t even edit that book. I would make a lot of corrections to each story, but afterwards I didn’t do a final editing of all 60 stories. And they are in chronological order. As soon as I wrote a story, I’d put it in a folder, and then another and another and then another one. And every 15 or 20 days, I’d write a story. I was at this for three years, from ’94 to ’97. Bohemia only came out once a month and I had a lot of time to myself.

With his novels and stories, Gutiérrez became Central Havana’s literary chronicler. With two million inhabitants in the city, Central Havana is the municipal area (one of 15 into which that capital is divided) with the highest population density: it holds 150,000 people, squeezed into aging buildings that go unrestored, with no parks or any social gathering areas, and that has been the theme for other novelists like José Antonio Ponte.* Gutiérrez lives on the highest floor of his building, and that is why his “rooftop” is both a real and symbolic place in which situations from his literature take place. Gutiérrez is also a painter, and his apartment is his studio.

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He has been called the Cuban Henry Miller or “The Bukowski of Havana” by Roberto Bolaño,* because of the thematic excesses of his books, from those linked to sexual activity to drinking. Rum, drugs, and sex abound in inverse proportion to the theme of the scarcity of consumable goods in Cuba. The characters in his stories and novels spend their days (every day) sorting out their lives and finding food, rum, intoxicants, and women. It is a predominantly masculine narrative, that is to say, developed from the Cuban man’s “macho” point of view: he thinks, imagines and exercises his virility as a superior and insurmountable identity. Nevertheless, one of the heirs of the “dirty aesthetic” is a woman, Ena Lucía Portela* and her Cien botellas sobre una pared (2002, One Hundred Bottles on the Wall). And other female writers, like Anna Lidia Vera Serova’s El día de cada día (2006, The Daily Day), never strayed from this approach, which has since become a tradition. What was attractive about Gutiérrez’s literature from the outset was that it symbolized the individual rebel, who didn’t conform to the modes and ways of society, in this case, revolutionary society. And that, after several decades of living with those ways, his fiction developed into a literary tradition and invented another. Instead of singing the Cuban Revolution’s praises, Gutiérrez describes a legendary city (that writers like Alejo Carpentier praised for its beauty and splendor), reduced to shambles by the detritus of abandonment and negligence. With Gutiérrez it is not about not loving Havana, but rather about loving it for all its age and its filth. His originality springs from this and focuses on the Central Havana Cycle, and said cycle ends in 2003 with Dog Meat. With the sixteen tales that make up the novel (or as a novel divided into sixteen sections), Dog Meat is a good summary of that cycle, because it reproduces Havana’s world and the life experiences of the central character (here a writer, without much camouflage) and their different vicissitudes. Between his wife Julia, with whom he breaks up, and his lover Miriam, who finally leaves him, the protagonist is a good mirror of what he takes to be Cuban reality: filthy streets, the end of socialist utopia, corruption. Oddly, the super macho he represents employs a sexual aid. Like the black character in El Rey de la Habana, a doctor has installed a pearl in his sexual organ, which is really “a four centimeter wide stainless steel sphere.” With that aid, which cost him five dollars, the narrator confesses: “I only have to introduce my penis and feel to calculate when the pearl rubs the clitoris. And done. They have one orgasm after the other, become addicted to the pearl, and pursue me. They want to repeat the dose every day and I don’t know where to hide.” If Cuba is no longer the socialist paradise, the character’s sexual paradise is also excessive, to the point that he flees his unexpected success. For readers lacking in ideological empathy for the Cuban Revolution, Gutiérrez comes across as an icon of cultural resistance. At least he hasn’t left for Miami. In fact, his books, though belatedly, are beginning to be published and to circulate in Cuba after their success in Spain. At the same time, for readers who do have an ideological empathy for the historical phenomenon that was the Revolution, Gutiérrez is a rarity of undeniable literary virtues. From a stylistic point of view, in his books we find a Rabelaisian excess, narrated with the exactitude of a Hemingway. And it’s

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because Gutiérrez has mastered a concise, rotund prose, as far as possible from that of Neobaroque master José Lezama Lima (whom Gutiérrez admired and mentions in one of his books, perhaps because Lezama was a loner like himself). Although Dirty Havana Trilogy (which ended up being re-edited into three separate books) is Gutiérrez’s most famous literary work, The King of Havana is probably most representative of “dirty realism.” The trilogy was completely autobiographical, according to the author; the second, a literary invention based upon his observations, starting with the fact that the character is not named “Pedro Juan,” but “Rey.” In this novel Gutiérrez carries out to the extreme the narrative ambition of not stopping without mentioning or describing all of the bodily fluids and their secretions and bowel movements as ways of connecting with the world. Whatever the body absorbs (alcohol and drugs) and whatever the body excretes. An excessive novel, magnificently written, it is both admired and repudiated by different types of readers. With The King of Havana, Gutiérrez reached the zenith of his literary art. The King of Havana is the story of Reynaldo (thus the name), from his poor infancy until his death in a garbage dump. A very dark black man (and in this sense different from the white author), Rey has perforated his penis and placed two pearls to better satisfy women, and seems to have no other life than to go to bed with as many women (and some men) as he can. Those women have very curious names: Fredesbinda (“the queen of fellatio”), Yunisleidi, and he even goes to bed with the neighborhood fool, Elenita. The novel is absolutely explicit in its description of sexual acts. Reynaldo works (when he decides) in the piers, carrying corpses in the cemetery, or in a brewery in which he drinks until passing out. This is undoubtedly Gutiérrez’s novel of “excess” and all that it describes is of unequalled filth. Throughout all of his stories, novels and chronicles, the incidents experienced by the main character—sometimes named Pedro Juan—are habitually the same, the abovementioned sexual exploits, drugs, and rum. Moreover, the writer’s image appears in almost all of the book jacket illustrations (photographs), as an underlining legitimizer of the “truth” in his stories. In this sense, although the turns of events in his novels and stories are numerous and varied, they are repetitive. Sex scenes abound that are devoid of any eroticism, quite to the contrary, these scenes are exacerbated by scatological descriptions. If the Cuban Revolution had foreseen the creation of their “new man” Gutiérrez’s narrative forces this new Cuban to descend from idealized utopia into simple biological nature. In the books that came after the cycle, we can perceive the search for new horizons, themes that are varied though always treated with impudence and audacity. Thus, Nuestro GG en La Habana (2004, Our G.G. in Havana, 2010) plays with the title of the Graham Greene novel, Our Man in Havana, in order to create an ingenious chronicle of the British novelist’s 1955 visit to the island; Melancolía de los leones (2005, The Melancholy of the Lions) is a compilation of very brief works of prose, vignettes rather than short stories; El nido de la serpiente. Memorias del hijo del heladero/ (2006, The Serpent’s Nest. Memoirs of the Ice Cream Man’s Son) was declared a “fictitious” novel from the start; Corazón Mestizo. El delirio de Cuba (2007, Mestizo Heart. Cuba’s Delirium) is a sort of narrative diary of his travels undertaken with the intention of

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getting to know—or to characterize—his compatriots. In 1989 in Cuba he had already published Vivir en el espacio (Living in Space), about space exploration. He published six volumes of poetry, from La realidad rugiendo (1987, Reality Roaring) to Morir en Paris (2008, To Die in Paris). Although invited more than once to clear out of Cuba like many of the uprooted, Gutiérrez has not done so. Central Havana is his world. It’s there that he has his rooftop from where he can view the wider world. It’s there that he has his neighbors, who have been the inspirations for so many of his characters. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez comes from a certain place and time. Obviously, he is not going to betray those. Jorge Ruffinelli

Works Cited Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan. La realidad rugiendo. Pinar del Río: Dirección Provincial de Cultura, 1987. —Vivir en el espacio. La Habana: Editorial Científico-Técnica, 1989. —Trilogía sucia de La Habana. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998. —El Rey de La Habana. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999. —Animal tropical. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000. —Dirty Havana Trilogy. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. —El insaciable hombre araña. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002. —Carne de perro. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003. —Tropical Animal. Trans. Peter Lownds. London: Faber & Faber, 2003. —Nuestro GG en La Habana. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004. —The Insatiable Spider Man. Trans. John King. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. —Melancolía de los leones. Madrid: Odisea Editorial, 2005. —El nido de la serpiente. Memorias del hijo del heladero. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006. —Corazón mestizo. El delirio de Cuba. Barcelona: Planeta, 2007. —Morir en Paris. Madrid: Embajada de España en Cuba/AECID, 2008. —Our G.G. in Havana. Trans. John King. London: Faber & Faber, 2010.

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Rita Indiana Hernández (Dominican Republic, 1977) “At the age of 12 I was convinced that I was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison.” This is the opening sentence of a recent column titled “Letra y música” (Letter and music) that Rita Indiana Hernández wrote in El País’ literary supplement, Babelia. Hernández, a kind of chameleon, is an androgynous six-foot-tall woman and multimedia artist who writes scripts and plays, invents ads, does performances, creates video-art, and sings. She also moves from one place to another: raised in Santo Domingo, she often visited her father who lived in the U.S. For the moment she resides with her girlfriend in San Juan (Puerto Rico). She started publishing poems in underground reviews and wrote some short stories, included in Rumiantes (1998, Ruminators) and Ciencia Succión (2001, Science Suction). In 2000 Hernández distributed an inexpensive edition of her first short novel, La estrategia de Chochueca (“Chochueca’s Strategy”), published in Puerto Rico in 2003 by Isla Negra Editores. Although the island’s cultural establishment completely silenced it, the novel caused an uproar in Dominican Letters. Her second short novel, Papi (2005, Daddy) was launched by the small Puerto Rican publishing house Vertigo. Since 2009 Hernández is more known as the leading voice of her successful and prize-winning electro-merengue-beat band, Rita Indiana & Los Misterios. During the Dominican book fair of 2010, she was invited to perform her songs not to talk about her books, which are not yet translated into English, but are well received and discussed in academia. In 2011 Papi was also published in Santo Domingo by FeriLibro and promoted in Spain by Ediciones Periférica, a reception more and more common for some lesser known authors in The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Although her novelistic work is still in progress, it is a significant example of the way in which some twenty-first century Dominican writers try to innovate their island’s fossilized literary landscape. Hernández as well as Aurora Arias, Rey Emmanuel Andújar, Junot Díaz,* Frank Báez and Juan Dicent, move clearly away from one of the main tendencies in Dominican narrative of the last two decades: the fictionalization, often in very outdated and anecdotic ways, of Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–61), the so called trujillato, and of the “democratic” variant of Balaguer, Trujillo’s ex-minister (1966–78; 1986–96). Hernández’s La estrategia… focuses on space, not on history, and centers on the adventures and wanderings through Santo Domingo of a group of adolescents in the 1990s. But the capital is not evoked in its monuments as emblematic expressions of Trujillian dominicanness. Nor is the emphasis on one particular area, as in many novels by consecrated writer Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, who symbolizes the suffering of the people under the crushing dictatorship by employing the Villa Francisca neighborhood as a microcosm. In her wanderings, Silvia, the protagonist of Hernández’s novel constructs her own erratic city in a new subversive cartography. The insubstantial reason of Silvia’s

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roaming is that she has to recover a sound system, stolen by her friend in a rave party. But this is only a pretext to evoke or remember her chaotic life in an urban context in which violence and disorientation are omnipresent, which is why the novel’s opening lines are so powerful: “They killed someone outside. I could hear the crowd’s shouting and running. Wanting to know something, I also ran./A beer truck dragged a boy leaving the highway covered with viscera and blood. People wanted to hurl themselves off the balconies, they run, ghoulish to witness the execrable handicrafts of death” (13). Silvia doesn’t believe in traditional (Trujillian) values of family or patriarchy. In her wanderings she meets various friends: an evangelist, a homosexual, a cyberspace addict, a sex tourism prostitute, all characters who are almost totally absent in traditional Dominican narrative. The only moments of relative cohesion are found in the friends’ collective trips, parties, sex scenes and their passion for music of groups like Nirvana or Meat Puppets. Significantly the book ends with Silvia’s visit to a homosexual friend, beaten into hospital, a dystopian setting par excellence. The behavior of these “pleasure-seeking-electro-bohemian-Americanized-middleclass-alienated youngsters” is similar to the tribes evoked in Silencios by Karla Suárez* or Mala onda by Alberto Fuguet* (Rivera-Velázquez 213). Many critics associated La estrategia… to Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the X-generation icon (Rodríguez 105–6). Nonetheless, it is a “Défonce Dominicaine” (Dominican trip), as the title of the fragment of the novel translated for the French journal Critique in 2006 emphasizes. The novel has un meneíto dominicano (a Dominican swing), in its contents and sometimes very oral language, and even in its very dirty realist fragments. From the title we are immersed in the national context, since Chochueca was a weird pariah who really existed in Santo Domingo. He would ask families for the clothes of the buried relatives after funerals, and thus Chochueca made the dead walk again. He was an outlier and that’s also the young characters’ strategy. This distant attitude is explained by Hernández as a consequence of Balaguer’s government that left all the young people without dreams, impotent, in an “undead” situation (De Maeseneer Encuentro 154). So the historical demons are still present, but only in the background, as shadows. This can also be observed in her second novel, Papi, written from the perspective of an eight-year-old Dominican girl who is waiting desperately for her father. The gist of this fragmented coming-of-age story is the daughter’s relationship with an elusive father figure, whose absence is compensated by an excess of material wealth. In a hyperbolic and frenetic style Hernández mixes satire, references to a child’s world, science fiction and horror movies. Her papi, always written in lowercase, lives in the U.S. and his wealthy life, supercars, luxurious commodities and mistresses, are based on illegal dealings. When this “Dominican York” is murdered by his “partners,” his daughter doesn’t accept her superhero’s death and becomes a kind of medium who embodies him as the head of a sect. In a surprising twist the last scene is situated (again) in a hospital where the girl visits her mother who recovers from cancer. Hernández states that Papi can be considered an autobiographical exorcism, because her father was killed in the Bronx when she was 12 (De Maeseneer,

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Seis ensayos 171). Duchesne-Winter reads the book as a grotesque application of Guy Debord’s ideas concerning the society of the spectacle, because the girl is subject to commodity fetishism and lives in a fictitious world where paternal love is expressed through consumption. Even papi’s funeral is a show, resembling a performance by a rock-star when the dead body descends from heaven in a helicopter. The book discusses also in a subtle way the novelistic tradition of the dictator novels that count with many eponymous examples in the Dominican Republic (De Maeseneer, Seis ensayos 173–80; Díaz Zambrana). Almost all the well-known characteristics of this genre can be traced in this throwaway patriarch, this simulacrum, this lower-case messiah. Like the characters in the dictator novels, he has a generic name, a low-class background, he is compared to God and to the devil (in its modern version of Friday the 13th’s hero, Jason), he orders the construction of huge buildings, he has a double, and he is very lonely, etcetera. All these traits are transposed from the public to the personal sphere, which is a tendency shared with many other contemporary novelists who deal with authority. Moreover, the book is a reflection on authoritarianism and the cult of icons in a broader sense than a political one. There is a brief mention in Papi of Balaguer’s politics of charity, but it is also about authoritarian structures in families, religious sects, hetero-normative societies, to mention some of the areas Hernández criticizes. Recently, Hernández has announced that she is preparing another novel. Readers of Spanish-American and Latino novels may wonder if she will continue to raise global issues in her irreverent Dominican style, thereby breaking the silence that surrounds her country’s literature written in (Dominican) Spanish. Rita DeMaeseneer

Works Cited De Maeseneer, Rita. Encuentro con la narrativa dominicana contemporánea. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006. —Seis ensayos sobre narrativa dominicana contemporánea. Santo Domingo: Publicaciones del Banco Central, 2011. Díaz Zambrana, Rosana. “¿Una alternativa a la novela del dictador?: paternalismo, nación y posmodernidad en ‘Papi’ de Rita Indiana Hernández.” Sargasso: Literature, Language, Culture 2 (2008–9): 83–92. Duchesne Winter, Juan. “Papi, la profecía, espectáculo e interrupción en Rita Indiana Hernández.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana XXXIV. 67 (primer semestre 2008): 289–309. Hernández, Rita Indiana. Rumiantes. s.l.:s.n., 1998. —Ciencia Succión. Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar/Autorin, 2001. —La estrategia de Chochueca. Santo Domingo and San Juan: Isla Negra Editores, 2003. —Papi. San Juan: Ediciones Vértigo, 2005.

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Rivera-Velázquez, Celiany. “The Importance of Being Rita Indiana-Hernández: WomenCentered Video, Sound, and Performance Interventions within Spanish Caribbean Cultural Studies.” Globalizing Cultural Studies. Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method and Policy. Cameron Mc Carthy et al. (eds) New York: Peter Lang, 2007: 205–28. Rodríguez, Néstor. Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana. México: Siglo XXI Editores, 2005.

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Luis López Nieves (Puerto Rico, 1950) According to Myrna García Calderón, since the 1970s, history, and political and cultural identity issues have been constant topics in Puerto Rican fiction, predominantly in the short story. Luis López Nieves can be placed within the ranks of those who assiduously study and reflect on Puerto Rican history, and like very few of his contemporaries, he has made the fictionalization of those concerns a point of departure for his novels. As a novelist, he has been interested in providing new twists to the discourses and tropes employed by historians. Such conception has positioned him close to the notion of history developed by Hayden White in MetaHistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1975). This is to say, History is a discursive record that narrates the past in order to classify and explain it. However, to do this, historical discourse requires similar structures and strategies than narrative fiction. In this regard, and given his chronology, he is part of the generation of SpanishAmerican novelists who practiced the “New Historical Novel,” but at the same time different from them. Specifically, López Nieves’s ideas about History and historiography have been determined by the particular and “unsatisfying” conditions of his nation’s history. Due to the colonial origins of the island, at one level López Nieves’ fiction reflects on the lack of an epic that portrays a revolutionary and resistive national subjectivity. This dissatisfaction allowed him to develop the notion of “historia trocada” (a “what if ” or alternative history). This approach allowed him to transform wellknown and verifiable historical facts into fiction by changing aspects of them. For that reason, the average reader is caught in reading a novelistic text that is not history, neither a classical historical fiction, but that requires a reinterpretation of history. As an initial example of this novelistic procedure, in 1984, López Nieves published a short novel (his web page calls it a short story) that caused a commotion in Puerto Rico: Seva. Historia de la primera invasión norteamericana de la isla de Puerto Rico ocurrida en mayo de 1898 (Seva: A History of the First American Invasion of the Island of Puerto Rico in May 1898), later published in a Colombian edition. In this novella, López Nieves sends a letter to the Director of the real and influential newspaper Claridad (left-wing and independence supporting). The letter refers to some evidence gathered by Víctor Cabañas, a professor of History, of a first North American military invasion that occurred prior to the historical one in 1898. To demonstrate the historical error the narrator provides a series of documents discovered and brought forth by Prof. Cabañas (letters, maps, a diary, affidavits, photos, and recordings). All the historical methodologies presented in Seva are turned into literary tropes geared for the correction of a historical inaccuracy. The novelist’s use of the epistolary

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technique lends an element of veracity to the other documents reproduced in the story. Among those “discovered” papers is General Nelson Miles’ diary (he was the officer who commanded the invasion of the island in real life) in which he states that the first U.S. invasion happened through the town of Seva, and not Guánica; “Today started invasion of Porto Rico (sic). As expected, we disembarked at the 10:00 hour in the beach town of Seva.” (23). Cabañas documents how the town’s inhabitants repelled the invaders by putting up a heroic fight. After three months of impeding the soldiers’ advance, Miles finds a collaborator in Luis Muñoz Rivera (well-known politician, father of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, the “Architect of the Commonwealth” of Puerto Rico) and with a fresh contingent of soldiers disembarks through the town of Guánica. As an act of revenge, he reaches Seva and proceeds to a war of extermination: “Since it is necessary to erase all trace of the town, I ordered the execution of everyone” (31). In addition, he completely erases the town from history by leveling it. Only one person survives: Ignacio Martínez, who will be found eventually by the professor and will corroborate the incident. The short novel ends with the mysterious disappearance of the professor. Today, the town of Ceiba occupies its space. In real life Ceiba, adding complexity to the fiction, was an important USA military and naval base until 2004. The implication was, in the eye of the uninformed reader, that the military base was constructed over the fictional town of Seva. The above summary serves as a general introduction to how López Nieves approaches his novelistic creations. The most interesting part for novelistic creation comes, however, from the commotion that the fiction generated in the population and on the media. Many people searched for the disappeared town and for the fictional character don Ignacio. Also, diverse sectors of the population, including many intellectuals, demanded from the government clarification on this issue. United Press International and the Associated Press prepared extensive articles for publication. Later, López Nieves had to explain publicly the fictional nature of his creation. The indignation of the population, as well as the international reaction to this short story, which served to bring forth its author, is well documented in the media: “When I published Seva I gained many enemies that wanted my head on a plate. Two individuals, even, invited me to a fistfight. They argued that I have disrespected Puerto Ricanness, because I was playing with history” (“La historia como fuente…” 64). After this success, López Nieves wrote two other novels that also interrupt historical discourses by interjecting fictional elements. In 2005 and 2009, respectively, he wrote the internationally known El corazón de Voltaire (Voltaire’s Heart) and El silencio de Galileo (Galileo’s Silence). El corazón de Voltaire, in addition to history, also deals with national mythologies. In this case, a geneticist from La Sorbonne, Robert Luziers, receives the unusual task from the French government: determining the legitimacy of Voltaire’s heart housed at the National Library. For such purposes, Luziers recruits the help of one of his friends, a specialist in medieval studies, Ysabeau de Vassy. The possibility that the heart may not be the original represents a blow for the French’s national imagination: “Did you know that the legitimacy of Voltaire’s heart, housed in the National Library, has been placed into question? Don’t you think that this is

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scandalous?” (16). As the rest of the novel details, issues of legitimacy or authenticity become important topics in his literary work. The narration is shaped by a direct style followed by multiple email exchanges. This “epistolary” technique is prefigured by his collections of short stories/novels entitled Escribir para Rafa (1987, Writing for Rafa) and La verdadera muerte de Juan Ponce de León (2000, The True Death of Juan Ponce de León). One of the most salient features of El corazón de Voltaire is that it is through a community of researchers interacting through the Internet that a search for the truth is acted upon. On the other hand, the novel reveals the importance of national myths and how governments and powerful institutions invest resources in the creation and maintenance of them. Of course, the characters face powerful obstacles, such as the Catholic Church, that impede their research progress. Through tenacity and the development of intellectual networks, the main character overcomes all the obstacles to “correct” History. However, in the end, the reader is left with a sense of distrust in facing History and its representations. El corazón de Voltaire became an instant success, in one month the novel’s first international print was sold out and has been translated into Icelandic, Polish, and Italian. As indicated above, and as Estelle Irizarry points out, his early fiction did have much to do with Puerto Rico’s history. However, El corazón de Voltaire and El silencio de Galileo represent a development in López Nieves. El silencio…, as does his previous novel, deals with a historical enigma: who invented the telescope, Galileo or his competitors from the Netherlands. El silencio…’s format is also based on emails and the mixing of multiples of discourses (historical, religious, academic, popular, communiqués, diaries). The characters are the same ones from El corazón de Voltaire: Roland de Luziers and Ysabeau de Vassy, and, as in that novel, issues of legitimacy occupy their actions. For the same reason, in El silencio… the narrator/historian will insist on the importance of documenting the historical truth, which in turn forces readers to think about the processes of historiography. Again, the Catholic Church becomes a significant obstacle in the course of discovering the truth. Galileo, like Voltaire and the novel’s protagonists, faced the church’s zeal and power. In both novels, the historian is like a researcher who can never completely exhaust a mystery, and both can be interpreted as documents about solidarity among historians in their search for the truth. Ironically, as López Nieves has argued in interviews, a good narrator is, also, a good liar, and he seems to argue that any historical reality is tainted by the multiple points of view, as in any good literary text. Curiosity and thirst for knowledge are the motors for action, and in both novels, like in Dan Brown’s, López Nieves uses veritable elements of reality combined with fictional ones to generate a form of mystery, but one with a detectivesque twist: History is Mystery. Since 2005, with the publication of El corazón de Voltaire, his interests in the discourses of Puerto Rican historiography have expanded in a significant way to include important historical myths and icons pertaining to European science and philosophy. His novels and shorter fiction alternate between the historical document and the imagined fictional dialogues among the characters. López Nieves’ narrative seduces the readers by inviting them to reconsider the novelties of historiography. We

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become learners and inventors like Galileo, with whose invention “humanity learned to see in another way” (230). Ángel Rivera

Works Cited García Calderón, Myrna. “Seva o la reinvención de la identidad nacional puertorriqueña.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 39 (1994): 199–215. Irizarry, Estelle. “La ‘leyenda urbana’ en la narrativa de Luis López Nieves.” Hispania 86.1 (March 2003): 32–42. López Nieves, Luis. “La historia como fuente de inspiración literaria.” Hispania 181:1 (Mar, 1998): 60–5. —El corazón de Voltaire. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2006. —Seva. Historia de la primera invasión norteamericana de la isla de Puerto Rico ocurrida en mayo de 1898. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2006. —La verdadera muerte de Juan Ponce de León. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2006. —El silencio de Galileo. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2009.

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Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (Venezuela, 1967) Méndez Guédez, along with Juan Carlos Chirinos,* is one amongst the growing ranks of Venezuelan writers who have adopted Spain as their new fatherland. These latest expatriates avow an at times complacent, and at others wistful, experience of Venezuela through novels, short stories and a profusion of distinct writings in Spanish, French, and English. Méndez Guédez’s novels are truly transatlantic extensions, where migrants marvel at changing seasons in Madrid, and travelers map out new European territories while yearning for the sun and warmth of Caracas. Perhaps these experiences have a degree of personal history modeled upon the author’s own itinerant experience between cities and between countries; Méndez Guédez has asserted as much to a degree of autobiography—but of a person he claims is not him. His words appear to simply have a life of their own beyond the text, words that entice the reader like “a juicy steak you cannot stop eating” (“Los vegetarianos”). Upon turning 40, Méndez Guédez admitted to becoming a bit cruel and quite cynical. That scornful attitude marks the spirit of his most recent novel, Chulapos Mambo (2011). Part of his inspiration is derived from “wild” Tom Sharpe and David Lodge books: “I wanted to construct an English-style funny novel; because literature in Spanish is not very appreciative of this genre […] I wanted to create a book to have fun” (“Entrevista a Juan Carlos Méndez”). A story about three rotten and sardonic bastards in a Caribbeanized Madrid (or Madrid-ified Caracas?), this novel borders on reading a literary version of a Guy Ritchie movie script. It is the purely humoristic wing of Tal vez la lluvia (2009, Perhaps the Rain), where the lust for immigration and the oppressive political regimes at play warrant surreptitious actions, such as a false gay marriage. Méndez Guédez’s penchant for crafting such contemptuous denouements is also notable in his short stories, especially in “Bruno’s Bicycle” (2009) and “The City of Sand” (2000). In the first, a neighborhood boy destroys an Italian immigrant family’s new, hard-earned Volkswagen by dumping sugar on its motor. Guilt awakens in him, and after watching De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) on television, he thinks he understands the struggles of the family. The boy falls into a feverish delirium and anonymously offers his own bicycle up for the family’s son, Bruno, while harboring wild desires for his sister. “Bruno’s Bicicle” is the tale of a rogue kid who has an epiphany and attempts to redeem himself, in line with the pícaro attitude from Chulapos and Tal vez…. These novels are extreme extensions from the semi-picaresque Árbol de luna (2000, Moon Tree), refreshingly narrated from a woman’s perspective, and which Méndez Guédez describes as “a rascal who is smart but pretends to be dumb. That is social conditioning […] This theme interests me very much” (“Entrevista…”). Árbol… features a couple that reverses their roles and personalities, pretending to be the opposite of what each one is: sharp or stolid. But such irony and farce is a metamorphosis from

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the sentimental narrative found in previous works such as Una tarde con campanas (2004, An Afternoon with Bells), a novel narrated from the perspective of sensitive José Luis, a young Latin American immigrant boy in Madrid. Una tarde…, he states in another interview, is “a narrative text inhabited by disequilibrium and contrasts, but in which everything manages to stay upright, even though nothing is definitive. A novel about learning and revelations, it possesses a beauty that goes beyond the verbal, that achieves the oneiric and that takes root in its characters and in a cosmovision in which harmony triumphs despite some collapses and sadness” (Girgado). It is indeed a beautiful story in which the experience of immigration gains a very real and very human aura as it is described in the naïve, yet hopeful, language of a child. Most notable in the sentimental vein is El libro de Esther (1999 Esther’s Book). This transatlantic love album is centered on Eleazar (the feeble, love-lorn, 30-something in crisis), Marilyn (the voluptuous, high-school sweetheart and now child-seeking wife), and Esther (the indelible former high-school flame who has fallen off the map). In a montage of times and spaces, the novel narrates the adolescence of the three characters entwined with their present-time plights. Here Méndez Guédez’s select style for elaborating the rituals and passages of adolescence reminds the reader more of Salinger than Sharpe, of a Holden Caufield with the soul of a Lord Byron. Like Holden, Eleazar is an anti-hero whose journey out of childhood and through the predicaments of loss, hypocrisy, and societal expectations, destroys the core immaculateness of love and youthful delights. He is melancholic for everything that was, and he is steeped in a dispirited and tortured existence. When El libro de Esther was first presented in Madrid, at the First Conference of New Hispanic Storytellers organized by Lengua de Trapo Press and the Casa de América, it was called “one of the revelations of the new Latin American narrative” (“Los vegetarianos”). In Venezuela, the novel was entered for the XII Edition of the distinguished Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, and was chosen as one of the finalists amongst 247 novels. Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, identified with the “Junior Boom,” has affirmed Méndez Guédez as one of the gems of the new Hispanic American narrative, while Méndez Guédez’s master, Venezuelan novelist and essayist José Balza, has called him a pure novelist. Critics have seen a resurgence of the nineteenth-century Spanish-American sentimental novel in El libro de Esther. In keeping with a return to this literary tradition, Méndez Guédez’s writing focuses on a delicate, perhaps melancholic and languishing character, while highlighting crusades for impossible love and misanthropic denouements. Eleazar, experiencing a premature mid-life crisis, lusts after former flame Esther, who, the reader soon learns, he has never even kissed once in his life. In the meantime, his wife Marilyn yearns for a child that Eleazar is incapable of conceiving with her. As the marriage crumbles, Eleazar relives his times with Esther. Once Marilyn leaves him, he drops everything on a whim and travels to the Canary Islands seeking clues to Esther’s current whereabouts: “People love strong emotions, anguish, delirium. I suppose that in the midst of the boredom of their lives they like to have something miserable to think about, something terrible to confront” (El libro… 13). It

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is a surprisingly instantaneous reaction, a guttural decision that rocks the susceptible man. Eleazar’s arrival in the Spanish islands during the Carnival season is neither coincidence nor thematic distraction. Carnival provides a space for excess, catharsis and cleansing. As Mikhail Bakhtin illustrates in Rabelais and His World, Carnival is opposed to official culture. In liberating one from dogmas and orders, it permits one to acquire a new mechanism of one’s relationship to man. The upside-down atmosphere of Carnival is a space of change and renewal for Eleazar, who spends days crisscrossing one of the islands, searching for possible signs of Esther. The former darlings do not seem destined to meet again: a series of disengagements and missed messages ends with a hand-written note and Esther’s promise to return the following day to see Eleazar. Yet the next day is too late. Eleazar’s last night on the volcanic island marred by Carnival is a mirage of costumes, ocean and rocks. The end of the novel is an eleventh-hour anxious delirium about a seemingly impossible encounter with Esther. The wistful Eleazar anticipates that he will finally free himself from Esther by fleeing from her after giving her an ocean rock she had requested from him long before—it will be a “scorched rock that should have happened thirteen years ago, this fragrant and wistful rock, menacing and sweet like the sleeping volcanoes of these islands” (188). The end of El libro… marks its highest achievement as Spanish-American sentimental narrative by leaving a disconsolate open end where Eleazar apparently moves on. This end is reminiscent of the appalling (to many), yet open end in Jorge Isaac’s María (1867): “Torn with emotion, I set out at a gallop over the lonely plain, whose vast horizon the night was darkening” (302). María’s Efraín and El libro…’s Eleazar both experience the loss of a first love through a retrospective saturated with a romantic gentleman’s sensibility. Such a nineteenth-century SpanishAmerican notion called for a virtuous sense of masculinity that permitted characters such as Efraín to be compassionate, tender, sympathetic, and even emotional, all the while being cosmopolitan gentlemen. It is the spirit of Efraín that Méndez Guédez captures in Eleazar, whose pickiness with foods and excessive cleanliness cost him the respect of high-school classmates. Eleazar’s inability to engage Esther physically is juxtaposed with the serial sexual conquests of his over-masculinized friends, such as Carlos Jesús (who does seduce Esther, much to Eleazar’s dismay) and those of his abusive boss Miguel Villalba. But beyond the masculine sensibility, El libro… reclaims the cosmopolitan flair of nineteenth-century gentlemen seeking new geographies through books, or what José Balza claims in an interview, that all literature is geography, and that writing is wandering through visible and invisible spaces (Garzón). The works of Méndez Guédez have in recent years turned towards witty violence suggestive of pop culture films. They are boisterous and fetching novels that bring a very welcome—and much needed—breath of fresh air and straightforward fun to Spanish-language novels. Paired with the exquisite sentimentality of his earlier work, Méndez Guédez’s ever-expanding oeuvre is set to affirm its laudable place in the libraries of avid readers and critics alike. Elda Stanco

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Works Cited Anaya Volpini, María. “Entrevista a Juan Carlos Méndez.” Culturama: La revista de información cultural en Internet. 22 November 2011. Web. Garzón, Raquel. “José Balza reúne 40 años de ‘literatura sobre la penumbra’.” El País. 1 November 2004. Web. Girgado, Luis Alonso.“Méndez Guédez: El viajero inverso.” El Correo Gallego, domingo 8 de mayo de 2005. Web. Isaacs, Jorge. María. Trans. Rollo Ogden. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890. Méndez Guédez, Juan Carlos. El libro de Esther. Madrid: Ediciones Lengua de trapo, 1999. —“La ciudad de arena (Acrílico sobre lienzo).” Hispamérica. 33.97 (April 2004): 73–5. —Una tarde con campanas. Madrid: Alianza, 2004. —“La bicicleta de Bruno.” Confluencia. 23.2 (Spring 2008): 188–93. —Tal vez la lluvia. Barcelona: DVD Ediciones, 2009. —Chulapos Mambo. Madrid: Casa de Cartón, 2011. —Árbol de luna. Madrid: Ediciones Lengua de trapo, 2000. Valle, Amir. “Los vegetarianos deberían tener prohibidas las lecturas de novelas.” OtroLunes: Revista Hispanoamericana de Cultura. 4.15 (November 2010). Web.

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Mayra Montero (Cuba, 1952) Currently among the most important contemporary writers in the Hispanic Caribbean, Puerto Rico resident Mayra Montero’s literary work has been internationally recognized. For example, in the year 2000 she won Spain’s prestigious Vertical Smile award with Púrpura profundo (2000, Deep Purple, 2003). Her second novel, La trenza de la hermosa luna (1987, The Braid of the Beautiful Moon) was a finalist for the Herralde Novel Award, one of Europe’s most important literary awards. Also, her novels, La última noche que pasé contigo (1991, The Last Night I Spent With You 2000), Del rojo de su sombra (1992, The Red of his Shadow 2001), Tú, la oscuridad (1995, In the Palm of Darkness 1997), Como un mensajero tuyo (1998, The Messenger 1999), El capitán de los dormidos (2002, Captain of the Sleepers 2005), and Son de almendra (2005, Dancing to “Almendra” 2007) have been translated into English by Edith Grossman. In addition, her work has been reviewed positively and studied in many academic journals and popular newspapers. One can argue that her novels represent a systematic effort to understand the Caribbean as a region with a set of common, but not homogeneous, traits and cultural practices. In other words, representative novels like The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm …, and Dancing… can be read as an invitation to read Caribbean texts by employing a polyphonic incorporation of voices similar to the spiritual possession that occurs in Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions. In that sense Montero, like one of the characters in The Red of His Shadow, makes “an effort to understand the world” (173). Such effort is produced in consonance with a travel narrative leading to a pan-Caribbean experience. As the author explains regarding The Last Night …: “Yes, I think that it is my most ‘pan-Caribbean’ novel. The notion of the ‘island which repeats itself ’ is very deeply rooted in this novel, as is the notion of “connected islands” and of sensualities connected by the sea, which is our Caribbean Sea” (Prieto). The novel The Red of His Shadow follows the same principle. The Red… narrates a tragic story about one of the many gagá troupes that travel through the Dominican Republic during Holy Week. That tradition is a legacy of the multitude of Haitians who crossed the border to become workers in Dominican sugar cane fields, bringing with them their culture and customs that end up informing Dominican culture. Zulé, the priestess or mambo of the gagá, is the novel’s main character. Her job is to ensure that the gagá travels successfully through the many sugar cane fields in the vicinity of La Romana. The complication lies in that the owner of another gagá, Similá Bolosse, is searching for either an alliance or war with Zulé’s gagá. Similá, a former tonton-macoute, is in collaboration with the area’s drug lords and is attempting to guarantee a safe route for drug trafficking. Zulé and Similá will be also entangled in a steamy sexual relationship framed by their religious practices.

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According to Mario Cesario, the travel narrative that structures the novel offers new possibilities, especially for Zulé: “This ‘stuff ’ of travel and writing bring about the possibility of a playful passage (an entering and exiting) into the (un)known world. [...] In this respect, travel and writing are similar practices structurally situated between self, other, and discovery, the last of these constructs understood as the production of a certain knowledge, the opening up of a practical and/or theoretical space in which the self is recreated and repositioned in a new configuration” (100–1). The travel and voodoo contexts not only empower Zulé, but also allow her to develop a certain kind of knowledge that brings her some form of liberation. Myrna García-Calderón, in her essay about The Last Night…, comments that in Montero’s characters exists a desire for knowledge combined with the evolution of a feminine identity developed through eroticism and travel experiences. While following the character’s traveling, García-Calderón explains, the reader is faced with a narrative structure that deconstructs discriminatory practices against women. In spite of the violence that the characters experience, one must read those experiences in the context of eroticism, which according to Georges Bataille’s well-known definition, is assenting to life up to the point of death. In this case, traveling and the erotic are connected with feminine identities as in many of her novels. Following the structure of travel narratives, Montero’s novels can be read as an intersection where lives connect intimately and relate to a larger cultural landscape that interacts with an Afro-Caribbean world. The Red… represents an invitation to read Caribbean texts by learning to decode their multiple and rich cultures. A novel such as The Red… transports readers to such cultural intersections, to become the Other when the reading gaze descends over the text. It is in this process where readers learn to coexist with, and to encounter, the multiple voices that one must take into consideration when attempting to understand the Caribbean as a region. The text is thus understood as a magical space where an epiphany occurs: The distance between the one who observes and the one who is observed is blurred. This can only occur if readers are willing to listen attentively to the voice of an Other who encompasses the multiethnic Caribbean experiences. In the Palm… is another Montero novel that represents a systematic exploration of Caribbean music, flora, fauna, ethnicity, and travel narratives that contribute to evolving theorizations of the region. As such In the Palm… belongs to a tradition started by novelists like Alejo Carpentier. Following Carpentier, Montero interprets Caribbean subjectivities by reproducing musical and religious experimentation. In the Palm… is based on the literary strategy denominated as “rhetoric of silence,” with the contradictory intention of giving voice to the suppressed Other. Thierry Adrien becomes one of the most important characters, and it is through his silence and religion that the novel offers a voice to a Haitian subject. Similarly, although the narration is about the decline of amphibian species in the Caribbean, the syncretic beliefs of its practitioners become important. In the novel, scientists cannot explain the catastrophic disappearance of various species of amphibians all over the world, including the “blood frog” (grenouille du sang) pursued by Victor and Thierry. Victor is an American scientist who is determined to find the mysterious frog in the

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area of the bloody Mont de Enfants Perdus, littered with corpses, the work of Haitian macoutes (thugs). Significantly, Thierry’s father was also a hunter, but his quarry was another species: the wandering packs of the living dead (zombies). The rich and tragic tales of both men inform their obsessive search for love and knowledge in other cultures. In an article on Carpentier, Mercedes López-Baralt explains that many of his characters fail in their quest for knowledge: “[…] none of them opened a space that could give a voice to the Other. They did not find the other because they did not listen to him” (89). Precisely, by refusing to silence the Other’s voice, Montero structures her novels. The representation of voodoo practices in In the Palm… works together with the rhetoric of silence as a strategy that refers to the characterization of a Caribbean subjectivity. Thierry describes voodoo ceremonies, thus inviting the reader to become engaged in a decoding process, to be positioned within the symbolic order presented. Thus, Thierry incorporates the voices of those who are in danger of being obliterated: “The first time they told me that story I was very little, but the first thing I asked was what had happened to the woman carrying the sack of bottles. That’s a defect of mine when people tell me something I always keep track of the ones in the background, the ones who disappear for no reason, the forgotten ones” (12). For that reason, Thierry respects all forms of life and adores what is sacred in them; their love stories, interests, and sorrows are the elements linking them. For him, saving the life of the white scientist is teaching him about a new human perspective based on tradition and spirituality. Victor, the researcher, summarizes this when he says: “What you love, he said, you must respect, and the principle of all love is memory. I could commit his words to memory, and he advised me to learn them, but repeating them without the authorization of the “mysteries” brought severe punishment. Since he hadn’t been able to save Papa Crapaud’s life, perhaps now, after so many years, he could save the life of another frog hunter.” (74). As a compensational device for the past silencing of the Haitian Other, and in spite of all the violence surrounding the characters, the novel’s last chapter is narrated by Thierry, who repeats the prayer that mirrors the growth of the two main characters: “I will see everyone I’ve been waiting for, probably everyone who loved me, I will stretch out my arms to them and speak to them slowly so they’ll understand: ‘You, darkness, enfolding the spirit of those who ignore your glory’ […] Then they will show me the light” (181). At the end, the light of understanding shuns all darkness by learning to listen to the Other. This understanding refers to a theorization based on the recognition of the multiethnic experience of the Caribbean, and requires that those reading the Caribbean abandon the automatization of culture and language to be able to look deeply and comprehend the Black and Haitian experiences. Dancing to Almendra is an equally remarkable novel, whose plot takes place in 1950s Havana. Not only is political turmoil looming over the island, but the violent actions of the Mafia frame the action. A political revolution is about to take place at the same time that Italian and Jewish Mafiosi fight for a piece of the wealth the Island is producing. Among the characters, Joaquín, the novice journalist specialized in show business, stands out. He is in love with Yolanda, a beautiful mulatto woman born in

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a circus who had lost an arm during a performance. Roderico, another character, is the director of a variety show at the Tropicana. His face is deformed by leprosy, and is known for his ambiguous sexual practices. Dancing… starts with the symbolic death of a hippopotamus killed by machine gun at the zoo. The message is meant for the fat Mafioso Umberto Anastasia, as a warning to stay out of Cuba, whose Mafia will not accept any newcomers. Joaquín deciphers the message thanks to the cues that a zookeeper provides him. Like Joaquín, the reader will try, also, to unravel the mystery. In this novel, all the mutilated or deformed characters are exceptional and essential to the narration, their bodies becoming a form of discourse that requires attention and interpretation. If the body is accepted as a marker of identity, then issues of the self will be shaped by mutilation or deformity. This form of absence shapes the novel and our understanding of it. In that sense, it would be easy to comprehend why Joaquín is obsessed with Yolanda’s enigma: “I saw her sleeve pinned up at the elbow and understood: there was no hand or forearm or elbow, what the hell was this? I was hypnotized and looked at her cleavage to become even more hypnotized [...]” (39). In this case, as in many of Montero’s novels, the mutilated body and eroticism are connected. In addition to the topics mentioned above, Dancing… presents a zoomorphic treatment of its characters. The zoo becomes an important metaphor: “A long chain of blood. That’s what the zoo is. And very often, life.” (3). In other words, society can exhibit the violence we see in nature, but amplified by our own social constructions. It is the Mafia and the government of Fulgencio Batista who will exert violence over the Cuban people. As in her other novels, Dancing… relies on Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs. For example, Roderico is directly connected to Saint Lazarus or Babalú Ayé: “I do not know English but I’m not that stupid, and when I heard her say ‘leprosy’ in English I thought of St. Lazarus, of the sick people I’d seen around the sanctuary. I thought it was a beggar’s disease.” (87). Roderico is sincerely interested in Yolanda’s wellbeing. Both are mutilated or deformed, and those traits are the source of compassion and loving kindness between them. This may be translated as paying attention to the needs of a community that has been shattered. After all, Santería requires an active collaboration from its believers. The image of Babalú Ayé is important not only because Lazarus resurrects but because he identifies with those who are marginalized, sick, or in trouble. He represents the responsibility towards the Other. This, in turn, will be interpreted as a search for a community. Evidently, the Mafia and the corrupt government form closed and violent societies. Everything outside of it is to be instrumental or destroyed. Challenged by that, Dancing… questions the nature of being in community: “And at that moment, surrounded by those self-glorifying [Grossman translated “seres flotantes” as “selfglorifying beings,” when “flotantes” implies instability and lack of belonging] and to a point inexplicable creatures, I began to ask myself what I was doing there, but not only there, in the house of Juan Bulgado, his wife, and his mother-in-law, but here, in this country and this city, working for a paper where I was allowed to interview only comedians and whores.” (34). Facing the question about which kind of community

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one must have access to, the novel proposes one in opposition to any fascist or criminal model. These three representative examples of Montero’s fiction, In the Palm of Darkness, The Red of His Shadow, and Dancing to Almendra, stand for the creation of a community with an ethical horizon: one that can respond for the wellbeing of others, based on the will and desire of being together, in spite of the gaps and interruptions of identities. Here, the wish for a community includes those who are abject, deformed, and different, a community based on a non-articulated-association, simply constructed on the wish of togetherness. What all the characters have in common is also a search for justice and truth, a desire of inclusion. Mayra Montero’s novels are a proposal against conservative ideologies, hard identities, and the closure of communities that may lead to the exclusion of others and to fascist political practices. Reading her novels, like studying cultural practices, requires compassion, an open imagination, deep attention, and loving kindness. The effect is one of invocation and displacement. As in Santería, it would be similar to requesting readers to allow the text to possess them so that a transformation can occur, a transformation that would allow the reader to become one with the Caribbean Other. Ángel Rivera

Works Cited Cesareo, Mario. “When the Subaltern Travels: Slave Narrative and Testimonial Erasure in the Contact Zone.” Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo (eds). New York: Palgrave, 2001. 99–134. García Calderón, Myrna. “La última noche que pasé contigo y el discurso caribeño.” South Eastern Latin Americanist 38.2 (Fall 1994). 26–34. López Baralt, Mercedes. “Los pasos encontrados de Levi-Strauss y Alejo Carpentier: Literatura y antropología en el siglo veinte.” La Revista del Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y del Caribe 7 (July-December 1988). 81–92. Montero, Mayra. Dancing to Almendra. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. —In the Palm of Darkness. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper and Collins,1997. —The Red of His Shadow. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper and Collins, 2001. Prieto, José Manual. “Mayra Montero.” Bomb 70 (Winter 2000). Web.

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Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Cuba, 1955) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the most internationally successful Cuban novelist of the revolutionary era and responsible for renovating the Cuban detective narrative in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though most widely known for his police fiction and for the creation of its charismatic protagonist, Lieutenant Mario Conde, Padura has also written highly regarded historical novels and, through his journalism and criticism, made a significant contribution to the cultural record of the contemporary Cuban scene. By awarding him the National Prize for Literature in 2012, the Cuban Ministry of Culture has officially recognized his status as one of the greatest novelists in the country’s history. A native of Mantilla, the southernmost suburb of Havana, Padura remains living in the house where he was born in 1955, and his work is redolent with memories of a Catholic childhood spent in the quasi-rural hinterland of the Cuban metropolis. His novels draw heavily on his own experience of growing up in the rapidly changing environment of revolutionary Cuba and provide a valuable subjective experience of a unique socialist experiment in the late twentieth century. His reflections on the injustices and failings of Soviet socialism, and his own personal disillusionment with it, are often melancholic and deliver at times bitter criticisms of the Cuban revolutionary regime, though in a sufficiently sophisticated manner that has meant he avoided censure and which permitted him to remain within the island, where he reached a cult status among the population. Padura’s ability to write at the edge of the permissible and in a way that appeals to audiences both inside and outside the island has helped to extend the boundaries of artistic freedom and he is among a number of contemporary artists who took personal risks in the early 1990s in order to make the creative space which today’s artists enjoy. Throughout his career he has written on the cultural life and cultural history of Cuba and has traveled the entire island recording the history and rituals of local cultural traditions. His academic ability is evident in his novels, which are meticulously researched and therefore marked by a verisimilitude often lacking in many contemporary Cuban novels, particularly of the detective genre. Padura studied Philology at the University of Havana and graduated in 1980 from whence he started a career as a journalist, critic, and essayist. He worked initially at the cultural magazine El Cayman Barbudo until 1983, when he was censored for having written an article on Catholicism, an experience that inspired a scene in his first detective novel Mascaras (1991). Ironically, his punishment was to be removed from El Cayman and transferred to the much larger circulation youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde for which he worked until 1989. While at Juventud he was sent as a correspondent to the war in Angola, an experience that shook his faith both in the revolution and in human nature, themes that again find their way into his fictional work. He went on to become managing editor of the cultural magazine La Gaceta de

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Cuba (1989–95) and editor-in-chief of the international journal of crime fiction Crime and Punishment (1994–5). In addition to his novels, he has written numerous screenplays for films and has collaborated with international directors. He has received many awards both at home and internationally, the most important of which in his early career was the International Novel Prize “Café Gijón” in Spain in 1995 for his detective novel Mascaras. This award included a publication deal with the Barcelona publisher Tusquets, who have since published most of his novels in their first Spanishlanguage edition. In 2010 he was awarded the Roger Caillois prize in France for El hombre que amaba a los Perros and he is a Knight Order of Letters of the Italian Republic and the Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. In 2012 the Cuban establishment finally recognized Padura’s achievement when he was awarded the National Prize for Literature, an event that should not be underestimated as it amounts to an official acknowledgement not only of his talent but also of the veracity of his vision regarding the errors that were committed in the revolutionary past. His novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles have been translated into 16 languages. His first novel Fiebre de caballos, published in 1988, is a love story among youths sent to a school in the countryside and is little read outside the island. It is for his detective novels that he is best known, the first four of which form a tetralogy entitled Las cuatro estaciones. These were published between 1991 and 1998 in Spanish and later in English, under different titles, by the London publisher Bitter Lemon Press. The following list provides the English language title and date of publication in brackets after the original Spanish: Pasado perfecto (Havana Blue, 2007), 1991; Vientos de cuaresma (Havana Gold, 2008), 1994; Mascaras (Havana Red, 2005), 1997, and Paisaje de otoño (Havana Black, 2006), 1998. These novels are set respectively in winter, spring, summer and autumn of the momentous year of 1989 when the Socialist bloc of Eastern Europe began to collapse. Together, the novels can be read as an allegorical treatise on the ills of a system that promised much but delivered little, other than disappointment, corruption and irony. Padura has published three subsequent books featuring Mario Conde. Two of these are the novellas La Cola del serpiente (2000) and Adiós Hemingway (2002), which was actually published first in Portuguese in 2001. The latter became Padura’s first book to be translated into English in 2005 and published by Canongate in the UK. Finally, the novel La neblina del ayer (2006), was published as Havana Fever in the UK by Bitter Lemon Press in 2007. In 2012, Padura was working on a further Conde novel concerning the artist Rembrandt provisionally entitled Herejes and which he described as a historical detective novel in “three periods, three personalities and three languages” (EFE, 2012), as such it evidently draws upon his experience of writing two other accomplished historical novels: La novela de mi vida (2001) and El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009) both of which provide detailed and well-researched biographies of historical figures. In the case of La novela de mi vida, Padura provides an examination of the life of the early nineteenth Century Cuban romantic poet José María Heredia, in which he relates the themes of exile and freemasonry to the formation of Cuban nationalist

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sentiment and life in contemporary Cuba. El hombre que amaba a los perros deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramón Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is a highly accomplished work and the result of more than five years of research. The novel attracted a great deal of publicity, mainly because of its political theme. The main argument is that Joseph Stalin betrayed socialism and destroyed the hope of creating a utopian society in the twentieth century leaving open the possibility that such a society might still be possible in the twenty-first. In many ways El hombre que amaba a los perros is a condensation of a theme that runs through Padura’s entire oeuvre, namely an attempt to understand the failings and ultimate collapse of Soviet socialism from the highly subjective standpoint of an individual who had been educated to see it as the perfect system but who lives to see it disintegrate around him. Indeed, his first detective series can be read as a catharsis, relating, through the travails of the lonely policeman Mario Conde, the existential angst this tragedy engendered. Until Padura began writing detective novels, the genre in Cuba was a medium through which an attempt had been made at inculcating in the masses the correct modes of behavior in a socialist society. Understandably, as writers struggled to marry the exigencies of this didactic task with the need to tell a thrilling tale, the quality of the massive output in novels, short stories, radio plays and TV serials was variable to say the least. Borrowing heavily from similar formulas adopted in the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, the Cuban genre had some successes but these were outstanding in the main because they shone against a mass of mediocrity. All too often anodyne policemen chased ‘evil’ CIA infiltrators and sympathizers in hackneyed plots that held little suspense. These failings were noted by Padura himself in critical articles published at the time. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the real world that sustained this fictional counterpart disappeared, and the way was clear for a revitalization of the genre. In stepped Padura with his four novels Las cuatro estaciones. Just as in the U.S. during the 1930s, when Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective story from the genteel drawing room mysteries that had been popular in the prosperous 1920s into the hard-boiled thrillers more befitting the gangster age, Padura effected a similar genre shift in Cuba as the Socialist world collapsed. Instead of being a family man with an impeccable socialist past, Padura’s Lieutenant Conde is a divorcee and a drinker with a heavy sense of irony who, instead of chasing CIA spies and fifth columnists, tracks down corrupt officials in a Havana of crumbling buildings, street girls, and shortages. Each of the novels in the series deals with a different theme. Pasado perfecto has for its villain a hitherto highly respected Communist Party official, who turns out to be a corrupt egotist planning an exit from the island with booty of hard currency stolen from the state. In Vientos de Cuaresma Padura bases the story in a high school and deals with the nation’s youth and youth subcultures—including the taboo subject of marijuana. Mascaras, the third in the series, is deceptively complex. On one level it is a well-executed whodunit? about the murder of a transvestite in a Havana Park, on another it is an examination of Cuban attitudes towards homosexuality and a revisiting of themes first aired publicly by the 1993 Oscar-nominated film Fresa y

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chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)—namely the persecution of Cuban artists and writers in the early years of the revolution because they were homosexuals. As the title (Mascaras—Masks) implies, there is a recurrent theme that deals with hypocrisy, both of officialdom as well as in daily life in Cuba, a theme familiar to those who follow Cuban culture closely, but a surprise to those who have a stereotypical view of the island. The final novel in the series Paisaje de otoño concerns the theme of exile and return and the relationship with the community in Florida. It also contains a final scene where metaphorically in October (coinciding chronologically with the collapse of the Berlin Wall) a hurricane is about to hit Havana with, we are told, potentially catastrophic consequences. For those on the ideological extremes of either the Left, who might have an uncritical support for the revolution, or the Right, whose tendency is to attack the revolution from a position often of ignorance, Padura’s work is particularly challenging. It is evident that his is a critical voice from within. At times the sarcasm and behavior of his policemen indicate an almost heretical attitude. Yet Padura remains in Cuba and is now officially regarded as one of the nation’s greatest authors. His presence in the island and his novels are thus a great achievement because they illustrate that Cuban socialism is not as repressive as its enemies claim it to be, while at the same time showing that Cuba is perhaps not as perfect as some of its friends might want people to believe. The Havana of Padura’s tetralogy is a heterogeneous place, where the macro politics of the Cold War, the U.S. embargo and the confrontation with the U.S. are not explicitly mentioned but brood nevertheless ominously behind the text where the characteristic scarcities and contradictions are ever present. Padura’s fictional reality in these novels is thus carefully nuanced and not easily bracketed into any ideological point of view. Following his international success and having won both critical acclaim and a huge public following in Cuba, by the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century Padura was enjoying the most freedom to write that he had ever experienced. That, coupled with the more open and relaxed era of the Presidency of Raúl Castro, enabled him to publish his most explicitly political novel to date: El hombre que amaba a los perros, a novel so well-received that it won him a publishing deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux that will make it his first novel to be published in English in the U.S. in 2013. In this novel, he draws upon his taste for intrigue, murder. and the stories of real people and includes a treatise addressing a central argument within the international left—the conflict between the conceptions of Stalin and Trotsky because the central story recreates the preparation and murder in Mexico of Leon Trotsky at the hands of the Catalan communist agent of Stalin, Ramón Mercader. This is not just something that has interested historians, as evidenced by the ever-increasing literature on the subject, but writers and novelists (e.g. Jorge Semprún) and filmmakers (e.g. The Assassination of Trotsky by Joseph Losey, 1971). In addition the motif of exile that is touched upon in his detective novels and given central space in La novela de mi vida is revisited here in the figure of Trotsky, who, having been expelled by Stalin from the Soviet Union finds temporary shelters in several countries, Turkey, France, Norway finally ending up in Mexico, where he meets his grisly end in 1940. This is a novel of

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dark conspiracies, of an assassin with multiple identities, of unexpected betrayals and numerous twists of plot. In reality, there are still many unexplored areas and questions surrounding the true history of Mercader, but in this novel they vanish. Padura respects the known facts of history but has enriched them with his own imagination and turned the characters into psychologically complex characters, providing voices and interiority in order to explain and extrapolate on the motives and psychology of Stalin. The historical canvas is drawn accurately and provides an overarching narrative in what is a complex and carefully constructed novel. It is in fact an intersected weaving of three separate books. The first is the story of Trotsky, told in the third person from his moment in internal exile in Alma Ata to his death in Mexico. This part resembles a typical biography and is obviously drawn extremely accurately from research. The second thread is also told in the third person but with much more use of dialogue and characterization. This is the story of Mercader from his time in the Spanish Civil War through to his recruitment and training as an agent and assassin by Stalin’s secret service and his subsequent murder of Trotsky. This is a kind of “faction” based upon historical evidence but embellished by the author to bring the characters to life. The third thread is a novel written in the first person as a variant of the “manuscript found.” Daniel, a Cuban writer, has released a manuscript written by his friend Ivan, now deceased, that is the story provided to him by an old man who went by the name of Jaime López, but who in reality was Ramón Mercader whom Ivan met in his dying years as a secret exile in Cuba. The resulting text, with abundant notes by Ivan, including his research into history books and his talks with Mercader, is in the end the complete work. Thus Padura’s intertextuality resurfaces, as in Don Quixote, the story becomes a web of different texts, perspectives and sources, and even becomes at times self-referential. This narrative approach allows three planes on which Padura deals with alternating themes: in Trotsky’s flight there is a huge presence of minute historical data that provides for his Cuban audience a great deal of information about a figure that has been very poorly represented hitherto in the island (for perhaps obvious political reasons). In the story of Mercader there is a great deal concerning Soviet espionage and the endless dissident purges ordered by Stalin in which the great tragedy of twentieth-century Socialism is explained, and finally, in the “novel of Ivan Cárdenas,” we have the story of the life of a young Cuban who comes to realize the perversion of the Communist utopia by the murderous character of Stalin. At the same time he learns to better understand his own history and that of Castro’s Cuba. This is the most symbolic and representative of the three texts and includes such metaphors as the collapse of the roof of Ivan’s house causing his death. This is a rich and the complex novel, not only because it so carefully reconstructs and explains the events that led to the death of Trotsky, but because in the character of Ivan, a product of the socialist education and system of Cuba, the author has created a moral consciousness that grows and develops within the narrative and provides a series of reflections on the concepts of artistic freedom, homophobia, racism, oppression, and genocide that have become the great myths of the twentieth century. The balance between these philosophical intentions and the narrative is finely struck,

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and the finesse with which the psychological profiles are drawn of even secondary characters, provides a density and richness seldom found in contemporary fiction. Any of the thematic clusters could be a novel in its own right, but in particular the story of Ivan, unfolding as it does with such a slow and precise pace and providing such depth, is truly an admirable piece of narrative. Achieving these effects is only possible when the writer has a varied and precise language and a mastery of idiomatic registers and resources such as free indirect style. In a sense therefore, Padura exemplifies the maturity of Cuban socialism in that it has been able to produce an author of such ability and education (his influences are wide-ranging—from Shakespeare to Salinger, Maupassant to Montalban, Mozart to McCartney) who is able to create a credible fictional Cuban world that is recognizable to visitors and Cubans alike and which is relevant to the current era. Some Cuban politicians clearly feel uncomfortable with him, but this is perhaps his greatest virtue because it makes his precisely the kind of popular literature that Antonio Gramsci called for. True art, said Gramsci, is about depicting life as it is lived now—whereas politics is always about some great future that is going to be. For that reason, he explained, the politician would always be at loggerheads with the artist. Padura is such an artist. He makes the reader sit up and think, using fiction not to propagandize but to philosophize. His novels might best be described as morality tales for the postSoviet era. Stephen Wilkinson

Works Cited EFE. 2012, 27 November “Leonardo Padura alerta sobre el deterioro de la creación novelística en Cuba.” Web. Padura Fuentes, Leonardo. Fiebre de caballos. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1988. —Pasado perfecto. Guadalajara, Mexico: EDUG, 1991. —Vientos de cuaresma. Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1994. —Máscaras. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1997. —Paisaje de otoño. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1998. —La cola de la serpiente. In Paco I. Taibo II et al. La Banda dei Cuatro. Milan: Tropea Editore, 2000. —La novela de mi vida. Santo Domingo: Edición Premio, Casa de Teatro, 2001. —Adiós, Hemingway. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2002. —La neblina del ayer. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2005. —El hombre que amaba a los perros. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2009.

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Antonio José Ponte (Cuba, 1964) Antonio José Ponte belongs to a generation of Cuban writers born after 1959 who began to publish and travel abroad in the 1990s during the so-called Special Period. This was a time when new laws were enacted in Cuba in response to the economic crisis unleashed by the end of Soviet subsidies, loosening decades of close control over Cuban authors (Whitfield Cuban Currency). An engineer by training, he published at first poetry and co-edited with Víctor Fowler an anthology of poetry, Retrato de grupo (1989, Group Portrait). In subsequent books Ponte wrote incisive essays on Cuban poets who had been forgotten or become ostracized during the 1970s, such as Virgilio Piñera (La lengua de Virgilio, 1993, [Virgilio’s Tongue]), José Lezama Lima, and the Orígenes group poets, and including the modernista poets Julián del Casal and José Martí (El libro perdido de los origenistas, 2002 [The Lost Book of the Origenistas]). Another fictionalized essay, Las comidas profundas (1997, [Profound Meals]) took the absence of food as a metaphor to reflect on Cuban culture. From the late 1990s on, Ponte published a number of short stories with small publishers in France or in Spain, to avoid tight editorial control in Cuba (two collections, In the Cold of the Malecon (2000) and Tales from the Cuban Empire (2002) are available in English). They were distinct from other Cuban writers who opted for genre fiction or “dirty realism,” like Leonardo Padura Fuentes* and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.* Ponte’s short stories are situated in no particular place, with only oblique references to a national space, as Esther Whitfield points out (“Prólogo”), and their characters belong to “displaced tribes,” experiencing events in uncanny settings (Ponte Un arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos 41). His first novel Contrabando de sombras (2002, The Smuggling in Shadows) was followed in 2007 by La fiesta vigilada (The Closely-Guarded Party), again a hybrid between an essay and a novel. His most recent publication to date is a book-length essay on the uses of new media in Cuba’s contemporary intellectual sphere, Villa Marista en plata. Arte, política, nuevas tecnologías (2011, Villa Marista in Silver. Art, Politics, New Technologies). While his preferred form of writing is the essay, Ponte’s voice is a distinctly literary one, his writing rich with intertextual references and formally complex. His engagement in his essays, poems and fiction with urban spaces and cultural memory has anchored his literary voice and has put him at the forefront also of discussions on urbanism and civil society. Contrabando takes up several themes of Ponte’s short fiction and essays. One of them is the fascination with “impossible places,” such as the cemetery, that are haunted with premonitions, and where memories of the dead and the living intermingle. A great portion of the novel revolves around the protagonist Vladimir’s efforts to find out who broke into his apartment, destroyed his books and painted the word maricón (fag) on his walls. Fernando Ortiz’s partially rescued Historia de una pelea cubana

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contra los demonios (1959, History of a Cuban Struggle against Demons), offers a fractional, if uncanny explanation: it references the only auto-da-fé transpired in Cuba during colonial times, when 16 homosexuals were condemned by the Inquisition and burned to death. The episode begins to haunt Vladimir’s dreams, producing memories of a repressed childhood episode, and as it turns out, it also haunts other people he meets. To read becomes a way of remembering and reflecting on stories of the past that had been repressed; it infiltrates the waking and the sleeping state of the protagonist, confounding his ability to distinguish between his imagination and reality The blurring of borders between sleep and wakefulness is remarked upon early on in the novel when one of the characters states having heard that “the roof between awareness and sleep has filtrations” (Contrabando 8). Images and dreams become conduits through which the protagonist moves between the past and the present, and the cemetery turns out to be the only place where Vladimir will find redemption. The cemetery and also the scaffoldings of a building, turned into supports instead of serving to renovate it, become, as José Javier Maristany writes, “urban metaphors of utopia,” referencing incongruously the future as well as the past. In Pierre Nora’s terminology they are memory palaces to which individual memories cling, associated at the same time with officially sanctioned ways of preserving memory, as with personal, affective memories and hopes. Ultimately, the cemetery serves as a metaphor to evoke Cuban contradictory memory politics. As Rafael Rojas explains, the official consecration of certain intellectuals over others in the national “pantheon” of Cuban literature has resulted in a sense of survival and of mourning among contemporary Cuban writers (11–16). Ponte’s essay-novel La fiesta in turn chooses as its guiding image the feast. The return of tourism, prostitution and the accompanying nightlife to Havana in the 1990s, after three decades of illegality, is for the narrator the imaginary degree zero that allows him to reflect back on what seems like a historical cycle, leading from the closing of bars and prohibition of gambling and prostitution in the 1960s to their reopening. What in Contrabando is a preoccupation with the dead and marginalized— in particular with homosexuals—now becomes a concern with “ghostly” repetitions in Cuba’s mainstream culture. There are also clear differences in genre and style: while Contrabando was written as a novel, using full names, but leaving the place and time of the narrative vague, in La fiesta, names are reduced to initials and characters little developed. Instead, Havana turns into a protagonist; its iconic buildings and neighborhoods are now the mainstays of the narrators’ wandering reflections. The essay is carefully framed as a first-person narrative divided into four sections; the first may be read as a prologue of sorts, beginning with episodic discussions, through friends’ commentaries and short reflections, of the narrator’s reasons for staying in Cuba, and setting up the narrative perspective and scene. It is followed by two chapters on feasts and ruins which adopt a more clearly essayistic format; the last chapter functions as a coda, where a visit to Germany is used to comment on what turns out to be the writer’s major concern: the question of surveillance and memory, and how records from secret service archives may or may not serve in the future to reveal information about the past.

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La fiesta contains a significant autobiographical element. A central episode in the first section relates the unusual decision of the Cuban Writers Union (UNEAC) to “disactivate” the narrator from his membership, which means losing his right to publish and publicly speak in Cuba, and also not receiving help in applying for exit visas to travel abroad. We know that this is what happened to the author Antonio José Ponte. The decision, however, to tell this story and eliminate the names of those associated with it, signals that the book is intended to be not a historical account but rather a reflection on the event in the larger context of the intellectual sphere. This novel is then two things at once: a speculation on the uncanny resemblances between Havana in the 1990s and the 1950s, and an essay on the position of the writer in contemporary Cuba. The motif of the writer’s “expulsion from the Cuban lettered city” makes this in many ways a text about the work of interpretation, as much as it is a history of the material advent of the tourism industry in Havana. The book is perplexing in that it cannot be reduced to a memoir, a novel, or an essay. Similar to Theodor W. Adorno’s seminal insight about the essay’s characteristic insistence on interpretation (152), in this book Ponte relates facts, but then wanders off to comment on readings and discussions of authors whose relationship to the subject matter can only be construed as metaphoric. Especially seen against the backdrop of Ponte’s journalism, this tendency in La fiesta to defamiliarize Cuban history, inserting it in a literary conversation with foreign writers, is striking. A useful point of comparison is the 2006 documentary A New Art of Making Ruins by German directors Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler. The documentary features Ponte as a commentator in several scenes where he argues that Havana’s dilapidated state is not only the effect of decades of economic scarcity and neglect of the capital, but also of Fidel Castro’s having made the city into a theater of confrontation between the United States and Cuba. As Ponte comments in this documentary, this also has had effects on the inhabitants of such ruinous buildings, who against their will are made to participate in the city’s slow destruction. In several articles, Ponte furthermore criticized that authorities in Havana were replacing dwellings with tourist restaurants and museums. Prestige objects financed through foreign donations such as a park dedicated to Lady Diana or a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in his eyes had nothing to do with the needs and the history of the city inhabitants (Ponte “Una catedral rusa para La Habana” [“A Russian Cathedral for Havana”]). This and other articles provoked heated reactions from those close to the Office of the City Historian, who defended the necessity of remedying the overpopulation of Old Havana (Calcines). Clearly, as an intellectual public figure Ponte has had a political stake in provoking a discussion on Havana’s decaying houses. Many of these arguments appear in La fiesta, but put into perspective by a narrator who has become a different sort of observer, in fact turning the exploration of ruins into a narrative undertaking whereby he is not reduced to passive voyeurism or complicity with the ruins, but instead reads them historically, as markers giving testimony to Havana’s rapid transformation. In Ponte’s previous poetry and essays, the city had often served as a setting in which to express the poet’s alienation. In his early poetry volume, Asiento en las ruinas

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(1992, A Seat in the Ruins), as Néstor E. Rodríguez has shown, Havana had appeared as a hostile scene for the poet. Also in his essay Un seguidor de Montaigne (1985, A Montaigne Follower) Ponte had compared the city to Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” calling it a “forest of symbols” (Un seguidor… 26). In El libro perdido de los origenistas he had spoken of “symbolic cities” that were read like books, and streets walked as if leafing through a book (quoted in Maristany 135). Finally, in a later essay, “La Habana: City and Archive” Ponte used a parable told by Cicero about the poet Simonides to explain how the poet may attach his recollections of an event to the space of a house to remember it. In all these instances, Ponte understands memory itself as iteration, where a street walk or remembering a series of sites becomes akin to the reading and writing process. In La fiesta he reworks this concept by turning writing into a trace that testifies to the fleeting presence of the writer. If writing is a trace, similar to the ruins of houses, the writer is now definitely a ghost. This motif of the ghostly poet is announced early on in the first section reminiscence of an “old poet” who lived in the 1970s years of civil death in Havana, ignored by former friends and authorities—we may assume it is Piñera. In the time of the narrator, however, the expulsion from the “lettered city” is not called a civil death anymore; rather, it coincides with the introduction to a special, “ruined” city: Havana. Writing appears now per se as an exclusive, solitary activity, done in isolation and autonomy from society, an activity where the poet is a specialist, a “ruinologist” who in spite of viewing the same sites, is distinguished through his writing from the visiting tourists or from regular Cuban inhabitants of ruins. The narrator’s train of thought in La fiesta is meandering, not tuned to a chronological sequence but rather to a chain of images. If we follow the sequence leading from one ghostly writer to another, the ghostlike existence of a Cuban writer fallen in disgrace during the 1970s leads first to musings about one’s own possible expulsion, and then to Edith Wharton’s fear of having her ghost stories rendered obsolete by the radio and cinema. From there the narrator comments on John Le Carré’s spy novels, accused after 1989 of complicity with the cold war, and from there finally to the writer’s own expulsion from the UNEAC (La fiesta 32–50). The main theme is indeed the reflection, in ever so many variations, on the “ghostliness” of the modern writer, who might be declared obsolete by a state or who might fear that his or her writing is becoming obsolete through new technologies. Indeed, the tension between old and new forms of writing, arbitrated by old and new forms of power, permeates La fiesta. Reinaldo Laddaga has described the novel, together with works by Fernando Vallejo, Sergio Pitol, Sergio Chejfec, W. G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Joan Didion, as one of several contemporary works exhibiting a new form attuned to the modern multi-media environment of weblogs, television, and personal websites, where writers adopt more and more a tone of “mediated immediacy” that privileges a confessional voice as well as fragmentary personal comments on politics and on literature in the mode of scanning or deciphering rather than reading or the search for meaning (341). If the tendency to comment on readings in a series of short individual observations is an expression of this more modern essayistic quality of La fiesta, its more

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novelistic aspect can be seen in the central symbolic operation, the splitting of the autobiographical I into two, the writer and the narrator. This operation is narrated twice, in the first and third sections. The repetition forces the reader to understand that the telling of facts and the writing of a story are separate, that the state’s act of rendering a person publicly invisible is only made into a reality if followed by the writer’s act of assuming and writing it. In the second iteration, the narrator evokes a one-year writing residence in Portugal as a precedent to the actual act of expulsion. He begins to suffer from a sort of “bilocation,” imagining himself in and outside of Cuba at the same time. The likening of the writer to a ghost and a stranger further underscores the transformation of the autobiographical narrative into fiction. To become a foreigner and a ghost in Havana is now a role chosen by the writer, conditioned by his writing, rather than imposed by the authorities. Hence, in the central second and third sections of the novel he is the impartial observer that he cannot be when writing as the authorial I. Consequently, Ponte’s narrator is the opposite of the eye-witness that one might expect, a Cuban writer turned into a spy, a sort of secret listener into the workings of Cuban society. As in Contrabando, a central concern of the narrator in La fiesta is with the manipulation of Cuban cultural memory. In contrast to Vladimir’s books, in La fiesta foreign books, radio, film, music, photography and architecture furnish memory material just as much as Cuban books. Additionally, one new source of information about the past is the material gathered by the secret service, also in many forms, written files, photographs or electronic files. Especially towards the end of the book, the files of the Cuban Secret Service, are matters of concern for the writer, who fears that unlike the written reports compiled on dissidents in the former East Germany, the Cuban files will most likely have been converted into easily erased electronic files by the time the possibility arises that the archives be opened to the general public. In the face of state-organized surveillance, the narrator insists on the importance of reassessing that which will constitute the archives of the Cuban post-revolutionary period, searching not only for what will become available but also for what is or will be missing. This might be why a substantial part of the novel is devoted to comments on the books of Cuban and non-Cuban writers. In the absence of a unified collective memory of Cuba, the narrator creates his own archive, reading together fiction and non-fiction, films such as Memories of Underdevelopment and documentaries (P.M., El Mégano), novels by Graham Greene and magazine articles by Jean-Paul Sartre. Ponte’s concern for the status of the written word and the uses of the archive has a distinctly Latin American context. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) Diana Taylor has suggested that cultural memory in the Americas is sustained by both the “archive”—that is, texts, maps, archaeological remains, films, and recorded sources—and the “repertoire,” that is, “embodied memory” as it exists in the form of dance, cooking, oral storytelling traditions, and so forth. In La fiesta, the writer’s concern is for the Cuban cultural archive, and most of the sources quoted in the text would belong to it. This archive is now multi-media: Ponte relies on multiple sources—essayistic, literary, audiovisual—and he insists on reading and rewriting it as an epistemological tool: only through the

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juxtaposition of different cultural manifestations can a fuller discussion of Cuba’s cultural memory be obtained. While he reads Havana as if it were a book, Ponte is not applying a post-structural lens to critique the power tied to writing. On the contrary, the eye and the ear of the writer bring together that which otherwise is scattered and precarious, it is a counterweight to the archival powers of the state. The image of the feast in turn, would belong to the repertoire, carrying its own memory weight; it is the feast that initiates the uncanny chain of associations between events of the 1960s and 1990s. Neither the archive nor the repertoire is a superior memory support. It is the uses that are made of them, the “mediations” through which they go, and the power dynamics that they oftentimes conceal that are questioned by the writer. Still, there is a certain bias for the written word over the intangible, that which is part of the pure feast. At the very least Ponte calls our attention to the difference between the event and its recording and mediatic manipulation. With regard to the emblematic 1990s film Buena Vista Social Club, for example, Ponte points out the gratuity of the music for a Cuban audience, since the musicians portrayed in it never existed as a group before being assembled for the CD production and film. He concludes: “Music and perfume had the power to relay false memories. What body nearby or what garden where one never was smelled that way? This music was the agent of events that never happened.” (La fiesta 138). The same can be said about Havana’s re-animated night life: the feast itself is a mirage, like the ruin, something projected and manipulated by a state and surveillance apparatus pursuing other goals than its citizens. The uncanny is a common thread in Contrabando as much as in La fiesta. It is, as Sigmund Freud wrote, a result of something familiar that turns unfamiliar, and as such a dominant constituent of modern nostalgia, pervasive in many contemporary novels. In Ponte’s work, the uncanny has two functions. On the one hand it accompanies the search of the writer for his archive—drawing him to books, films, or magazines, buildings and places that are strangely familiar and unfamiliar, throwing light on past and present. Faced with the precariousness of that archive and the false memories projected by the Cuban and international culture industry it becomes clear that the archive’s mediations have turned more daunting than ever for the writer. On the other hand, the uncanny is a result of the writer’s discomfort with his own position in society, which is at the heart of his transformation into a ghost or foreigner. While he can only write from within Cuban society, he is reduced to being a stranger; and while he would like to assume the role of an archivist, he is competing with the state and the media industry for authority to speak of Cuba’s past and present. The genre of La fiesta is a hybrid, with the carefully stylized narrative perspective and framing of a novel and the focus, typical of the essay, on the subject’s interpretation, as opposed to objective scientific knowledge. The work borrows its strategies from its contenders, with its narrator spying on Cuban society as if he were a secret agent, and reading Cuban culture through the lens of contemporary media. In doing this, Ponte’s work speaks to more than the Cuban intellectual discussion of the 1990s and its plight between aesthetic autonomy and political engagement (Buckwalter-Arias). It is deeply involved with issues at the heart of contemporary Latin American literature, resorting

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to a distinctive fictional/essayistic form to intervene in the uncertain negotiations of cultural memory between the state, the media industry, and the writer. Anke Birkenmaier

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “The Essay as Form.” Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Frederic Will. New German Critique 32 (Spring–Summer 1984): 151–71. Buckwalter-Arias, James. Cuba and the New Origenismo. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010. Calcines, Argel “Todos los caminos conducen al templo (Respuesta a las preocupaciones del escritor Antonio José Ponte).” La Habana Elegante 38 (2007). Web. Laddaga, Reinaldo. “La intimidad mediada: apuntes a partir de un libro de Antonio José Ponte.” Hispanic Review 75.4 (2007): 331–48. Maristany, José Javier. “Topografías urbanas: De los andamios a los apuntalamientos. A propósito de Contrabando de sombras de Antonio José Ponte.” La Torre 10.35 (2005): 135–48. Ponte, Antonio José. Contrabando de sombras. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002. —La fiesta vigilada. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007. —“La Habana: City and Archive” Havana Beyond the Ruins. Cultural Mappings after 1989. Anke Birkenmaier, Esther Whitfield, (eds) Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 249–70. —“Una catedral rusa para La Habana.” Encuentro en la red (2006). January 23, 2007. Web. —Villa Marista en plata. Arte, política, nuevas tecnologías. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2010. —And Sigfredo Ariel. Un seguidor de Montaigne mira La Habana. Matanzas: Ediciones Vigía, 1995. Rodríguez, Néstor E. “La mirada epistemológica en la poética literaria de Antonio José Ponte.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33.3 (2009): 565–77. Rojas, Rafael. Tumbas sin sosiego. Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006. Whitfield, Esther. Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. —“Prólogo.” Antonio José Ponte. Un arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos. Esther Whitfield, ed. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. 9–30.

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Ena Lucía Portela (Cuba, 1972) Acclaimed by many readers and critics as the most outstanding of the new wave— the “novísimos” or even “posnovísimos”—of postmodern, avant-garde Cuban writers beginning to be known in the 1990s for their experimental playfulness and intertextualities, Havana-based Ena Lucía Portela is the author of four novels, and a very large number of short stories and articles, published in Cuba and elsewhere. Born on 19 December, 1972, Portela has lived in Havana all her life, although she has traveled in Europe and the U.S. As the daughter of a professional translator father and an editor mother, she grew up surrounded by books in many languages, and references to an extraordinary variety of international works, words, and topics, which abound in her prose. She graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in Classical Languages and Literatures and a thesis on Aristophanes’ political comedy. Since then, she has worked as an editor for the Editorial Unión publishing house in Havana. She published her first short story when she was 18, perhaps the first explicit lesbian love story to be published in Cuba, and her texts have appeared in print regularly since then, both in Cuba and internationally. Her first novel, El pájaro: pincel y tinta china (The Bird: Brush and India Ink) was published in 1998 in Havana, and in Barcelona in 1999, after winning the Cirilo Villaverde Prize of the Cuban Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC) in 1997. As critic Nanne Timmer points out, “the plot is less important than the writing itself, which is presented as a playful game full of metafictional devices.” (196). The three central characters fall in love with a fourth person, Emilio U., author of a novel titled El pájaro: pincel y tinta china, a novel which comes to matter more to them than their own lives. Reality and fiction fuse and intertangle: the voices of I/he/she become indistinguishable, all boundaries are crossed. Portela’s second novel, La sombra del caminante (The Walker’s Shadow) was published in Havana in 2001 and in Madrid in 2006. As Iraida López comments in her prologue to an edition of a later Portela novel, it is a text with a dense and tangled plot dominated by homicides and suicides, presenting “a universe where the only certainties are abuse and gratuitous violence.” (xxi). It is never resolved whether the criminal protagonist is male or female, Gabriela or Lorenzo, but the novel is full of suspense, as the reader seeks clarifications and connections that are never provided. Set in Havana, it is one of the darkest and most oppressive of Portela’s texts, yet transformed by the brilliance of the verbal acrobatics. The causes of so much violence and despair are never articulated, but they are ever promised, in a novel that begins with a homicide and ends with the imminent suicide of the killer. Portela’s third novel, and first major international sensation, was a postmodern detective story, set in Havana, and very much about daily life in Havana, 2002’s Cien

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botellas en una pared (translated into English as One Hundred Bottles by Achy Obejas, 2010), was published in Madrid and Barcelona that same year, and again in Havana in 2006, and quickly translated and published in at least eight other languages. It won the 2002 Jaén Award in Spain, and many other awards for the translated texts, including the Dos-Océanos-Grinzane Cavour prize in France in 2003. It is an intense depiction of a Havana in ruins, a topic found in some of her Cuban contemporaries included in this volume. The central character, Z, is suspended in nothingness, trapped in permanent disorder, attuned to only the immediacy of hunger and sexual desire. Abused by her male partner, she finds solace in a relationship with Linda Roth, a successful lesbian murder mystery writer, and observes a world that seems alien to her. In 2007, Portela was chosen as one of the 39 Latin American authors under the age of 39 to be honored in a prestigious literary event in which other novelists included in this book participated, Bogotá39 Hay Festival, celebrated in the Colombian capital. Portela’s fourth novel, Djuna y Daniel (Djuna and Daniel) which appeared in Havana and Barcelona in 2007, strips away the layered Cuban street language (spliced in with a forest of international literary references) of the earlier novels. The novel is set in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, and focuses on the life stories of the writer Djuna Barnes and Daniel Mahoney, about whom Barnes wrote in her novel Nightwood, an influential work for several earlier Spanish-American novelists. In contrast to her first novels, Djuna y Daniel is written in standard Spanish, rather than in deliberately distinctive Cuban Spanish. Fragments of other novels (labeled as such) have been published in various magazines, including pieces of a recent startling text, La última pasajera (The Last Passenger) in a journal of Cuban culture that was published in Madrid until recently. This forthcoming novel is much more conventional (deprived and disillusioned Cubans, repressive security forces, eagerness to leave the island). A murder mystery section of this novel has been published in English, also translated by Achy Obejas, in her collection of Cuban fiction, Havana Noir (2007). Critics such as Nara Araújo and Abilio Estévez have written about Portela’s dual intention of “startling and amusing” (56) or “amusing and stimulating reflection” (13), a duality central to Portela’s writing. In an interview with Iraida López, who has written extensively about Portela’s work, the author discusses how she likes “readers to laugh…, out loud if possible, and then suddenly jerk to a halt, go back and ask themselves: What on earth am I laughing at?” (56). It is to be seen if her future novels maintain those interests. Mary G. Berg

Works Cited Araújo, Nara. “Erizar y divertir: La poética de Ena Lucía Portela.” Cuban Studies 32 (2001): 55–73.

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Estévez, Abilio. “Ena Lucía Portela: un ‘frisson nouveau’.” Prologue to Ena Lucía López, Iraida. “Prólogo: En torno a la novela negra: Poética y política en Cien botellas en una pared.” In Ena Lucía Portela, Cien botellas en una pared. Doral, FL: Stockcero, 2010. —“Ena Lucía Portela. Entrevista.” Hispámerica XXXVIII, April 2009: 49–59. Portela, Ena Lucía. El pájaro: pincel y tinta china. Havana: Unión, 1998. —La sombra del caminante. Havana: Unión, 2001. —Cien botellas en una pared. Madrid: Debate, 2002. —Djuna y Daniel. Havana: Unión, 2007. —“¿En serio que no tienes miedo? [fragments of the novel La última pasajera] Encuentro de la cultura cubana 51/52 (2009): 83–92. —One Hundred Bottles. Trans. Achy Obejas. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2010. Timmer, Nanne. “Dreams that Dreams Remain: Three Cuban Novels of the 1990s.” Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing. Theo d’Haen and Pieter Vermeulen, (eds). New York: Rodopi, 2006. 185–205.

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Mayra Santos Febres (Puerto Rico, 1966) Mayra Santos Febres is a prolific and award-winning author of works that encompass all genres with the exception of theater. While she is perhaps most recognized for her novels, in particular 2000’s Serena Selena vestida de pena (Serena Selena: A Novel), she has also written award winning short stories, most notably the collection Pez de vidrio (Urban Oracles) which won the 1994 Letras de Oro prize. Her collection El cuerpo correcto (as yet untranslated in its entirety) contains the story “Oso blanco” (White Bear), winner of the 1996 Radio Sarandí Award, part of the 1996 Juan Rulfo International prize. Though narrative is her preferred genre currently, and the one for which Santos Febres has earned the most notoriety, her poetry is also frequently excellent and has won awards. Her 1991 collection Anamú y Manigua (untranslated) was considered among the ten best books of 1991 by the Puerto Rican daily, El Nuevo Día. Her collection of poems, El orden escapado won the Premio Evaristo Rivera Chevremont, Revista Tríptico in 1991. Along with these varied works she has also written a parody, at least what appears a parody, of the self-help book genre called, Tratado natural de medicina natural para hombres melancólicos (2011, A NaturalTreatise of Natural Medicine for Melancholic Men). Her Sobre piel y papel (2011, On Skin and Paper) is a collection of essays that appeared previously in Puerto Rican newspapers beginning in 1986. There is a clear trajectory in her work. She began writing poems, then later began writing short stories, and now is more fully focused on longer narrative forms. However, her prose, especially her early work, demonstrates a clear poetic quality. Santos Febres belongs to a generation of writers for whom the question of Puerto Rico’s status and its relationship to the U.S. no longer forms a horizon that limits their imaginations. This is not to say that the question of Puerto Rico’s status as the oldest colony in the world is not an important issue for them, quite to the contrary. What it does mean is that their artistic production is no longer circumscribed by the limits of coloniality. In the “Introduction” she wrote for the anthology she created of Puerto Rican writers of her generation, Mal(h)ab(l)ar: antología de nueva literatura puertorriqueña, (1997, Magically Speaking Badly: An Anthology of New Puerto Rican Literature) Santos Febres says that, “New Puerto Rican literature does not define anything, it frees itself from such work in order to describe and exercise in that other domain of freedom which is the imagination” (19). She goes on to say that, “It seems to me that this characteristic proposes a new approximation to literary duty that distances itself from the traditional role assigned to Puerto Rican literature as the forger of social or national consciousness” (19–20). The silence she describes should not, then, be read as acquiescence, but rather as an extreme form of rebellion in which the colonized refuses to continue playing the colonizer’s game.

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In the colonial situation, the colonizer limits the colonized even when the colonizer rebels against authority, since the colonizer has already dictated the terms in which the relationship is realized. It is a relationship in which all of the variables are predetermined by the colonizer. Writers of Santos Febres’ generation have begun to turn their imaginations to places beyond the colonial grasp. She and other contemporaries are writing in the opening created for them by “la generación del 70” (the generation of 1970), the one just previous to them. That generation began to break with the, until then traditional notion that artists were expected to perform, shape, establish, and defend Puerto Rican identity. The reaction against the limiting role of artists as forgers of identity is particularly visible in Ana Lydia Vega’s work and most evidently stated in her essay, “Sálvese quien pueda: la censura tiene auto,” (“Save yourself if you can: Censorship Is on Autopilot”) where she criticizes the limits that Puerto Rican artists place on themselves given the political situation they live in. The demand that the artist must create and defend national identity in the face of colonialism placed limits on artistic production in two ways. First of all, and most obviously, art was expected to define who Puerto Ricans are in the face of constant colonial pressures from the north. Secondly, this identity was defined by the cultural elites, those who controlled the publishing houses, editorial entities and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. For the cultural elites—largely white, wealthy males—, the defense of identity against colonialism meant returning to a Hispanist, heteronormative past, which in turn implied the marginalization and exclusion of Afro-Puerto Ricans, women, gays, lesbians and transgender groups from acceptable modes of imagination. Vega and her generation of writers questioned these limits and moved beyond them constantly in their writing. In particular, Vega pokes fun at the selfimportance of the institutions and their functionaries who claim the power to limit identity and representational practices among Puerto Rican writers. Vega’s work can be seen as laying the groundwork for the liberation of national artistic production that will increase acceptance among the public, particularly the academic public, for a type of writing that does not have identity formation as a means of political resistance as its primary concern. Santos Febres comes of age as a writer in the 1980s and 1990s just when these questions are posed in the classroom and in literary circles. From here, she begins to create her own literary voice. This is not to say that colonialism or questions of race and gender are unimportant in Santos Febres’ work, quite the opposite. In the prolog that she co-wrote with Ángel Darío Carrero in the anthology, En el ojo del huracán: nueva antología de narradores puertorriqueños (2011, The Eye of the Hurricane: A New Anthology of Puerto Rican Writers) they comment on their generation’s relative silence regarding identity, once so important to writers and artists in Puerto Rico that, “It is possible to sense the repugnance of indifference. But it also goes along with the rupture of limits that are definitive and defining” (12). Silence should not be read as a lack of concern, but as disgust, frustration, anger, and that they are fed up with having to deal with an unresolvable situation. Though issues of identity may not be at the forefront of her work, her varied oeuvre is sprinkled with poems, stories, and novels that have issues of race, gender, and identity at least in the background.

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Her first novel, Serena Selena vestida de pena, presents gender issues with the transvestite, questioning eponymous character of the novel in the neo-liberal context that confronts Caribbean subjects. What is also interesting is that the majority of the novel takes place in the Dominican Republic, so the traditional movement in Puerto Rican narrative from Puerto Rico to New York, or to Spain in the distant past, shifts to another Caribbean island. The fact that there are Dominican migrants in Puerto Rico, who are often the butt of racially charged jokes, forms an ironic backdrop to the novel. Though it might be difficult to perceive autobiographical associations in her literature because it is so creative, Mayra Santos Febres is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer. That being her “status” or “identity,” it can be necessary to situate her within the long, and under-recognized, line of Afro-Puerto Rican literary production. One critic, Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz, characterizes the deployment of the African voice in the Puerto Rican literary canon in this way: In the case of Puerto Rico, the black voice frequently appears codified, in literature and other mediums, as a defective zone of language. The black subject is he or she who does not know what to say and, in other instances, he or she that does not know how to speak. (77)

Santiago Díaz points to the double-edged nature of the exclusion/inclusion of Afro-Puerto Rican subjects: Even when they are allowed to speak, they are only heard as an absence. Looking back to the mid-twentieth century when négritude was in vogue, African subjects were included only when they performed a type of writing characterized by the inclusion of words that either had or appeared to have their roots in African languages. If it is possible to think of the famous poem by Fortunato Vizacarrondo as an example, “Y tu agüela, a’onde e’tá” (“And Where is Your Grandmother?”). The question of race and racism is evident in the poem as the poetic “I” asserts his pride in his African roots while chiding his interlocutor not only for calling the “I” “negro” but for also hiding his grandmother in the kitchen because she would reveal his connection to African culture. This poem is important because it lays bare the racial conflict that is still prevalent in Puerto Rico. However, it makes evident the issue of racism while, at the same time, enacting a linguistic version of blackface that can eventually become clichéd. That is, it performs a language that, in terms of the fathers of culture and the elites, is a “defective,” “inaccurate” and incorrect way of enunciating. The fact that Juan Boria often performed or declaimed this poem at fiestas patronales (the Saint Day festivals of particular towns) and other public events until his death shows their popularity, but it also shows that the popular acceptance of the image of the Afro-Puerto Rican speech as being, in some way, imperfect. Even as the Afro-Puerto Rican voice enters into the canon, it is limited by the required performance, a representation that underscores the vision of the dominant culture reconfirming its own racist understanding. Santos Febres goes beyond this limiting definition imposed by racist systems of inclusion through her creative and linguistically poetic talents. While Santos Febres writes about the issue of race in her poems, stories and novels—in fact her most recent novel Fe en disfraz (Masked Faith) has slavery and

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race relations at the forefront—she does not perform race in ways that former cultural elites would expect. The words that she uses in her Foreword to her and Rafael Franco’s translation of Willie Perdomo’s Postcards of the el barrio could be used to characterize her own writing. She says of Perdomo, an Afro-Nuyorican (a “Nuyorican” is a New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage) poet, “It is not about being Nuyorican, but writing from the Nuyorican standpoint” (11). Her attitude regarding work by Puerto Rican writers of the diaspora is indicative to how her own work inserts itself into the Puerto Rican, U.S., Latin American and global imaginary. That is, she does not limit herself to telling the expected tales of a variously marginalized woman. This positioning inevitably frames her work and worldview, while she writes about diverse topics in many different ways. Similarly, Santos Febres’ work does not conform to the autobiographical aesthetic that the mainstream often expects of writers who are not male, heterosexual, and white. Rather she writes her novels, poems, and stories from the perspective of an Afro-Puerto Rican woman living in a doubly or triply colonized position. She appropriates the tools left her and uses them to her own advantage to go beyond the limits of coloniality. In Fe en disfraz Santos Febres’ narrator is a white researcher, Martín Tirado, who uncovers historical data that allows him to tell the story of “Fe” by using the internet and electronic data basis. He tells the story of colonialism, modernity’s “underside,” but he also goes beyond. Though there is much that some might argue separates them—space, time, race, gender—the narrator finds a commonality between himself and the subject of his study. In fact, all distinctions, including that of space and time, collapse until the historian literally loses himself in Fe. Colonial modernity would encourage a more distant relation between observers and observed in which differences are highlighted thus confirming the “truth” of racism and colonial difference. Another example of this can be seen in a story in Pez de vidrio, “Marina y su olor” (“Marina and Her Smell”) where she takes the racist, prejudicial notions that “los negros apestan” (blacks stink) and turns it into a weapon. Here, the innovation is not only thematic, but also stylistic. As Efraín Barradas says in his review of the story and Pez de vidrio, “in order to create a story with a rich plot and, above all, rich in linguistic value, it is a story that makes us think of García Márquez and Esquivel. But with good affect and without imitating anyone, Santos manages to give this story political meaning” (119). In this way her work adds to the openings created for her by Vega and the “generación del 70” by founding a new space for herself and future writers. Santos Febres creates resonances with past Puerto Rican authors while, at the same time, not being limited by them. For example, Barradas says in his review that the short story was once an important genre for previous generations, but that it appeared to have become stuck in the past, resting on their success, adding that “we were all wondering where the new short story writers were” (119). The question, he says, is answered with Santos Febres’ collection. Given the propensity during the present time to give more importance to the novel and, to a lesser extent, the short story, it is perhaps easy to overlook the substantial number of poems that she has written. Her poetic imagination, as well as the focus

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on the metaphorical qualities of the word, greatly influence her narrative style. Though she says her first novel, Serena Selena, vestida de pena was, based on personal experiences with transvestite, transgender and gay Puerto Ricans during her years with ACT-UP, it greatly exceeds what has come to be the style of representation of choice these days that engages in a documentary type of hyper-realism. In Rubén Rodríguez Jiménez’s review of Serena Selena he underlines the relationship between the real, political struggles of the people depicted in the narrative. However, he says that, “Santos Febres’ narrative is one that resists critical analysis, even though the avid reader notices things common to literature” (869). It is precisely because of the poetic, imaginative quality or style of her work that it “resists critical analysis” and even though the critic may find stylistic or thematic tropes that are “common in literature,” Santos Febres exceeds them with her uniquely poetic language. Now that she has made her name as a narrator, one wonders if she will return home to poetry. John Waldron

Works Cited Barradas, Efraín. Review. “Pez de vidrio by Mayra Santos Febres.” Hispamerica. 24.72 (1995): 117–20. Rodríguez Jiménez, Rubén. Review. “Serena Selena vestida de pena.” Hispania 85.4 (December 2002): 868–70. Santiago Díaz, Eleuterio. Escritura afropuertorriqueña y modernidad. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2007. Santos Febres, Mayra and Angel Darío Carreño, (eds) “Prólogo.” En el ojo del huracán: nueva antología de narradores puertorriqueños. Colombia: Editora Géminis Ltda, 2011. 7–16. Santos Febres, Mayra. Pez de vidrio. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1996. —“Prólogo.” Mal(h)ab(l)ar: antología de nueva literatura puertorriqueña. Puerto Rico: Yagunzo Press International, 1997. 11–26. —Serena Selena, vestida de pena. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2000. —“Forward.” Willie Perdomo. Postcards of el barrio. San Juan: Editorial Isla Negra, 2002. —Fe en disfraz. Doral: Alfaguara, 2009. Vega, Ana Lydia. “Sálvese quien pueda: la censura tiene auto.” Esperando a Lolo y otros delirios generacionales. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. 83–90.

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Karla Suárez (Cuba, 1969) Acclaimed in Europe (where she has lived since the late 1990s) as one of the startling, irreverent, dramatic new “posnovísima” Cuban voices of recent decades, Karla Suárez has published three novels, three collections of short stories, several books of nonfiction, and many stories and articles in anthologies and periodicals. Suárez was born in Havana on Oct. 28, 1969, and trained as a computer engineer at the Instituto Superior Politécnico de La Habana, a career she has followed intermittently since moving to Rome in 1998, and then to Paris in 2003 and on in 2010 to Lisbon. Suárez’ first collection of short stories, Espuma (Foam) was published by Ediciones Letras Cubanas in Havana in 1998. Her story “Aniversario” (Anniversary) was adapted for Cuban theater in 1996, and “El ojo de la noche” (The Eye of the Night) and “En esta casa hay un fantasma” (There’s a ghost in this house) were adapted for Cuban television in 2002. Suárez’ second collection of short stories, Carroza para actores (Float for Actors) was published in Colombia in 2001. Suárez has also collaborated with photographers on two books which combine their photographs and her texts: Grietas en las paredes (Cracks in the Walls), Belgium, 2007, with her short stories and Yvon Lambert’s photographs, and Cuba, donde el camino te lleve (Cuba, the Paths of Chance) France, 2007, with her memories of Havana, and Francesco Gattoni’s photographs. Her first novel, Silencios (Silences) was published in Spain in 1999, and won the Fifth Annual Lengua de Trapo Prize in 2000. It has been published in many countries, in translation, including Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, and Slovenia, as well as in multiple editions in Spain and Cuba, and it has won many prizes and commendations. The novel centers on a female protagonist (who is nameless in the novel) who grows up in Havana in a difficult family, who confronts issues of emigration, divorce, censorship, drugs, homosexuality, rape, and communication problems as well as other major life issues, as the young woman grows into adulthood and self-sufficiency, and discovers the lies and subterfuges of the society around her. Karla Suárez’ second novel, La viajera (The Traveler), published in Spain in 2005, and subsequently in translation in France, Portugal, and Italy, tells the story of two Havana friends, Circe and Lucía, in their attempts to find lives for themselves after leaving Cuba, first for Brazil and then on to other countries where they try to feel at home. Lucía and her Italian husband settle in Rome, but Circe keeps moving, searching for a city that feels like “her city,” keeping a diary of her travels that she eventually lets Lucía read. It is about emigration and exile, a search for identity and purpose, and about human hopes and needs. As Luisa Campuzano comments, it is not a novel about Cuba, but about what two young women learn about themselves and their geographic spaces.

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A third novel, Habana año cero [Havana Year Cero], winner of the Gran Premio del Libro Insular in 2012 in France, was published in Portuguese in Lisbon in 2011 and in French in France in 2012. It is set in Havana in 1993, during the height of scarcities and economic uncertainties, and it centers on a group of four friends both fascinated by and obsessed with the inventions of Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci, who constructed the first working telephone in Havana in the end of the nineteenth century, but who did not manage to file a patent, so the discovery of the telephone has been attributed to Alexander Graham Bell. The four Havana friends hope to establish proof of Meucci’s discovery, but they also hope to survive the economic crisis themselves and profit from their discoveries of forgotten documents. Karla Suárez has won many awards and distinctions, and has been writer-inresidence of the Agence régionale pour l’écrit et le livre in Aquitaine, France in 2006, and participant in many literary festivals and workshops in Italy, France and Portugal. Mary G. Berg

Works Cited Alhau, Max. “Karla Suárez: La Voyageuse.” La Nouvelle Revue Française. January 2006. Web. Campuzano, Luisa. “Residencia y errancia: perfiles de la emigración en La viajera de Karla Suárez.” Oltreoceano: Rivista sulle migrazioni, 6, 2012. 79–87. Suárez, Karla. Silencios. Madrid: Ediciones Lengua de Trapo, 1999. —La viajera. Barcelona: Roca Editorial, 2005. —Habana año cero. Lisbon: Quetzal Editores, 2011. Timmer, Nanne. “El relato de una casa deshabitada: voz, sujeto y nación en Silencios de Karla Suárez.” Confluencia 25. 2 (Spring 2010). 158–67. Valle, Amir. “Karla Suárez: ‘No creo que el mundo esté condenado.’ ” La Jiribilla, #17, Aug. 2001. Web.

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Zoé Valdés (Cuba, 1959) In the mid–1990s, parallel to the opening of Cuba to tourism, the legalization of the dollar, and the boom of Cuban music, art, and literature in Europe and the U.S., the name Zoé Valdés started to make waves on the literary scene and appeared on bestseller lists with the publication of La nada cotidiana (1995, Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada: A Novel of Cuba, 1997). In this novel are themes that can be read throughout the 13 novels that Valdés has published over the last two decades: the writing of the body, the search for a voice that speaks from direct experience, narration of the self, the construction of female/individual identity in relation to the theme of the nation, testimony, the redistribution of roles that semanticize the masculine and the feminine, the parody of literary genres, and humor. The critical reception of La nada…, Valdés’ second novel Sangre Azul (1998, Blue Blood) having already been published in Cuba, was diverse, encompassing both outspoken praise and utter contempt. The provocative tone of the novel seemed to shock certain sensibilities of the audience. The most voracious critics implied that Valdés had been crudely opportunistic for presenting an exoticism catering to foreign readers, for utilizing explicitly sexual language from the mouth of a woman writer, and for the novel’s political critique. In the years after, when Valdés moved to Paris and published one novel after another—among them the short novel La hija del embajador (1996, The Ambassador’s Daughter), 1999’s Querido Primer Novio (Dear First Love, 2002), Bailar con la vida (2006, Dancing with Life), La cazadora de astros (2007, The Star Hunter)—this provocative tone came to be visible mainly in the press, rather than in her novels. It is her depictions of Cuban daily life in combination with popular culture and literature that attracts readers, for example the bolero in 1996’s Te dí la vida entera (I Gave You All I Had, 1999). The role of the market became more pronounced in Cuban literature in the 1990s, as well as the theme of money itself. In Te dí la vida entera, for example, a one-dollar bill expresses the whole argument of the novel. While La nada… marks the start of the increasing commercial success of Valdés´s work, at the same time it represents the beginning of the “novel of the special period” (Whitfield), in which a Cuban author narrates to a non-Cuban implicit reader. In the novel, as well as in its critical reception, we read a referential hunger for Cuba and for its circumstances. In her analysis of Te dí… Whitfield shows how the signifieds dolor and dólar are placed in the same dichotomy of “Cuban” versus “non-Cuban” in different layers of the novel. A hyperconsciousness of the gaze of the foreign tourist in order to refurnish the Cuban stereotype is also clear in Valdés´s short stories (Timmer, “Miradas”). Humor, through the combination of different linguistic registers that contrast with one another, frequently appears in her texts. “The sublimated and spiritualized

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expression of literary rhetoric originally belonging to [Spanish-American] modernism lie next to obscene expressions that refer to the body and that are particular to Cuban colloquial language” (Vera León 180). Throughout Valdés’s writing over the last 20 years (which can be seen as testimonial narrative or even neocostumbrista texts) popular Cuban choteo, expressions, and jokes abound. As a whole, the series of novels construct what we might call a “textual Cuban map” (Abellás 42), sharing thematic and technical resources as well as characters. For example, the main character in La nada…, Yocandra, is also the neighbor (a secondary character) of the main character in Te dí…, and she emerges again as the main character in one of Valdés’s most recent novels, El todo cotidiano (2010, The Daily Everything). In this textual map, Havana is a crucial setting (especially in Te dí…), although the theme of exile and cities such as Paris and Miami has begun to function as substitutes since the publication of Café Nostalgia (1997, Cafe Nostalgia), and Milagro en Miami (2001, Miracle in Miami). As in other Cuban texts from the 1990s (for example by authors like Antonio José Ponte* and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez*) Havana is a site of ruin for the main characters, which brings to mind the image of Cuca in Te di la vida entera, dying buried beneath a collapsed mansion. These “post-utopian” landscapes, coined by Violeta PadrónBermejo for Valdés and other Cuban authors, are often in direct dialogue with the utopian city in Cuban nationalist discourse, a dialog visible in even the first line of La nada…, which situates the main character in relation to origins and in relation to the Fatherland: “She comes from an island that wanted to build paradise.” Although at first sight the nation is one of the most recurrent topics in Valdés’s work, it is not the main topic. In relation to the city of Havana, for example, the texts also deal with the writing of the body and direct experience, captured in phrases such as “it´s like a woman is a synonym of the city,” and “the city has a uterus” (Te dí… 90). Valdés not only retakes the city/female body in resonance with the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, but significantly gives her a voice as well. With humor and parody, Valdés uses certain novelistic formulas (the picaresque, bildung, adventure, romantic, and autobiographical) in her re-affirmative writing of the female subject. She and later writers of the next generation such as Ena Lucía Portela* and Karla Suárez* give a solid form to post-soviet Cuban literature by women. Her novels, however, are marked much more strongly by gender politics than Portela’s or Suárez’s, for one of the fundamental rules in hers is the redistribution of gender roles. This feminist consciousness shows itself, according to Madeline Cámara, in five points that she emphasizes in her reading of La nada… and which I propose to take as a reference for Valdés´s work in general: 1) “the antiheroic main character,” 2) “the autobiographical discourse that reaffirms the identity of the female subject,” 3) “the critical restructuring of the social relation of the female subject with the Cuban nation,” 4) “the use of the erotic and the eschatological as a challenge to the traditional feminine literary image,” and 5) “the development of a new kind of solidarity between the main character and other marginal characters” (La letra rebelde 62). Strong women appear in all of Valdés’s novels, although parody is also used to show their antiheroic character. Their strength is derived from the transgression of fixed gender roles, as seen in Lobas de mar (2003, Sea She Wolves) the fictional biography

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of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who dressed like men to enter the masculine world of piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is not the only time that her work deals with the transvestism of feminine characters which undermines macho discourse. José Ismael Gutiérrez correctly sees the novel’s opening as “a double attack against two fundamental pillars of the reigning ideology: against the abusive machismo of Cuban society on the one hand; and against conservative and puritan revolutionary morals on the other” (41). Valdés explicitly shows this in La nada… through the use of the term “machismo leninismo.” Cámara’s analysis of socialist society, where there has been a “transfer of power in which the patriarchy traditionally exercised by the Father and the Husband, has fallen into the hands of the State” (55), helps to explain why political criticism and the theme of the nation have been fused with feminist critique in Valdés’s work. Frequently in her work there is a dichotomy between a group of characters which semanticizes the masculine, juxtaposed with a group of revolutionary characters. In this way, the characters of the traitor (the husband), the father, and Fidel Castro appear to be very similar in La nada…, and it is no accident that one of the few female characters in this semantic field is called “La Macha Realista” (Timmer, “La crisis de representación” 266). Castro’s image and name are represented indirectly, through phrases such as “you know who” in La nada…, and wordplay like “Comedian in Chief ” and “Extra Large size” in Te dí… . Ridiculing heroism and masculinity is the axis of this narration and is urgent for the affirmation of existence of the narrator. Absent fathers are also common in her novels: in El pie de mi padre (2002, My Father’s Foot) as well as in La eternidad del instante (2005, The Instant’s Eternity) the search for the father is the central plot, and in more than one novel the identification with, and also separation from, the mother is crucial (Sangre Azul, La nada…, Te dí…). Birth, both literal and symbolic, is an important topic in many of her novels (Pitman), and it shows a complex identification and self-narration which creates an identity through language. In Sangre Azul, birth is treated in combination with poetry and the body. In La nada… the description of giving birth and being born is explicit and it is precisely here that the problem of split identity is best seen. Here there is identification with two bodies: the body of the new-born girl, and the body of the mother. “She wanted to see it all, when I left her body and cried softly, (...). I was easy and slippery. I was alienated from myself. I´m still alienated. My mother stopped being me. I stopped being her.” (25). As the narrator becomes more and more involved in the Cuban patriarchal order, it is not surprising that the name of the Mother shifts from Aída, to La Ida (The Mad/ Absent-Minded Woman). In addition to the narration of birth, heavy emphasis is placed on the narration of daily life, memory and sex. To some critics all of Valdés’s novels subvert the law of the father and builds a poetic feminist discourse that she opposes to traditional notions of nation and gender, forming a “Matria” instead of a “Patria” through the stories told by mothers (Santos). Over the nine chapters of La nada…, as if they were the nine months of pregnancy, a new-born subject is created through language. The description of bodily birth runs parallel to a symbolic birth through narration in the novel, which is endless because of the circular structure of the

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book. The main character’s renaming of herself as “Yocandra” instead of “Patria” is a proposal of her own alternative sign in a patriarchal world. Together with the rejection of the name Patria, we can observe the re-essentializing of the original fusion with the mother prior to linguistic severance and prior to the paternal legislation of the sign. Subjectivity, individual experience in relation to the collective, is also a constant in Valdés’s work. The creation of an individual present and the discovery of a relationship to a collective past is the theme in Café Nostalgia (Cardoso). Here there is parodic play with testimony and collective experience. The two main characters of La nada… and Te dí la vida entera explicitly return to 1959 in a sort of frozen time (Santos), in which Valdés’s narrator talks about the “guilt and burdens of the present through catharsis,” where “the suffering does not affect the heroes of the Fatherland, but rather the common people” (Santos 964). At the same time, concrete experience and the specific in self-narration is emphasized: the construction of identity and the search of one’s own voice, where Valdés pads out her characters with some autobiographical elements. Her novels ultimately base themselves in the representation of personal experiences related to politics, and the deconstruction of identities molded by patriarchal discourse. With that consciousness she shows, to quote the thesis of Julia Kristeva, “an experience of language in which the two sides of speech—the inferior edge (feminine) of the psychosomatic and the superior edge (masculine) of the logical-conceptual—are not sides rigidly opposed, but borders that move interdialectically” (quoted in Richard 740). Valdés’ most recent novel is La mujer que llora (2013, The Woman Who Cries), based on Picasso’s muse, Dora Maar. Nanne Timmer

Works Cited Cámara, Madeline. “Feminismo vs totalitarismo: Notas para un estudio de textos y contextos de mujeres, en Cuba contemporánea (1989–94).” Bordes 2 (1995): 55. —La Letra Rebelde: Estudios De Escritoras Cubanas. Miami: Universal, 2002. Cardoso, Dinora. “Café Nostalgia: Art and Exile.” Neophilologus 89.4 (2005): 563–73. González Abellás, Miguel Angel. “ ‘Aquella Isla’: introducción al universo narrativo de Zoé Valdés.” Hispania 83.1 (2000): 42–50. Gutiérrez, José Ismael. “En aguas de nadie: identidades transnacionales y (des) enmascaramientos sexuales en Lobas de mar, de Zoé Valdés.” Hipertexto 3.Winter (2006): 29–46. Pitman, Thea. “En primera persona: Subjectivity in Literary Evocations of Pregnancy and Birth By Contemporary Spanish-American Women Writers.” Women: A Cultural Review 17.3 (2006): 355–67. Richard, Nelly. “Feminismo, experiencia y representación.” Revista Iberoamericana LXII.176/177 (1996): 733–44. Santos, Lidia. “Melodrama y nación en la narrativa femenina del Caribe contemporáneo.” Revista Iberoamericana LXIX.205 (2003): 953–68. Timmer, Nanne. “La crisis de representación en tres novelas cubanas: La Nada Cotidiana

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de Zoé Valdés, El Pájaro; Pincel y Tinta China De Ena Lucía Portela y La Última Playa de Atilio Caballero.” Revista Iberoamericana LXXIII.218 (2007): 259–74. —“Miradas, Mascaradas Y Espectáculos De Lo Invisible.” Revolución y Cultura 5–6 (2007): 16–21. Valdés, Zoé. La nada cotidiana. Barcelona: Emecé, 1995. —La hija del embajador. Barcelona: Emecé, 1996. —Sangre azul. Barcelona: Emecé, 1996. —Te dí la vida entera. Barcelona: Planeta, 1996. —Café Nostalgia. Barcelona: Planeta, 1997. —Querido primer novio. Barcelona: Planeta, 1999. —Milagro en Miami. Barcelona: Planeta, 2001. —El pie de mi padre. Barcelona: Planeta, 2002. —Lobas de mar. Barcelona: Planeta, 2003. —La eternidad del instante. Barcelona: Plaza Janes, 2004. —Bailar con la vida. Barcelona: Planeta, 2006. —La cazadora de astros. Barcelona: Plaza Janes, 2007. —El Pájaro; Pincel y Tinta China De Ena Lucía Portela y La Última Playa de Atilio Caballero.” Revista Iberoamericana LXXIII.218 (2007): 259–74. —“Miradas, Mascaradas Y Espectáculos De Lo Invisible.” Revolución y Cultura 5–6 (2007): 16–21. —El todo cotidiano. Barcelona: Planeta, 2010. Vera-León, Antonio. “Narraciones obscenas: Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Zoé Valdés.” Todas Las Islas La Isla: Nuevas Y Novísimas Tendencias En La Literatura Y Cultura De Cuba. Eds. Janet Reinstädler and Ottmar Ette. Frankfurt am Main and Madrid: Vervuert/ Iberoamericana, 2000. 177–92. Whitfield, Esther. Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

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Pedro Antonio Valdez (Dominican Republic, 1968) Pedro Antonio Valdez became known throughout Latin America in 2003 when Arturo Ripstein, the respected Mexican filmmaker, announced he was adapting Valdez’s novel Carnaval de Sodoma (2002, Sodom’s Carnival). After attending the V Festival Internacional de Cine de Santo Domingo (2003)—which showcased the Mexican film industry and which awarded him the Best Director Award for his The Virgin of Lust (2002), which opened the Festival—Ripstein discovered Valdez’s novel and inquired about its movie rights. As Ripstein noted in an interview with Rosa Silverio, “[Carnaval de Sodoma] is one of the best Spanish language novels I’ve read in a very long time. It’s dazzling to encounter Valdez’s literature. He is a splendid writer whose work seems to me to be formidable.” In 2006 the movie premiered with the title Carnaval de Sodoma. The novel was published by the Dominican branch of Alfaguara in 2002, and that same year it received the Premio Nacional “Manuel de Jesús Galván” awarded by the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture. After the movie’s premiere, Alfaguara internacional decided to publish an international edition. His following novel Palomos (2009, Street Boys) was also published by Alfaguara. Valdez thus becomes an “Alfaguarized” author. According to Eugenio Partida, “an author Alfaguarizes himself or ‘reaches his pinnacle’ when the Alfaguara publishing house decides to put out his complete works or a library with his name. This creates a sort of canonization of the author; let us say that it supposes that the greatest aspiration of an author is not to belong to an avant-garde or literary tradition but to be ‘Alfaguarized’.” In Valdez’s case, Alfaguara has not published his complete Works but two of his novels, one at the international level, and another one with a local branch. In this regard Valdez’s trajectory as a novelist is similar to that of others included in this volume. When Valdez became known throughout Latin America, however, he was not obscure within Dominican letters. He had received several national book awards, including the Premio Nacional de Poesía de la Universidad Central del Este (2001), which he won with Naturaleza muerta (2001, Still Life), the Premio Nacional de Cuentos (1992) with Papeles de Astarot (Astarot’s Papers), and the 1998 Premio Nacional de Novela with Bachata del ángel caído (1999, Bachata of the Fallen Angel). He also received the 1998 Premio Internacional Alberto Gutiérrez de la Solana for his theater piece Paradise. He has also published essays, such as Historia del carnaval vegano (1995, History of La Vega’s Carnival) With the short story anthology Los nuevos caníbales: antología de la más reciente cuentística del Caribe Hispánico (The New Cannibals: Anthology of Recent Short Stories from the Hispanic Caribbean) he won the 2000 Premio del PEN Club de Puerto Rico. His tenure as Executive Director of the International Book Fair in Santo Domingo (2004–12) has kept him in the

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public eye and has surely had a decisive impact in the valuation and promotion of his work. In Valdez’s novels, the city, the barrio, and the whorehouse are the privileged spaces in which the plots are set. Anthony D. King points out that “Cities themselves have been instrumental not only in imagining their own collective identities, but also in imagining the community of the nation” (10). But in addition to the city, in Valdez’s writings, La Vega, the barrio, and other spaces, such as the whorehouse, are important as expression of a community in the construction of the nation. In his essay, “Tres secuencias bolerísticas en Ritos de cabaret de Marcio Veloz Maggiolo,” Francisco Cabanillas posits the neighborhood and the cabaret as symbolic spaces for the Dominican nation. The neighborhood, according to this critic, constitutes one of the spaces “ignored by official historiography” (38). He adds: “Of course there’s much more. For instance, the novel [Ritos de cabaret] not only focuses on the nation from the perspective of the neighborhood, it also defines it in function of the barrio’s reality, which, as we will see, transmits two meanings: the nation as cabaret” (38). According to Benedict Anderson, a nation: “… is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Bachata…, Carnaval… and Palomos have as their setting the city of La Vega. Although the second takes place around the main park of the city, and in the last novel the neighborhood is never explicitly named, in the first the name of the neighborhood is mentioned: Riito. The actors in these marginal barrios are poor people, with their dreams, illusions, and aspirations broken. Without exception, in these novels, the whorehouse is at the center of the identities of its characters: aggressors, machos, fighters, frustrated writers, pimps and prostitutes. In Carnaval… one must mention the “Royal Palace”, a restaurant and social center that, with the years, ended up transformed into a brothel by the Chinese immigrant Shangsán. In Bachata…, the whorehouse is Luis Canario’s bar, and in Palomos the representative bordello is Casa de Muñecas (The Doll House). In Carnaval…, the popular culture of the brothel is presented in open antagonism to high culture, represented by the institutions of the priest and of “society ladies.” The “Royal Palace” is located across from the cathedral, where Father Cándido struggles to have the brothel closed. Likewise, in Bachata …, Father Ruperto and the church lady Liberata attempt to close Luis Canario’s bar. The erudite Catholic priests make a number of references, in some cases apocryphal, to Greek and Latin philosophy and to European literature and culture. One can also find in each novel a character who represents elite literary knowledge and culture. In Carnaval, it is the poet Edoy Montenégodo, in Palomos, “The Intellectual,” and in Bachata, it is Benedicto Pimentel. A salient aspect of the presentation of popular culture in Valdez’s novels is that of music. Within the context of Dominican culture, the use of popular musical genres, such as the merengue, bolero, and bachata, as literary subtexts is of great significance (Valerio-Holguín 2009). Valdez uses the musical competence of Dominican readers to

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connect these narratives with a general public. This connection is achieved by means of the production of images, through the incorporation of fragments of song lyrics, descriptions of dances, and the reference to musicians and singers. These referents connect with “collective emotions” that appeal to subjects in the process of cultural identity (Keil 123). But, in his novels, not all musical genres appeal to subjects in the same manner. The bolero, the most ecumenical Latin American musical genre, appeals to the majority of subjects, independent of their class, gender or race. The merengue and the bachata, which were originally rejected by the elites, developed from residual (and marginal) genres to emergent ones. And even though the merengue has been transformed into a national symbol, the bachata even today is stigmatized by its lowerclass origins. Carnaval... incorporates boleros and merengues with the songs of such popular English-speaking artists like the Bee Gees and Elvis Presley. This music constructs the subjectivity of the clients and prostitutes of the brothel. By means of the song “Olvídame y pega la vuelta” (Forget Me and Turn Around) by the Argentine brother and sister duo Pimpinela, Mónica, a prostitute in love with a city official, remembers how she had been deceived by a “man” before she started pursuing her current profession: “It’s two years and a day I have lived without him; it’s two years and a day since I’ve last seen him and, even though I have not been happy, I have learned how to live without his love; but as I was forgetting, suddenly, one night it returned” (261, in italics in the original). The song’s lyrics mimic and model the story of Monica’s rejection by the “man.” Like the merengue and the bachata during their origins, the reggaeton, more specifically the dance style known as “perreo” (“dogging”), has been stigmatized as lower class and indecent by the country’s elites. Reggaeton, which originated in Panama and Puerto Rico in the 1990s, is a hybrid genre which fuses rap, reggae, hip hop, and, depending on the country or interpreter, salsa, merengue and bachata, among other styles. In Palomos, the nation is imagined and constructed not only from the neighborhood and the brothel, but also through music, specifically Rap, reggaeton, and hip hop lyrics. MC Yo, the homodiegetic narrator, sings together with the rapper El Lápiz Conciente (The Conscious Rapper): “In the street there’s no owner, the kids are nuts. They go to school with cigarettes in their lunch boxes. I have a friend who does it with anyone. His blade is broken. Killed with a home-made gun; an everyday scene. For breakfast, problems, for dinner, they have problems” (28). MC Yo imagines himself wearing “a chain of white gold and diamonds, worth one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars … driving a Hummer with a speedometer that starts at 100 kilometres per hour … And I, with a wallet full of dollars, singing, without a worry, in duo with Eminem” (23–4). As a macho art form, bachata generally expresses in its lyrics the pain and suffering caused by female infidelity and parting. In the whorehouse, this musical genre, is associated with drinking, dancing, the dissolute lifestyle, fighting: in sum, with the experiences of pimps and prostitutes. The bachata “reflects” the life of its characters and translates, in some manner, their way of thinking. For instance, in Bachata…, El Machote and El Gua discuss and even have a knife fight over their rivalry as machos.

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The prostitute known as “La China” says to El Gua: “Take it easy, papi chulo...don’t start another mess … advised la China, coming from El Machote’s table. Once next to him, she whispered, ‘you fuck his woman and now you are fucking with his juke-box’ ” (94). Women as object of pleasure, and the juke-box as the source of music, are here presented as equal. El Machote’s violence against the Gua is postponed and displaced against his woman, whom he kills when she attempts to leave him. In another section of the novel, El Gua is murdered by a jealous client in Luis Canario’s brothel. Valdez’s novels are aligned with “dirty realism,” which I call “neonaturalism,” which (as represented by figures such as Raymond Carver) characterized the U.S. novel in the 1980s: sordid and abject characters who live in a world of crime and filth (Macey 99–100). In his three novels, references to filth, stench, human secretions and orifices, abound. In Carnaval..., rat, cockroach, and fly infestations take place. In the Royal Palace, the stench of dead rats makes the air unbreathable. Sex, violence, and drugs shape the characters’ behavioral norms, especially in Palomos. All of this is expressed in descriptions, dialogues, scenes and situations presented by means of a vulgar and base vocabulary on the part of characters and narrators, which clashes with the high cultural references. Humor, irony, and the mixture of elite and popular culture, present not only in references, but also in the language, characterize these novels. True or apocryphal, these quotations from cultural authorities are undermined by the irreverence of vulgar expressions, popular sayings or aphorisms, and word games. Pedro Antonio Valdez is one of the contemporary Dominican writers who have made a name for themselves within Spanish-American literature. His novels, like those of the Dominican-American Junot Díaz*, dealing with the youth culture and written in a subversive and irreverent language, differ from mainstream novelistic practice in the Dominican Republic; not only in their topics, but also in the manner in which these are dealt. But, as we have seen, there is much in them that links them with the achievement and promise of other authors in The Contemporary SpanishAmerican Novel. Fernando Valerio-Holguín

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1996. Cabanillas, Francisco. “Tres secuencias bolerísticas en Ritos de cabaret de Marcio Veloz Maggiolo.” En: Arqueología de las sombras: La narrativa de Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. Fernando Valerio-Holguín, ed. Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar, 2000. 33–47. Keil, Charles. “People’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony.” Dialectical Anthropology 1–2 (1985): 119–30. King, Anthony D. “Boundaries, Networks, and Cities: Playing and Replaying Diasporas and Cities.” In Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City. Alev Cinar and Thomas Bender, (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 1–16. Macey, David. Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

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Partida, Eugenio. “Comentarios sobre comercialización y pseudocultura en la Literatura Latinoamericana del Siglo XX.” Coloquio de Cultura Mexicana 22 and 26 October, 2007. Aula Cervantes, Universidad de Zagreb. Valdez, Pedro Antonio. Bachata del ángel caído. San Juan/Santo Domingo: Editorial Isla Negra, 1999. —Carnaval de Sodoma. Santo Domingo: Alfaguara, 2002. —Palomos. Santo Domingo: Alfaguara, 2009. Valerio-Holguín, Fernando. “El orden de la música popular en la literatura dominicana.” Céfiro 8:1 (2009): 101–18.

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4

Greater Andean Region Introduction More than any other area represented in this book the greater Andean region reminds one of the difficulties implicit in conforming a novelistic generation according to age, and a strong argument could be made that after the Boom masters, the strength of the novel in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru is found in writers born in the early or mid–1940s. There are no clearer examples than the novels of Peru’s Miguel Gutiérrez (b. 1940) and Ecuador’s Javier Vásconez (b. 1946), both of whom have had essay collections published about their narrative; their influence and importance to their countries’ fiction being undeniable. Both write sagas with recurring characters and themes, the former in extensive novels, the latter mainly in shorter fiction. If Vásconez is gaining greater prestige outside of Ecuador (he was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos prize), especially with several editions of El viajero de Praga (The Traveler from Prague), which coincidentally was published in the newer generation’s annus mirabilis, 1996, it is due to his overcoming the national obstacles to publishing or gathering attention internally. Gutiérrez is a major voice for the state of the art of the novel in his country, especially with his comparative essays on the genre. The younger Ecuadorian novelist, Leonardo Valencia, included in this book, correctly argues that many of his compatriots have not overcome the burden of the social realist past, and to date, still with few exceptions, their novels tend to prove Valencia right. They may have forgotten that in 1985 Raúl Pérez Torres (b. 1941), principally a short story-writer, wrote the nonfiction roman à clef Teoría del desencanto (Theory of Disillusionment), an unheralded precursor for many of the Macondite and Crackite authors’ complaints about stagnant narratives, loss of innocence, and the default nature of old political commitment. Pérez Torres’ novel was reprinted in 2010, perhaps because it is a generational portrait of the complex relationships among the young that mirrors present-day conditions. It is also an axiom that Peruvian novelists can experience an anxiety of influence centered on Vargas Llosa, just like Colombians experience the García Márquez paradigm. That was not the case when Edgardo Rivera Martínez (b. 1933) published País de Jauja (1993, Land of Plenty), a hugely successful bildungsroman considered the best Peruvian novel of the 1990s. Just as exposure to the greater extraterritorial republic of letters by Bolivian novelists proves extremely difficult, there are many Andean writers who have found a niche in their own countries, and Gutiérrez is a

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model in that regard. He and other Peruvians are not at all on automatic pilot about their evident progressive commitment, especially considering, as this book certainly proves, that there are now vast numbers of Andean novelists who are thriving without any need to model their fiction on their elders. There is another issue regarding Andean fiction that surely affects other areas: what constitutes a bestseller, and what authors thrive outside of the “published in Spain” syndrome? For example, Sergio Bambarén (b. 1960), a Peruvian Paulo Coelho, is for all intents and purposes a bestseller, published by some of the houses that emphasize the literary fiction of many of the authors in this book. Meanwhile, in Bolivia, after his first novel, El festejo del deseo (1992, Celebration of Desire), Juan Carlos Luchín (b. 1955) enjoyed great success among the Argentine public with La gula del picaflor (2004, The Womanizer’s Gluttony), while his most recent work is a 2011 nonfiction comparison of what he deems to be the fascism of Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Evo Morales. Due to recent governments, a greater effort is being made in Ecuador to bring into the cultural fold underrepresented indigenous groups, but in actuality there is little of greater value than identity politics that is being produced among those groups, a condition that exacerbates the need to go beyond usual U.S. academic triumphalism. It is a sad state of affairs, particularly considering that there is a great tradition that was initiated by Adalberto Ortiz and Nelson Estupiñán Bass. In this regard the case of Jorge Velasco McKenzie (b. 1949), of Ecuadorian and Jamaican background is extremely interesting and exemplary. Lucid about his craft, thorough in his research and with frequent recourse to his background in art and authority as an avant-garde poetry expert, Velasco has concentrated in novelistic sagas about his native Guayaquil, foremost among them Tambores para una canción perdida (1986, Drums for a Lost Song), En nombre de un amor imaginario (1996, On Behalf of an Imaginary Love), and Río de sombras (2003, River of Shadows), which was published by Alfaguara. Among the novelists within this book’s generational limits the metafictional, punning prose of Marcelo Báez (b. 1969), particularly his Tan lejos, tan cerca (1997, So Far, So Close) and Tierra de Nadia (2000, Nadia [or] Nobody’s Land) and the internationalist writing of Gabriela Alemán (b. 1968), are worthy of greater attention outside Ecuador, where they live. Objectively, Báez’s novels and their questioning attitude toward new media, especially emails, is much ahead of novelists, some included here, who are still presenting that approach as new. Alemán, whose first novel is Body Time (2003) and like Valencia was invited to the Bogotá39 Hay Festival, is now receiving attention with the 2012 publication in Spain of her 2007 novel Poso Wells, a graphic novel hybrid based on H. G. Wells’ 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind.” Báez and Alemán still bear the burden of being published nationally, a major drawback for small countries with great literature. Two other Ecuadorian novelists worthy of further consideration are Alfredo Noriega (b. 1962), whose De que nada se sabe (2002, About Whom Nothing is Known) was made into a movie in 2008, and Eduardo Varas (b. 1979), who was chosen as one of the Best Kept Secrets for the 2011 Guadalajara book fair. Varas’ Los descosidos (2010, The Incoherents) and Noriega present two complementary yet very different view of their country, without resorting to cliches or hyperbole.

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Peru’s Diego Trelles (b. 1977), whose recent Bioy (2012) has not met the expectation created by his thinly veiled tribute to Bolaño in his first novel, El círculo de los escritores asesinos (2005, The Circle of Killer Writers) is undergoing a similar experience, even though both his novels were published in Spain. The great Peruvian promise is Jeremías Gamboa (b. 1974), whose Contarlo todo (2013, Telling it All) is creating the expectation of a new Bolaño, in part because the rights to his novel were sold to seven countries in various languages by his agent Carmen Balcells, who still represents some major Spanish-American novelists. Pedro Novoa (b. 1974) is the author of Seis metros de soga (Six Meters of Rope) and Maestra vida (Master Life), two short novels published in 2012, the last of which won the Primer Premio Internacional de Novela Corta Mario Vargas Llosa in 2011. Any cartography of contemporary Peruvian narrative must mention a bestseller praised by Bolaño, Jaime Bayly (b. 1965), who has gone from his early, thinly veiled autobiographical novels of homoerotic content to the short novel trilogy Morirás mañana (2010–12, You Will Die Tomorrow), in which drugs, guns, sex, lowly passions and murder provide a background for exacting revenge on “imaginary” enemies, including critics. More a punning novelist whose work is mainly published in Spain, and a participant in Palabra de América (see General Introduction), Fernando Iwasaki (b. 1961) has recently published El arte de introducir (2011, The Art of Presenting) a collection of nonfiction which includes abundant praise for his “contemporaries,” many included in this book. Colombia, as The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel demonstrates, is a vast and diverse territory for the novel. Still, one wonders how the history of its contemporary fiction would have changed had Andrés Caicedo (b. 1951), not taken his life in 1977, hours after receiving the first copy of his ¡Qúe viva la música! (Long Live Music!). This widely popular novel is a seminal forerunner to the interest in popular culture, partially informed by Caicedo’s brief stay in the U.S. Like Bolaño, Caicedo could be defensive, funny, impassioned and irritated in the same sentence. In 2008 Norma publishers issued his notes, unpublished book reviews and loose commentaries on world literature as El libro negro (The Black Book). That same year Norma published the posthumous short novel Noche sin fortuna (1970–6, Luckless Night) together with the short story “Antígona” (Antigone, 1970), and Mi cuerpo es una celda (My Body Is a Cell), a sort of autobiography composed from Caicedo’s letters and jottings under the “direction” and “staging” of Alberto Fuguet. It is revealing to compare Caicedo’s reception with William Ospina’s (b. 1954) whose trilogy on the conquest of the Amazon has had a positive reception, even though the novels recycle a now standard form of rewriting history. After Caicedo, the generation that challenged or gave a new twist to the legacy of Gabriel García Márquez has been thoroughly examined by Orlando Mejía Rivera’s La generación mutante. Nuevos narradores colombianos (2002, The Mutating Generation. New Colombian Narrative). Ably and succinctly, combining analysis, literary history, and interviews with the authors, Mejía Rivera provides an overview of the country’s new authors, starting with Caicedo’s contemporary, Juan Diego Mejía (b. 1951). Mejía Rivera corrects the impression that drug trafficking is a privileged theme for the new writers. Still, the absence of women in his outlook could have been easily amended by

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the discussion of the prolific novelist Piedad Bonnett (b. 1951), whose Para otros es el cielo (2005, Heaven Is for Others) is one of the very few Spanish-American campus novels, and Consuelo Triviño Anzola (b. 1956), whose La semilla de la ira (2008, The Seed of Wrath) is a subtle nonfiction novel based on the life of an early SpanishAmerican bestseller, the Colombian novelist of purple prose novellas (to purists, bordering on soft porn) José María Vargas Vila. Mejía Rivera interviews authors included here, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Santiago Gamboa, and Jorge Franco. In addition to them, and factoring in the internal differences in Andean countries that still affect their novelists’ publishing outside of their countries, we learn at length about Julio César Londoño (b. 1953), Rigoberto Gil Montoya (b. 1966), Octavio Escobar Galindo (b. 1962), and Philip Potdevin Segura (b. 1958). A bit over a decade afer Mejía Rivera’s selection, one can add Margarita Posada, whose second novel Sin título: 1977 (2008, Titleless: 1977) has not had the impact of her first, De esta agua no beberé (2005, roughly, Never Say I Will not Do That ). Antonio Ungar (b. 1977), who participated in the Bogotá39 Hay Festival, has attracted more attention with Las orejas del lobo (2006, The Wolf ’s Ears), and Tres ataúdes blancos (2010, Three White Coffins), both published in Spain. Meanwhile, Jaime Espinal (b. 1975) attracted media interest with Open the window para que la mosca fly (2005, Abre la Venta So That the Fly Vuele), his bilingually funny novelistic pastiche about a Colombian who emigrates and becomes a U.S. super hero. Even though his second novel, No es una historia de amor (2009, It is Not a Love Story), has been praised by Jorge Franco, Espinal’s novelistic efforts seem destined to replicate Efraim Medina Reyes’, discussed in the General Introduction. But if scandals have anything to do with contemporary Colombian narrative the paradigm has been the linguist, essayist, biographer, animal rights advocate, and novelist Fernando Vallejo (b. 1942). Other than his The Lady of the Assassins, his five-volume “autobiography” El río del tiempo (1999, The River of Time) is the best palimpsest for his subsequent fiction, which open about his homosexuality, his travels, political incorrectness, and ultimately trenchant worldview. At the other end is Tomás González (b. 1950), who started publishing novels in 1983, but only his most recent, Abraham entre bandidos (2010, Abraham among Bandits) and above all La luz difícil (2011, The Difficult Light), translated into German in 2012, have found a larger public, perhaps confirming one of this book’s criteria for generational adherence. It is still to be determined if the novel in Colombia returns to the privileged position it had during the last third of the twentieth century. In terms of Bolivia, the situation described for Ecuador and Peru is aggravated by an even greater lack of resources and outlets, and perhaps geopolitical factors. Consider the great poet Jaime Sáenz (1921–86), also the author of two great posthumous total novels, Felipe Delgado (1989) and Los papeles de Narciso Lima Acha (1991), both superior to any novel written by living Bolivian novelists. But Sáenz is still unknown outside of some academic circles. Press commentaries and academic reports point out that Bolivian novelistic production concentrates on men, and that is certainly the case for the other Andean countries, and a problem beyond the bounds of representative literary history. Authors like Giovanna Rivero (b. 1972) are achieving

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some prominence, mainly in the short story, but are still published by local houses. In Rivero’s case, her erotic novel Las camaleonas (2001), whose title is a play on words not with chameleons but with cama (bed) and leonas (lioness), had some success, while her recent Tukson, historias colaterales (2008/2010, Tukson, Collateral Stories) a hybrid (a graphic novel was added to the second edition) close to a short-story cycle has not attracted foreign attention. One can certainly think that the above context will do little to quell the controversies spelled out by specialists on the Andean novel. Will H. Corral

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Héctor Abad Faciolince (Colombia, 1958) Two key events have impacted the course of Abad Faciolince’s literary career. The first was garnering the first Premio de Narrativa Innovadora Casa de América and publishing his novel Basura (2000, Garbage) with the Spanish press Lengua de Trapo, thereby expanding his readership in the Hispanic world. The second was the 2006 publication of El olvido que seremos (Oblivion: A Memoir). This account of the murder by a hired assassin of his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, brought him world fame. This book set sales records in Colombia and has been translated into French by Gallimard (2011), into English by Old Street (2010) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012); and as of 2012, into German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian. The international profile of his works began in 1996 when his first novel, 1994’s Asuntos de un hidalgo disoluto was translated into English as The Joy of Being Awake. In 2005 the Mandarin translation of his novel Angosta (2003) won the award for the best foreign novel published in China. However, his Tratado de culinaria para mujeres tristes (1996, Culinary Treatise for Sad Women), an unusual work which combines bizarre and real recipes with self-help advice, may well end up being his most translated work. Abad’s writing profession got underway in 1991, with the publication in his native Medellin, of the short-story collection Malos pensamientos (Bad Thoughts). Since then, in addition to novels, he has also sporadically published short stories, such as those included in El amanecer de un marido (2008, The Dawn of a Husband)—dealing with the breakdown of love affairs—or the hybrid narratives of Traiciones de la memoria (2009, Memory’s Betrayals). He has also published journalistic essays, some included in Las formas de la pereza (2007, The Shapes of Sloth), as well as a travel narrative, Oriente empieza en El Cairo (2002, The Orient Begins in Cairo), and a personal dictionary titled Palabras sueltas (2002, Loose Words,). In 2012, Abad published his first book of poetry, Testamento involuntario (Involuntary Testament). Before becoming a full-time writer and journalist, he had translated Italian authors into Spanish, including Giuseppe Tomasso Lampedusa, Gesualdo Bufalino, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia and Natalia Ginzburg. Their influence can be felt in his own work, especially his early narrative. If one had to delineate certain constants in his novelistic production, one would have to begin with the frequent presence of metafictional aspects, among them selfawareness, self-critical reflexivity, the peculiar conjunction of critical and creative endeavors, the tendency to dissolve the difference between reality and fiction, and between essay and novel (Quesada Gómez 2009: 333). The use of a metafictional model is most developed in Basura, which openly parodies it. But it is already present in his earliest texts, such as in “Duelo” (“Duel”) in Malos pensamientos. His narrative production is eminently bookish, rich in metafictional games, frequently composed

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of texts within texts, of multiple- level fictions. Moreover, in them acts of reading and writing are privileged (or their absence is thematized). The Joy of Being Awake and Fragmentos de amor furtivo (1998, Fragments of a Furtive Love), as will later Basura and Angosta, explore these issues in the manner of Calvino, although the obvious referent to some of the play with the materiality of writing and the literary work itself, as well as the use of digression, is Tristram Shandy. The Joy of Being Awake also took the form of a memoir dealing with the remembrances of Gaspar Medina, a Colombian millionaire retired in Italy. This dissolute gentleman, aged 60, reflects on his life in front of his secretary, Cunegunda Bonaventura, and constructs a narrative with picaresque echoes (Vélez Upegui 52–5), while marshaling literary allusions and references to national and world literatures. The novel possesses a cumulative structure, with a succession of past episodes, and a constant back and forth to the narrative present. In the prologue, titled “In Which Nouns and Pronouns are declared,” there is a reflection regarding the subject of enunciation as within the creative act. The reader is faced with a vindication by the main character of the work’s authorship, dictated to his secretary, which resembles what could be called the “fiction of the reader”: “We are three: my secretary, you and I. I am named as is written; my secretary is named Cunegunda Bonaventura; you can call yourself by your name. The three of us and this paper. Without lies or false modesty” (x). If in Basura Abad crossed out whole pages, in the The Joy of Being Awake, he pursued a similar goal: an apologia for the blank page. This happens, not without sarcasm, in chapter XXIV, titled “Wherein a Eulogy of Silence Is Proclaimed & What is not Disclosed in Passing over Several Years of Life Is Declared”: three blank pages, in which all that can be read is the paratext, the name and number of the chapter, and the page numbers. These games with the materiality of the book are constants in Abad’s work, extending from the permission given to the reader to skip a specific passage or chapter, to the suggestion that the reader tear out a page. Similarly, in Angosta the reader necessarily becomes suspicious when the implied author attempts to convince her to skip the central chapter. In addition to being social criticism and a comedy of manners, this novel is also a metafictional exploration. Linear reading is undermined by digressions introduced in the numerous footnotes that describe and introduce characters. From the start Angosta proposes mixing real and fictional life, by describing with sexual innuendos how the protagonist, the bookseller Jacobo Lince, enters a book as if it were a woman (11–12). Basura explores in great depth the possibilities of metafiction. By means of the found manuscript topos, Abad introduces a first-person narrator, a journalist with literary pretensions, who provides us with fragments salvaged from the trash of his neighbor, the frustrated writer Bernardo Davanzati. Like a local Max Brod, for weeks, the impertinent journalist recovers and publishes the papers that Davanzati discarded. The narrator informs us that Davanzati had published two books that did not enjoy good reviews nor were widely distributed. And we only know Davanzanti’s fate after the publication of his writings by his intrepid neighbor. Davanzati thus places himself at the head of a list of writers who do not write or, more accurately, destroy what

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they write so that their work never sees the light of day. His attempt at achieving a silent writing leads him to construct a character, the protagonist of the story “Narciso in paradiso (et in Inferno ego)” who, unable to stop writing, desires that his texts disappear the moment they are written. This character, without doubt a variant of Davanzati, wishes he owned a pen that would write in erasable ink: “A text written not with indelible ink, but with an ink so delible that it would erase itself as it is written” (Basura 121). Davanzati will go as far as writing without ink, the pen leaving an immaculate silent page, demonstrating that what is written can be gone with the wind. As in Abad’s other novels, there are significant Cervantine echoes in Basura. The authorial game of mirrors is probably the most obvious. The role of editor taken up by the narrator transforms him into the real author of the final text that reaches readers thanks to his appropriation of someone else’s writing. In a sense, the narrator can be considered Davanzati’s double since, like him, he is engaged in writing. This mode of composition also leads to the lack of an ending of the narrative segments included, which leads to a reading in which finding out what happened in narrative terms is not a priority. In this manner, the reader who reads for endings is eliminated, as the Argentine avant-garde writer Macedonio Fernández proposed. There are two reasons for this reduction: the narrator/compiler who selects at will, and Davanzati’s inability to complete a novel (given his dried-up imagination). He can only begin but never end them. In addition to Fernández and his Una novela que comienza (1941, A Novel that Begins), another obvious reference is Calvino who, in his If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), creates a longer work out of truncated beginnings of novels. Cervantine references and works are a leitmotiv and frequent hypotext in Abad’s writings. In addition to borrowing thematic motifs (searches in libraries, gentlemen, nieces) from Cervantes, Abad’s interest in developing a more or less explicit theory of the novel by means of the act of writing itself gestures towards the metafictive inclination Cervantes epitomizes. Basura offers numerous opportunities, especially in the narrator’s comments and footnotes to the texts. For instance, he touches on the problem of the timely distribution of variety and sameness, a topic discussed by the characters in Don Quixote II. For the narrator, some of Davanzati’s narratives are true Matryoshka dolls, mixing apples and oranges. Davanzati constructs “a narration on the border of nonsense in which the reality of what is being told appears to be supplanted by the illusion of reading, of readings, moreover, that are very peculiar because they are the readings produced by the very protagonists of the story” (Basura 146). The narrator’s criticisms of Davanzati’s obsessions are not without irony, because, without being as extreme, he does something similar. The incorporation of the texts read by the characters into the narrative is another manner in which the fabula branches out. The narrator, for instance, calls attention to the discrepancy between Davanzati’s writings and precepts of narrative unity that had especial importance during the Renaissance for theorists who emphasized the importance of finding equilibrium between unity and diversity, as postulated by Aristotle in his Poetics. Moreover, the narrator decries Davanzati’s compulsive insertion of stories within stories, a practice that diverges from the path taken by the modern novel. To illustrate

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this, the narrative transcribed between pages 146 and 152 has up to five different distinct fictive levels. It is a true Chinese box in which stories proliferate ad nauseam, and an example of what should not be done in a narrative. Without duplicating such levels of complexity, this type of narrative structure is nonetheless one of the defining traits of Abad’s works. The fragmentary nature of Basura provides the novel with the quality of multiplicity defended by Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but lacking in Davanzati’s original literary constructions. Chance appears to determine the insertion and placement of the found fragments by the narrator. This fact justifies the conceptual variety of meanings and the mixture of contents, at a time in which dispersion and deconstruction of narrative is in fashion. In the fifth of his memos, Calvino defines the contemporary novel as “an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people and the things of the world” (113). The knowledge provided by Basura is about the literary world and is constituted by the repertoire of possible literary techniques, and the implementation of the theoretical problems raised throughout literary history. As stated, Basura, like novels of chivalry, and novelists from all periods, including Cervantes, mimics, parodies or simply repeats in order to grant the writing greater verisimilitude the commonplace of the found manuscript, of which the actual book is a more or less faithful translation or copy. Abad replaces the ancient manuscript with trashed fragments that it is often necessary to clean or reconstruct, and the unnamed narrator is the translator who has to select and physically extract the texts from the trash. Literary criticism is also parodied. In an attempt to guide their reception the narrator, even though he admits to knowing little about literature, comments, praises, or censors the texts he recovers. By means of the information he provides about the author he proposes specific interpretations of Davanzati’s texts. The ensuing discourse cannibalizes the specific language of narratological theory, thus intensifying the metaliterary character of the text by means of the conjunction of fiction and criticism. Commentary is not limited to the neighbor’s texts, but his reflections also include other real-life writers, as well as the literary act in general. It is possible to perceive a similar satirical view of the role of the literary critic in Angosta. Some of the narrator’s comments in that novel reproach the supposed inability of critics to understand contemporary literature, as well as mock those who practice an autobiographical interpretation of it and attempt to find at all costs a causal connection between life and work in an author. Satire combines with parody when Davanzati deals with the issue of influence in his novel (within the novel) Rebus. There is satire in its reference to one of the most exhausting debates in contemporary Colombian narrative: that of the importance of Gabriel García Márquez and magical realism. One can see in Davanzati a contemporary of García Márquez or, alternatively, as belonging to the immediate next generation over whom the Nobel Prize winner has cast an overwhelming shadow. Satire fuses with parody given that one of the authors created by Davanzati, Serafín Quevedo, cannot escape the all-powerful influence of García Márquez. Quevedo,

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whose writing willfully attempts to distance itself from magical realism, instead becoming something like a violent realism. Quevedo’s attitude is symptomatic since although he attacks García Márquez in order to attempt new modes of writing, he is unable to escape his influence even when contradicting him: “in the tropics we have no autumn, not even for patriarchs” (Basura 61). Fragmentos de amor furtivo, Abad’s second novel, may be the one that shows the least concern with metafiction, employing the device, already found in The Arabian Nights, of a framing narrative within which a plurality of stories is inserted. Two of its characters are Susana and Rodrigo, lovers who, isolated due to the plague of violence afflicting Medellin, give themselves over to erotic passion. This affair develops throughout several months, mediated and conditioned by the revelations about her romantic past that Susana, like a new Scheherazade, tells Rodrigo. It is through Rodrigo, the passive listener of his beloved’s erotic experiences, that the topic of jealousy, which begins being retrospective and ends destroying the relationship, is explored. Abad connects this theme, associated with Cervantes, Shakespeare and the Golden Age theatre, to Colombian reality and thus is able to transition into politics, when he establishes a connection between the suspiciousness of the lovers and the lack of social trust in the police state that Colombia has become. The above discussion leads to a second constant characteristic in Abad’s narrative: the revisionary analysis of national history. The problems which afflict the country throughout its brief history are present in diverse forms in all of his novels; from the war between liberals and conservatives to the problem of hired killers, to the massacre instigated by the banana company, the assassination of liberal candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the ensuing Civil War between 1948 and 1958, the drug trade and the generalized corruption it helped cause. Thus, in Fragmentos de amor furtivo, Medellin is depicted as plagued by violence, the exact antithesis of eroticism and literature. In The Joy of Being Awake, the protagonist subjects the historical events that have scarred Colombia during the twentieth century, such as the banana company massacre (1928) and the murder of Gaitán (1948) to different distortions. As a Colombian émigré in Europe, Gaspar Medina offers a version of his country’s history mediated by the sieve of temporal and spatial distance and slanted by the subjectivity implicit in the autobiographical genre and the dubious morality and reliability of its narrator. On the other hand, the couple constituted by the uncles of the protagonist—the bishop of Santa Marta and Jacinto, the parish priest of Aracataca—represents a peculiar version, as thesis and antithesis, of the eternal opposition between conservatives and liberals. Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez* includes this novel among those that reconcile a concern with aesthetics with political denunciation, arguing that this novel “solves, without calling attention to the fact, the supposed contradiction between politics and literature” (106). The construction of the topos of hell on earth, implied in The Joy of Being Awake and in Fragmentos de amor furtivo, is fully developed in Angosta, an apocalyptic fable inspired by Medellin and Colombia, as well as the marginalization of the Third World by the West. Using The Divine Comedy as referent, Abad’s novel creates a hierarchical space divided into the sectors; Cold Lands (or Paradise), Temperate Lands and Hot

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Lands (or Hell). This space constitutes a model of Medellin and the world. It also refers to conflicts outside Colombia, through clues that “situate us in a much more global projection of the narrative world depicted in Angosta” (Becerra 72). As happens in real-life Colombia, Angosta’s society—divided into upper, middle, and lower classes who live in different neighborhoods—is racially composed of whites, blacks, Indians, mulattos and mestizos, present in each of these neighborhoods. Racial prejudice, together with economic considerations, leads to the identification of skin color with social status. This is a society built on a logic of exclusion that generates different types of violence throughout all strata (Osorio 32). More than a cosmopolitan search for external exoticisms, one finds in Abad’s novels the deconstruction of the idea of what it means to be Colombian, or, better said, its reformulation. In that sense his literature explores what it means to belong to a nation whose decomposition is being portrayed. And it does this from inside; deconstructing national topics and constructions, while showing that a hybrid and critical sense of belonging is possible (Quesada Gómez, «Una letteratura postnazionale» 38). In Oblivion…, Abad silently undermines the possibility of a uniform society. The dystopian counterpoint not only originates in a society that has become one of the most violent in the world, it can also originate, as anywhere else, in the natural world. Thus Abad’s discourse is not Manichean. The family tragedy has natural (his sister’s death), as well as social and political causes (his father’s murder). His memoir reveals instead the contradictions of Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century: a country torn by incongruities that do not necessarily exclude each other, but that, instead, could perfectly coexist in a tense equilibrium. Thus, instead of the eternal belligerence between liberals and conservatives, in Oblivion…, Abad offers his family, in which each parent espouses a radically opposed ideology regarding religion without generating confrontations, as an example. Despite his personal subscription to the liberal tradition and the enlightened atheism of the eighteenth century, Hector’s father accedes to his wife’s desire to let their son attend a school run by Opus Dei, without this fact leading to any disagreement. Another Colombian and Latin American tradition subverted in the book is the celebration of the mother. As Michael Greenberg has shown, the book acknowledges this panegyric tradition and redirects it to the father. In fact, the narrative has hagiographic echoes, which are unusual in a society in which fathers are not usually seen in such overtly positive terms. As we know, a large number of Colombian novels and stories have dealt with the problem of violence, one of the flaws present since the foundation of the nation. In fact, violence has become one of the signs of identity of the country and its literature between centuries, and in the 1950s, literature would take out a copyright on the issue with the so-called “novel of violence.” Novels such as Laura Restrepo*’s La multitud errante (2001, A Tale of the Dispossessed, 2003), Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos (2007, The Armies, 2008), and, in a different manner, Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, 2001), Jorge Franco*’s 1999 Rosario Tijeras (Eng. 2004), Mario Mendoza’s Satanás (2002), or Juan Gabriel Vásquez*’s El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011), recreate some of the many forms national violence takes.

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On occasion, this proliferation of literary representations of violence in its different manifestations (guerrillas, paramilitary, drug-trafficking, murderers for hire) can become a new kind of exoticism for European and North American readers. It can be seen as a macabre, but also attractive and even harmless, trait since it is confined to a distant Third World. Abad has forged a decoy built to gull the European and North American readers’ attention by its Latin American singularity; as once happened with the narrative of the Cuban Revolution and with certain variants of magical realism. This is why there are authors who, without denying the existence of violence, refuse to transform it into the center of their fictions, and, in particular, resist portraying the hired assassin as hero. Violence for them is a dead weight that is difficult to discard without being accused of writing escapist fare. Abad resists transforming murderers or drug pushers into the starlets of contemporary Colombian narrative. For instance, he rejects the mode, associated with the Antioquia province, of the “sicaresque,” a kind of picaresque, in which the hero is the drug cartel assassin, not the picaro (rogue). With a few exceptions, these are relatively mimetic narratives, lacking in literary virtues, which present the assassins as heroic figures. Oblivion… goes further. It can be read as anti-“sicaresque” because it shows the underside of this ennobling of the assassin found in some novels of the 1990s and 2000s. One of the central concerns of the author, intimately related to his preoccupation with the discourse of history, is memory. The issue had already been raised in the construction of Medina’s fake memoirs in The Joy of Being Awake. The distortions to which he subjects twentieth-century Colombian history range from the blocking of the narrator’s memory to protestations of veracity (which by their mere presence raise the possibility of fictionalization), also include aposiopesis, and erroneous attributions. To the narrator’s memory problems, and his untrustworthiness, one must add the issues implicit in narrating events supposedly experienced, as well as those only known by hearsay. The problems of memory (or false memory) are explicitly treated in the essays-narratives anthologized in Traiciones de la memoria (2009). There Abad stresses that the area of the brain active in remembering experiences and events is the same as that which we use to imagine the future. This quotation from the prologue is a statement of intent: “I am never sure if I am remembering or inventing.” The consequences of this affirmation are important, especially in this era in which people’s historical memory is being recovered. To the question of how to narrate history, already studied by Hayden White, and the voluntary betrayals between discourse and reality, one must add, in the light of Abad’s work, the involuntary betrayals that hide the truth on which justice ought to be based. This is not an absolute truth, but rather “a truth composed of cracks and, therefore, of contrasts, of images both clear and blurred, of memories with clear or undetermined referents” (Fanta Castro 38). This is what Abad vindicates in Oblivion… . The investigation in Traiciones de la memoria of the authorship of a poem attributed to Jorge Luis Borges in “Un poema en el bolsillo” (15–180, “A Poem in the Pocket”) illustrates how written information is the only weapon against the forgetting in which we live. In Oblivion…, Abad had previously informed readers that one of the few things he recovered from his dying father’s pockets was a poem copied probably by his

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hand. The first verse—“Ya somos el olvido que seremos” (we are the forgetting we will be)—provides the Spanish title for Oblivion…. The mistitled poem, which Abad and others attributed to Borges despite its not being included in his complete works, is the epitaph on Héctor Abad Gómez’s headstone. This provenance was contested by some Borges specialists and gave rise in Colombia to a larger polemic regarding a possible self-interested use of the Argentine writer on Abad’s part. His response is updated in “Un poema en el bolsillo,” and together with Jaime Correas’ nonfiction novel, Los falsificadores de Borges (2011, Borges’ Counterfeiters) provides convincing evidence that Borges is the poem’s putative author. Abad’s successful investigation is thus juxtaposed with the failed police investigation into his father’s murder (the murderer is never prosecuted or even found). In this manner a Borges poem about forgetting ends up imparting a kind of poetic justice on a debased reality; unintentionally reinforcing Abad’s literary vocation. Catalina Quesada

Works Cited Abad Faciolince, Héctor. The Joy of Being Awake. Trans. Nathan Budoff. Newton Upper Falls, MA: Brookline Books, 1996. —Fragmentos de amor furtivo. Bogota: Alfaguara, 1998. —Basura. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2000. —Angosta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2004. —Traiciones de la memoria. Bogota: Alfaguara, 2009. —Oblivion: A Memoir. Trans. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012. Becerra, Eduardo. “Mapamundi colombiano.” Quimera 248 (2004): 71–2. Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Fanta Castro, Andrea. “Imágenes del tiempo en El olvido que seremos.” Letral 3 (2009): 28–40. Greenberg, Michael. “Letter to my Father.” The New York Times Book Review 20 May, 2012. BR24–25. Osorio, Óscar Wilson. “Angosta y el ancho caudal de la violencia colombiana.” Nueva novela colombiana. Ocho aproximaciones críticas. José Jesús Osorio, ed. Cali: Sin Frontera Ediciones, 2004. 31–41. Quesada Gómez, Catalina. “Héctor Abad Faciolince: la metanovela parodiada.” La metanovela hispanoamericana en el último tercio del siglo XX. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2009. 333–62. —“Una letteratura postnazionale.” Nuova Prosa 56–7 (2011): 33–50. Vásquez, Juan Gabriel. “El tiro en el concierto: política y novela en Colombia.” En El arte de la distorsión. Bogota: Alfaguara, 2009. 99–108. Vélez Upegui, Mauricio. “De Asuntos de un hidalgo disoluto.” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 4 (1999): 47–74.

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Jorge Eduardo Benavides (Peru, 1964) Jorge Eduardo Benavides inscribes himself in the tradition of “international postmodernism,” that is, a strictly aesthetic appropriation of the epistemology as illustrated by the author’s recurrent use of multiperspectivism, the interpolation of various genres, and the overlapping of narrative vignettes held together by a framing dialogue. This web of intricate plots yields multiple interpretations as the jagged pieces of the puzzle smooth out the fine line between highbrow and mass culture, presumptuous and colloquial speech, official and unofficial versions of history. However, Benavides’ novels are neither revisionist accounts nor performative parodies of historic events. Despite banking on key moments in recent Peruvian history, the moment “When-it-all-changed” (Jameson ix), these traumatic events function as a pretense for exploring the human condition of characters who make contradictory decisions in their search for validation and empowerment. In Los años inútiles (2002, The Useless Years) the author explores the multiple manifestations of corruption during Alan Garcia’s first administration: “not only financial but also moral corruption, we became selfish, vulnerable, we lost our integrity” (Gazarian 109). The multiple plot lines and countless characters that populate Los años… establish points of contact with the failed assassination attempt of Ramiro Ganoza, a right-wing presidential candidate. The abrupt dissynchrony, attained through the continuous shift in narrative tenses, yields enough evidence to blame both left-wing Shining Path rebels and government militia groups as responsible for the assassination plot. In addition to paying homage to Vargas Llosa by embracing his total novel technique (Ruz 89), Benavides’ pieces of the puzzle are laid out onto a multidimensional blanket or what Jameson describes as hyperspace, a new spatial experience aimed at “grow[ing] new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (39). The reader surveys the city of Lima through the gaze of Rafael, Sebastián and Luisa, characters forced to transgress boundaries across affluent, middle-class, and shanty-town districts of an ever-growing city. This reconnaissance of the city often coincides with the moral decay of characters as they introspectively reflect during their commute thus laying out a map of the human psyche as well. El año que rompí contigo (2003, The Year I Broke Up with You) explores the intricate lives of five middle-class, university students set against the backdrop of the upcoming 1990 presidential elections. Despite their apathy towards politics, hyperinflation makes its way into the private lives of Aníbal and María Fajís, a young couple who can barely make ends meet during the final months of Alan Garcia’s first administration that proved to be disastrous for Peru’s economy. Social unrest catches up to Aníbal who has kept at home an MRTA manifest mailed to Mauricio, a young

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journalist sought after by the terrorist group. Aníbal ends up in jail as Ivo, the only single member of the pack, has apparently turned him in to the police to flee with María Fajís. Benavides lays out the facts from multiple perspectives thus challenging his readers to put together their own version of the truth. In addition, the constant shifting of narrative tenses, the selfish intentions of the youngsters, and the holding back of information by a significant other, add more ambiguity to the conveyance of meaning. However, the romantic and power relationships among pivotal characters also function as shifting gears that facilitate the reader’s maneuvering through a maze of interwoven plots and deceiving intentions. In Los años…, the failed relationship between Sebastián, a young political advisor to conservative José Antonio Soler, and Rebeca, an upper-class college student with a social conscience, provides cohesion to a narrative that is constantly switching settings, time frames, and registers. In the same fashion, the involvement of La Gata (Soler’s daughter) with Arturo, a student affiliated with APRA and a government-sponsored commando, enable the reader to delineate both ideologies as Arturo despises Lima’s elite. Likewise, in El año… the grueling cohabitation between Aníbal and María Fajís depicts the domestic effects of political instability and inflation as these university students struggle to find menial jobs and come up with tuition money. In Un millón de soles (2007, A Million Soles) this symbiotic relationship takes on institutional dimensions as Juan Velasco’s dictatorship (1968–75) relies heavily on the Coap’s (underground intelligence unit) ability to infiltrate and unveil any form of dissent, particularly among cabinet members. Even Montesinos’ affair with Anita Blacker, a student activist and ironically daughter of the Minister of Internal Affairs, is no deterrent to push her father out of office. Un millón… is the prequel to the two novels discussed above although the author did not conceive the series as a trilogy from the start. Benavides provides cohesion to the apparently dissimilar plots of the three novels by interpolating recapitulations of pivotal events and by creating younger versions of key figures such as Rolando Fonseca (press), José Antonio Soler (conservative), and Sánchez Idiaquez (APRA) thus adding chronological continuity to these fictional narratives. Despite its underlying historical references Un millón… is neither a dictator novel nor a historiography. Benavides fictionalizes the lives of prominent figures in Velasco’s cabinet and entourage to delineate how ideology turns into corruption, how trust turns into betrayal fueled by the desire to preserve newly acquired status and power. Despite unavoidable comparisons to Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000), Benavides centers on peripheral characters rather than the figure of the dictator himself. However, it must be argued that Benavides’ novel could have also been subtitled The General’s Feast as most economic policies and political maneuvers are decided at social gatherings hosted by his cabinet members, some of whom suspiciously disappear in the interim. Deception is the name of the game. Benavides also recurs to game theory as a framing technique as the reader is intermittently allowed to peek into a poker game among Coap members who cautiously share their version of the competing narratives. In the same fashion, Sebastián and Pepe Soler (son) conduct a framing dialogue which yields

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enough information to help untangle the truth in Los años…. Likewise, in El año…, Ivo’s insistence to experiment with an Ouija board predicts the unlikely victory of Alberto Fujimori over Vargas Llosa even as the latter was leading in the polls. In many instances Benavides’ male protagonists are reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s and Charles Bukowski’s self-destructive characters. Aníbal fails at every job he performs, and as a provider to his domestic partner Sebastián sets himself up for failure as he tries to justify human trafficking as an altruistic endeavor. Robert Ruz points out that in Benavides’ novels the intellectual who takes on the role of detective becomes the victim and the villain in the end (94). Such is the case of Sebastián as he uncovers J. A. Soler’s involvement in Ganoza’s assassination attempt yet becomes victim to political machinations as he decides to withhold the truth. In turn, he becomes the villain by impregnating a shanty town girl whose baby is to be sold in the international market. Rafael Pinto also falls victim to his journalistic integrity as he uncovers blackmail cases on both sides of the isle but is forced to exile himself in the outskirts of Lima instead of gaining recognition. Some of Velasco’s ministers are kidnapped and deported as they show any sign of disapproval towards the general’s new policies. General Blacker’s apparent suicide is perhaps the epitome of defeat, even more so than Velasco’s demise, as the former is caught up between his allegiance to the dictatorial regime and his reticence to cover up his daughter’s involvement with a subversive college organization he was obliged to crush. Despite the display of multiple forms of machismo, Benavides seeks to detect the contradictory trap of masculinity at the intersection of a society that defines itself in terms of class, race, gender, and culture. Leading women in all three novels are reified as the object of desire of male protagonists. They exercise their machismo by possessing, disposing of, and voyeuristically gazing at the bodies of María Fajís (Aníbal), Rebeca and Luisa (Sebastián), and Anita Blacker (Montesinos) even against their will. However, these very same women turn this patriarchal society upside down as María Fajís defies double standards by having an affair and leaving Aníbal without regret. La Chata (Elsa) defies the patriarchal establishment in El año… as her sympathy for the MRTA collides with her father’s ideology, a retired general. In the same fashion, Rebeca’s liberal politics clash with her father’s elitist social conservatism. Although her quest for social justice is compromised by her utilitarian assistance to Luisa, Rebeca does not hesitate to leave Sebastián once she finds out his deceiving motives. Anita Blacker completes this trilogy of subversive feminine characters, as she manages to go undetected under her father’s radar and utilizes her beauty to manipulate the unscrupulous Montesinos. This paternalistic attitude of powerful men towards younger women also extends to their appropriation of the patria, a relatively young nation eager to satiate every man’s needs but who is yet abandoned or even sold to the best bidder when no longer desired. By the same token, the dumping of men by these leading women symbolizes the homeland’s rejection of unscrupulous male archetypes. Despite choosing Lima as the setting for his trilogy, Benavides’ three novels can also be read within the context of any major Latin American city. Each novel is equipped

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with a virtual tour guide who helps us navigate through this hypertext of multiple layers and textures. Ruz argues that in Benavides’ first two novels this mapping of the city is carried out by outsiders “as they travel from one corner of the city to another, they cannot get to grips with the city because of its sheer scale and degradation” (98). Aníbal’s mapping of Lima, initially traced by his taxi route, is completed with his frequent bus rides throughout the city. The same applies to central characters in Los años… as Sebastián and Rebeca step out of their comfort zone to meander into peripheral districts in search of Luisa. Her bus rides in turn, from affluent and middleclass districts to the shanty town are not fortuitous since it highlights a network of interdependence among characters from diverse social strata; it depicts not only a cartographic map of Lima but also a layout of the complex interactions between the haves and have nots literally distanced by a few degrees of separation. This mapping of the self in the quest for identity takes on a larger scale in Benavides’ fourth novel La paz de los vencidos (2009, The Peace of the Vanquished). Set in the Canary Islands, the nameless narrative voice fades away as he fails at every attempt for happiness. This alienated Peruvian transplant finds solace in pleasant memories as remembering has replaced every form of human interaction and interdependence. However, this postmodern nostalgia is devoid of yearning as this recreation of events is a mere simulacrum of the past. The narrative voice keeps morphing into multiple manifestations of the Other as an alternate form of escapism. What seems at first a tale of the immigrant experience turns into a pseudoexistentialist novel as the narrator reflects in the following journal entry: “Ever since I arrived on this island I’m consumed by the fear of vanishing into my own routine, of being devoured by the absence of goals” (137). The insular setting of the novel contributes to his sense of deterritorialization as the protagonist is thrice removed from his homeland, from the continent he dreamed of touring as an adolescent, and also from himself. The novel is populated by alienated characters that have consciously isolated themselves after experiencing various forms of trauma: immigration (Enzo), the Spanish Civil War (a retired teacher), his father’s death (Arturo), writer’s block (Capote), and failed romantic relationships (Elena). The narrative voice keeps a diary as well as maintains an epistolary exchange—both genres often associated with the feminine and the confessional. Unlike his fictional predecessors the protagonist of La Paz… does not display any form of masculinity; he no longer has a country and he fails at every romantic relationship even when a woman moves in with him. The cameo appearance by Mauricio and Elsa from El año… as two of the narrator’s college friends hints at the possibility of Aníbal as the diary keeper, and by extension Aníbal as alter ego of the author. In this sense, La paz… also constitutes a way for the author to distance himself from his previous literary production centered on Peruvian themes. Although published in 2009, Benavides finished writing La Paz… in the interim between his first two novels. As he points out in an interview with Jonathan Blitzer, this exercise “allowed me to escape somewhat the overwhelming reality and technical complexity that I was pursuing in those other two novels.” Benavides opts this time for a linear chronological narrative, a limited number of characters, and appropriates the structure of a diary as

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an archaeological artifact that allows the narrator (an alter ego of the author) to trace back to multiple versions of himself. The distinction between author and protagonist, fiction and reality, is almost nonexistent in Benavides’ most recent novel Un asunto sentimental (2012, A Sentimental Matter). The reader is presented with competing narratives surrounding the alleged affair between acclaimed writer Albert Cremades and an attractive young woman of mysterious origin. Albert’s own account of his romantic escapade is in turn deconstructed by Carlos Franz* and later challenged by Armas Marcelos’ assertion that this alleged romantic escapade “was more like a nightmare.” Jorge and Ana Gorostiza provide an alternate omniscient version of Albert’s failed marriage as Ana claims to be a close friend of the ex-wife’s family. The fictionalization of well-known literary figures as well as author’s acquaintances further challenges the reader’s ability to stitch together his/her own version of the truth as “fiction [constantly] intoxicates reality.” Unlike Benavides’ first novel, which highlighted the interaction among dissimilar characters from various social strata, Un asunto… relies on the deception of uniformity achieved through the simulacrum of reproducible spaces (five-star hotels, luxurious restaurants, Instituto Cervantes branches, writers’ gatherings) through a journey that spans 13 cities from Istanbul to Tenerife, from Lima to New York. What may be initially perceived as travel literature, becomes a multi-layered creative artifact as the parallel worlds populated by alternate versions of the characters, intersect with firsthand accounts from established writers and literary agents which in turn displace and discredit the original authorial voice. Benavides’ pre-configuration of the novel as a travel log enables the reader to explore any of the 13 segments in any given order. By the same token, multiple renditions of the main characters (Albert, Belén, Tina, Jorge, Dinorah) encourage the reader to configure his/her own version of the truth since the novel does not offer alternate endings but rather alternate ways of perceiving this narrative montage. The malleable intentions of the parties involved in Un asunto prove to be unreliable as the same character is portrayed as an attractive translator in one version of the plot while she appears to be a terrorist suspect in another. Benavides’ five novels to date convey multiple forms of storytelling as the author himself is split between the creative space where he dwells and the last place he left behind. Alex Lima

Works Cited Benavides, Jorge Eduardo. Los años inútiles. Alfaguara: Madrid, 2002. —El año que rompí contigo. Alfaguara: Madrid, 2003. —Un millón de soles. Alfaguara: Lima, 2007. —La paz de los vencidos. Alfaguara: Lima, 2009. —Un asunto sentimental. Alfaguara: Lima, 2012.

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Blitzer, Jonathan. “The Delayed Arrival of the Writer: An Interview with Jorge Benavides.” Words without Borders. March 2011. Web. “Entrevista a Jorge Eduardo Benavides.” Part 1–7. Cervantes Virtual. February 2012. Web. Gazarian-Gautier, Marie-Lise. Retratos en palabras. Quito: CCE, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Ruz, Robert. Contemporary Peruvian Narrative and Popular Culture: Jaime Bayly, Iván Thays & Jorge Eduardo Benavides. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005.

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Diego Cornejo Menacho (Ecuador, 1949) Diego Cornejo Menacho has worked for decades mainly as a journalist, and it is just to point out that his most recent prose, primarily complex and multilayered novels, culminates in 2010’s nearly perfect Las segundas criaturas (The Secondary Creatures), now revised and slightly expanded for its 2012 Spanish edition. This is one of the two or three outstanding Ecuadorian novels of the period between centuries, and undoubtedly one of the best of its type in Hispanic fiction, which begins to explain its publication in Europe, a progression similar to that of other novelists in this book. A revisionist, metafictional and in its quirky way historical novel, Las segundas criaturas is imbued with a sharp and subtly allusive humor that from the realm of fiction tries to explain, and refute, the peripheral status that “minor” or “small” literatures like that of his country have acquired to date. There is also no doubt that Cornejo’s novel refers in parallel form to experienced or bastard readers who are the most docile and obsequious one can imagine. Las segundas criaturas also refers to writers who have been working on their craft in a linked and patient fashion, until forging a corpus of original fictions. In some cases those novels are happily insular, and like others in this book have had enough influence to reorganize national literary cartographies, or to facilitate comparison with similar productions in nearby countries. Cornejo’s determination to not deviate from the novel as his main source for fiction has managed to open him to malleable writing possibilities, a path that allows him to cover the distances separating one genre from another without prejudice or difficulty. An “inciliado” (“inxile”) in his country, as he likes to think of himself, Cornejo is still a well-kept secret, which to some degree is a positive position, since his novels are mature products that are quite different from the national norm. They are also novels that, despite being published by Alfaguara (or being “Alfaguarized,” as other contributors to this book posit), await critical reception beyond the enthusiasm of the press, and in particular specialized criticism that will be above the naïve demand for predictably mestizo literary projects that turn the writer of fictions into a politically correct public figure. Still, Ecuadorian criticism in general has wrongly perceived Cornejo’s Gato por liebre (2006, Swindle), the 2008 national Premio Joaquín Gallegos Lara winning Miércoles y estiércoles (Wednesday’s Fools) and Las segundas criaturas as branches of the author’s nonfiction, mainly Crónica de un delito de blancos (1994, Chronicle of White People’s Crime). Crónica de un delito de blancos, a fact-based tale of corruption, politics, and the new and greater role indigenous people are playing in Ecuadorian society, evinces the ease with which Cornejo applies fictional techniques (not necessarily fiction) to journalism, and his novels show the opposite flow. These blurrings have caused

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traditional novelists, and critics, to cringe. However, any such views, generally clumsy and tautological in their arguments, are easily contradicted and put in perspective by the nonfiction included in the extensive Nux Vómica (2011), which has a number of articles that can be construed as his poetics for fiction and journalism. Still, such critical views are being abandoned by the novel’s increasing repercussion at the national and international levels, thereby creating the need of a larger critical apparatus for his work, its possible sources and its greater role in the creation of a canon for the contemporary Spanish-American novel. It is thus perhaps useful to settle the fact that in Cornejo’s prose the flows of novel and essay are defined by careful wording, even though the concerns and channels may be different. In what is construed as strictly “literary” Cornejo’s location is more a reliable resistance to subscribe unconditionally to a national literary discourse and to a canon achieved through extraliterary means. This is why it is difficult to look for Ecuadorian models in his novels, since Cornejo has renounced the pose of “shunned writer,” local sinecures and servility to institutional promotion. Within that context, particularly with Las segundas criaturas, it is more productive to remember that Cornejo has invented a tradition where there wasn’t one, or where local and foreign critics did not want to see it. If, for example, Leonardo Valencia*’s cosmopolitanism could be considered a strategy to abandon or question a canon that acts collectively (his essays reinforce that idea), in Cornejo the move is more internal: he takes what he wants, generally imaginings of Ecuadorian historical and literary history, small episodes of Quito’s bourgeoisie, and fictionalizes them. In Cornejo’s prose there are fewer trips than in some of the novels of his contemporaries, and any travel, metaphorical or real, is more a slow assimilation that serves to construct an aesthetic space in which immediate referents are insufficient, or in which tradition has been a synonym for inertia and oblivion. Cornejo’s prose has stricken that current harshly, and it is enough to think about his most successful novel so far, Miércoles y estiércoles. This is a political nonfiction novel constructed from another real story: the disappearance of the Restrepo Arismendi brothers, two adolescents of Colombian origin, and the proven responsibility of the Ecuadorian national police and the right-wing government of the time for their torture and murder. This brief and intense novel could have been a long journalistic piece that tried to put together the pieces of the puzzle of the whereabouts of the brothers, still unknown. Instead Cornejo subtly continues the mystery by imagining where the bodies could be buried, and by making the executioners victims of their own politics of extermination and brutality. This inversion, which includes portraying local political bosses as chieftains of a State that is more like a farm, makes Miércoles y estiércoles a meditation on recent Ecuadorian politics, politicizing even the popular speech of lowly henchmen (one of whom is a woman) and their sexist behavior. Gato por liebre, published two years before, is a sort of x-ray of a woman and the city in which she lives with the narrator, Quito. There are sentimental moments in the novel that could appear excessive, full of local references. Nevertheless, the passages that portray a city beset by the ashes of a volcano nearby, and the invitation to think

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of a city as a female body are memorable. Gato por liebre also reveals a thorough linguistic care that takes precedence to the narrative thread or characters, to the point of combining the possibilities of expression in a blog with reminiscences or dialogs. It is also notable that Gato por liebre weaves a corporal architecture with experience, as if desire never ceased or renewed itself with the passage of time and concomitant changes. Las segundas criaturas, the novel which places Cornejo’s narrative squarely in the company of other novelists in this book, resists an exact literary sociology. In other words, one could write about how the novel renews its evident literary sources, but it would be insufficient. There is a historical setting, the enthusiasm for the SpanishAmerican novel of the 1960s and its sequels, and the non-role in that setting of a small, fractured country. There is also a historical development, or more precisely a real joke: with the literary Boom in full swing the canonical José Donoso and Carlos Fuentes, invented “Marcelo Chiriboga,” a great Ecuadorian writer who could share the stage with them, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and other literary stars of the time. Chiriboga is the star in Donoso’s El jardín de al lado (1987, rev. ed. 1996, The Garden Next Door, 1992), and appears in Fuentes’ Diana, o la cazadora solitaria (1994, Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, 1995) Both novelists added or returned to their creation until their deaths, even in interviews, and Cornejo’s novel borrows imaginatively and frequently from all that attention. Cornejo, like Donoso in his fiction, imagines that Chiriboga existed in real life, and departs from the prank whose possibilities the two renowned novelists did not develop. Cornejo creates and suggests a fictitious biography of a fiction that runs through the national nostalgia and early affections of Chiriboga in the Ecuadorian highlands, adding an ironic look at the naïve flirtations of the Boom writers with the European metropolis, their anguish for inserting themselves in the first world literary market, and their acquisition of knowledge, and anecdotes. Chiriboga becomes involved with high class lovers, among them a stand-in for the actress Jean Seberg, Fuentes’ supposed lover, already fictionalized in his Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone. Chiriboga suffers from the century’s disease, which was to aestheticize Marxism, and hires an agent very similar to the “real” Carmen Balcells, the Boom’s mother, whose point of view rules over Las segundas criaturas, as she seems to do in Donoso’s The Garden Next Door, with the name Nuria Monclús in both novels. The Ecuadorian receives prizes, celebrates in endless parties, has writer’s block, and returns to writing as if he were returning to the home he lost as a child. At the end of the novel the narrative voice belongs to Chiriboga, which makes it feasible to think that Las segundas criaturas is also a nostalgic commentary on the literature that was not written in Ecuador: My agency [Chiriboga says his literary agent says] has represented me since La caja sin secreto [The Box without a Secret], the novel he wrote in Mexico, stirred great enthusiasm in literary circles for its formal daring and its thrilling plot. Like William Faulkner or Gabriel García Márquez—there is no more to it—Chiriboga was lucky in his ability to create a great fiction in a book that proposed a new

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stylistic construction and, at the same time, a story of life and action […] At the beginning critics did not understand it, as happens with all great works. But later there was consensus that La caja sin secreto meant a turning point in Spanishlanguage literature. At Éditions du Seuil Severo Sarduy predicted that La caja sin secreto would not be a best seller, but was convinced it would be a long seller. His prediction came true, because it is still read with awe and passion twenty five years after its first edition. (2012, 27–8)

The previous fragment is merely representative of the allusive richness of the novel, which together with its power and audacity activate numerous critical and theoretical possibilities centered on narratology and literary history, like all outstanding novels. First among them is the novel’s unprejudiced revision of homogenic Boom tales from the 1960s, and then of its critique of Ecuadorian and Spanish-American criticism, or its absence or incompetence in reading their own literature as “national.” Chiriboga moves toward a space destined for the glories of world literature, but Cornejo includes a strain that criticism has not pointed out: the possibility of tension between the periphery in which Chiriboga grew up and the world he (famous and supposedly respected) and other peripheral subjects move in. In a scene based on Fuentes’ Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, Nuria Monclús relates an anecdote about “Jean Seberg,” who is pondering leaving “Carlos Fuentes” for Chiriboga or for a Mexican student rebel. Seberg says of the latter: “He smells, has rotten teeth, has no table manners, is gross, I am afraid he would hit me, and because of all that I find him indispensable” (2012, 61). Chiriboga is the Ecuadorian vulgarian and parvenu who clashes in a literary space that has become elitist and bourgeois, and becomes the noble savage the white Spanish-American parvenus need as a conscience. Seberg tells Fuentes: “Men like you bore me. I don’t want an author who is admired, decent, refined, and western. I can’t stand your Italian toothpaste or manners. You are the Mexican duplication of my husband, but he is more famous, more European, more civilized, more refined and a better writer than you” (61). In similar clashes with his own recreation Cornejo makes a crisis out of what could have been and what can only happen in fiction. But Las segundas criaturas is written meticulously and patiently, fictionalizing the topography of real cities, including numerous characters slightly made up or directly real (mainly writers, Donoso and Fuentes included), stacked like the proverbial Russian dolls or Chinese boxes so dear to the Boom writers, and enhanced by the prose of Enrique Vila-Matas and Augusto Monterroso, who appear in the novel. But above all, readers have to be reminded that Chiriboga is a pathological liar, which makes any authenticity and even the postmodern effect of the real and semiotic savvy in Cornejo’s novel even more complex. Ultimately Las segundas criaturas possesses an exact geometry that makes it vastly different from other metafictions by his contemporaries. His great contribution is that, like Abad Faciolince*’s Basura (2000, Garbage) and Eduardo Berti’s Todos los Funes (2004, All the Funes), Cornejo does not let his novel become solipsistic or smug. On the contrary, he problematizes literature with a greater twist. The novel is perhaps

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an alternative history of Ecuadorian narrative (Pablo Palacio and other avant-garde forerunners appear, as do canonical realists like Jorge Icaza and similarly “committed” writers), or a decompression of a stodgy landscape in which what James Wood calls “hysterical realism” prevails. That mode has allowed an unequal and multiethnic society to be represented through elementary and sweetened views of popular culture, through boring lives obsessed with complaining about living in the periphery, while adopting the consumer trends of postmodern hipsters. Those “themes” have made contemporary Ecuadorian narrative topical, predictable, and uncritical. But they have also allowed its very few deserters, Cornejo among them, to problematize that landscape, making it worth revisiting it with Las segundas criaturas, which refuses to engage in the “patriotic task” to make pedagogy out of fiction. Diego Cornejo has stated in various interviews that he has thoroughly read and agrees with the definitions of the novel proposed by Milan Kundera, who makes an appearance in Las segundas criaturas. It is possible that assertion is insufficient for his prose, which has become unpredictable in stories that continually contest specific forms. Cornejo, who reports he is writing a novel with political themes, insists on being open to all options, revisiting Western parameters for the novel, as can be ascertained in the literary essays and reviews collected in the “De la creación” (On Creation) section of Nux Vómica (297–390). But as one who still lives in his country, like other novelists in this book, he is aware that his art is more demanding, particularly when publishers, bookstores or literary agents do not seek writers like in the first world. Cornejo further seems unconcerned that his place among Ecuadorian and Spanish-American novelists is still in play, which may be why he was able to afford the luxury of creating a true counter canon, through a healthy irreverence that Chiriboga and his initial creators did not dare practice later in their careers. Antonio Villarruel

Works Cited Cornejo Menacho, Diego. Gato por liebre. Quito: Alfaguara, 2006. —Miércoles y estiércoles. Quito: Alfaguara, 2008. —Las segundas criaturas. Quito: Dinediciones, 2010. —Nux vómica. Antología muy personal 1987–2007. Quito: Paradiso Editores, 2011. —Las segundas criaturas. Madrid: Editorial Funambulista, 2012.

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Alonso Cueto Caballero (Peru, 1954) With La hora azul (2005) Alonso Cueto, already one of Peru’s most respected novelists—the Anna Seghers Preis and a Guggenheim Fellowship among his honors— came to the attention of international readers within and outside the Spanish-speaking world. Winner of the prestigious Herralde award, his novel was also named the best Spanish-language novel published between 2004 and 2005 by China’s National Publishing House, and to date has been translated into 13 languages, including English as The Blue Hour (2012). As with Santiago Roncagliolo’s* Red April (2009) and Ivan Thays’* Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro (2008, A Place Called Dog’s Ear), The Blue Hour details the violence that plagued Peru throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, to a greater degree than Roncagliolo’s and Thays’, Cueto’s novel deals with the role of the military in the deaths of nearly 70,000 persons during the insurgency led by the Shining Path. The protagonist Adrián Ormache is a successful lawyer, who is, on the surface, happily married to the beautiful and rich Claudia and father of two bright and welladjusted daughters. Like many of Cueto’s characters, Adrián, a pseudonym used by the first-person narrator, belongs to Lima’s upper middle class. In fact, he is clearly ensconced in the post-Fujimori Peruvian elite: “prominent members of congress like Carlos Ferrero and Lourdes Flores. [Former] President Belaúnde … They were good friends” (3). Adrián, however, experiences an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with his life, “this heaviness … this general ache,” and a repressed violent streak, a “desire to indulge in acts of wanton violence” (5, 6). This superficial personal equilibrium is upset by his mother’s death and the discovery that she had been paying a blackmailer. Adrián’s investigation leads him to discover the brutal and pervasive repression that his deceased (and distanced) military father had meted out in Huanta, a town on the outskirts of the city of Ayacucho. The novel shows that the violence was directed not only against the Shining Path, but especially against the region’s mostly indigenous civilian population. In particular, the elder Ormache had kidnapped and raped Miriam, a young woman who, unlike many of his other victims, had managed to escape the military base and remain alive. Adrián searches for her in Huanta, in the process uncovering the genocidal violence he had managed to ignore while developing his career in Lima: “I had seen death, poverty and cruelty, and considered them accidents of nature; fleeting moments in the lives of other people to be quickly set aside. Now they seemed to me like gifts I had not noticed before” (280). Cueto had already attempted to represent the dark side of Peru’s recent past in his previous and fifth novel, the thriller Grandes miradas (2003, Great Gazes). This novel is inspired by the real-life torture and murder of judge César Díaz Gutiérrez— Guido Pazos in the novel—by the national intelligence service run by Vladimiro Montesinos, President Alberto Fujimori’s all-powerful intelligence tsar. Indeed,

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Fujimori and Montesinos are characters in the novel, and passages are narrated from their points of view. (Cueto also claims that The Blue Hour is inspired by a real, though less generally known, story.) Mario Vargas Llosa, in a generally laudatory review, has pointed out that, perhaps, their “being too close to us,” explains why “the two most real characters in the novel [Fujimori and Montesinos] are the least realistic.” Nevertheless, Cueto’s novel successfully portrays the period’s brutality and venality. Although the novel narrates Gabriela’s (Pazos’s partner) attempt to murder Montesinos, Grandes miradas is Cueto’s version of a total novel. In fact, Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat are probable sources of inspiration. However, unlike its Vargas Llosian precedents, novels capable of self-sufficiently representing dictatorships as organic entities that responded to the needs of significant social groups and sectors of the population, Grandes miradas presents the Fujimori regime as artificial and detached from society, and, therefore, as inexplicable, even as the government controls and manipulates the country. The Blue Hour, which publisher Jorge Herralde describes as “a kind of diptych complemented by Grandes miradas,” shies away from attempting a total portrayal of the Shining Path rebellion and the concomitant military reaction (“Alonso Cueto narra”). If Grandes miradas is focalized through numerous perspectives, even Fujimori’s and Montesinos’, The Blue Hour looks at the horror from an ethical perspective of individual responsibility. (In fact, ethical considerations had understandably played a central role in the rejection of Fujimori’s regime in Grandes miradas). The novel’s conclusion has Adrián deciding to care for Miriam’s son, who may in fact be his brother, after her death. Adrián responds to the genocide made possible, in part, by Peru’s geographic, cultural and racial division, by literally becoming his brother’s keeper. The Blue Hour also has intertextual links with Cueto’s fourth novel Demonio del mediodía (1999, Midday Demon). Unlike Grandes miradas in which personal desires and goals are interrupted and ultimately subordinated to the unbearable Peruvian reality of the time, politics—from the 1989 end of Alan García’s corrupt government to Fujimori’s dictatorship with a democratic facade in the 1990s, the defeat of Vargas Llosa’s presidential candidacy in 1990, and the violence of The Shining Path—serve only as backdrop to a frustrated triangular romance. The novel is partly narrated by the three lawyers involved in this unachieved triangle: Ricardo Borda, like Adrián, successful and well-connected; his talented younger subordinate, Renato La Hoz, like Miriam, originally from Huanta; and the object of desire, Celia Carlessi, also a member of the same firm. The Blue Hour can thus be read as a chronological continuation of the earlier novels—since it deals with the aftermath of the violence of the 1990s—and as a synthesis of them by seamlessly fusing the personal with the political. Adrián’s “redemption quest,” to use Justin Warshaw’s description of The Blue Hour (21), and the ethics of reconciliation implicit in this and other of Cueto’s novels, has generated some backlash among critics. For instance, the noted novelist Miguel Gutiérrez, author of the acclaimed novel La violencia del tiempo (1991, The Violence

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of Time) sees in The Blue Hour a class based “seigneurial perspective,” an example of the “master’s pity at his serf ’s life” (421). By foregrounding Adrián’s point of view and story, Cueto avoids incorporating truly subaltern voices, and eschews any attempt at depicting a search for justice. Despite Cueto’s manifest intention, he would, in Gutiérrez’s view, be complicit with the mindset that made possible the brutal disregard for indigenous lives and human rights. One can argue that the novel gains considerably by being narrated by Adrián, blind to the violence taking place just out of his sight. However, this emotional and intellectual reclusion in job and family is not only a precondition that makes possible the violence of the military, but also is a very common response to even the most urgent social problems, not only in Peru. As has so often been noted about detective fiction, Adrián acts, in part, as a stand-in for readers who, like the narrator/protagonist, learn facts they may very well have wished to ignore. Moreover, the events uncovered in the narrative are violent crimes against the civilian population by the Peruvian military, which are directly adapted from the 2003 report published by the CVR (Truth and Reconciliation Commission). This fact grants The Blue Hour unusual political significance. Despite the Fujimori regime’s corruption—scathingly portrayed in Grandes miradas—its unabashed use of indiscriminate brutality in its repression of the Shining Path, and that both Fujimori and Montesinos are currently serving sentences for their crimes, there is still significant support for Fujimorismo. This support was evidenced by the virulent attacks on the CVR from much of the Peruvian media and, more recently, by the significant percentage of the vote received by Fujimori’s daughter Keiko during the 2011 run-off with Ollanta Humala. Cueto’s denunciation of the Fujimori regime, which, one must note, is accompanied by an explicit condemnation of the Shining Path, is even more admirable since he is one of the few major Peruvian writers who reside in Lima. The Blue Hour and Grandes miradas, as well as his three most recent novels, El susurro de la mujer ballena (2007, The Whale Woman’s Whisper), La venganza del silencio (2010, Silence’s Vengeance), and Cuerpos secretos (2012, Secret Bodies) are characterized by an adroit incorporation of thriller structures and techniques probably explained by Cueto’s earlier forays into crime fiction. One could even argue that most of his best narrative, including his short stories, makes use of thriller devices, even when no crime is present. In fact, two of his novels are outright crime fictions: Deseo de noche (1993, Desire at Night) and El vuelo de la ceniza (1994,The Flight of Ashes, rev. 2007). These works, though minor, gain much of their interest in the juxtaposition of plots and characters characteristic of the genre with Lima’s social customs. For instance, both novels include femmes fatales; El vuelo de la ceniza, a private detective and a serial killer. Deseo de noche provides a clear example of this purposeful dissonance between generic traits and the society described, when the protagonist introduces his femme fatale fiancée to his mother, thus presenting a clash between Lima’s traditionally tight knit family structures, and characters who respond to the more individualistic realities and fantasies of a genre which originated in the Englishspeaking world. Likewise, in El vuelo de la ceniza, the serial killer, whose family is

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originally from Canada, kills “dark skinned” women in a spree of misogynistic ethnic cleansing in which, paradoxically, he is the true minority (70). In addition to incorporating crime fiction techniques, which make it a real pageturner, The Blue Hour’s “conflation of Adrián’s personal trauma with his nation’s dark history” (Evans 15), allows it to be read as a renewed version of a “national romance,” novels that according to Doris Sommer fuse romantic and patriotic love by presenting interracial, interethnic or interclass romances as allegories for the constitution of a modern unified nation. The somewhat surprising romantic relationship established between Miriam and Adrián can best be understood as expressing, albeit in a more realistic vein, the genre’s desire for national reconciliation. In fact, it is tempting to read other aspects of the novel as allegorical, i.e., the allusion to the Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui in the directions Adrian must take to reach Miriam’s home: “the statue of Mariátegui where I had to turn left” (210). Despite this suggestive reference, The Blue Hour does not proclaim any explicit political message and calls for racial, cultural, and regional reconciliation rather than revolution. Cuerpos secretos also features an interracial and class-crossing romance, though with the genders switched: Lourdes de Schon, a married, white, upper-class, woman has a torrid love affair with Renzo Lozano Quispe, a mathematics professor originally from Cuzco. While the novel points out the racial and cultural differences between the lovers—even mentioning Andean myths collected by Father Jorge Lira—the principal distinction between them is one of class. In a dramatic conversation with Renzo’s mother, Lourdes notes: “I have had problems, but never real problems, the problems that threaten one’s life, the problems that kill people and make one suffer hunger and not know where to sleep or not have clothes to wear” (317). While the novel presents a clear overlap between race and class, it also shows this linkage as progressively dissolving as a consequence of the country’s economic boom. For instance, Vanessa, Renzo’s former lover, opens a successful restaurant and catering business, and moves into an upper class neighborhood. Even Renzo has entrepreneurial ambitions: he is planning on opening a school. Perhaps as a consequence of this undermining of class and cultural distinctions, Cuerpos secretos, unlike The Blue Light, concludes its national romance in an optimistic note. After visiting Lourdes, who is now living with Renzo and Milagros, her daughter from another affair, in Cuzco, Gerardo, Lourdes’s half-brother, looks up at the moon, and thinks about their common friends and family. He reflects: “They were all there, beneath that light, helping hold up Lourdes, and Renzo and Milagros” (375). If a history of ethnic violence frustrated Adrián’s and Miriam’s romance, apparently successful capitalist modernization would seem to create the conditions for the overcoming of the divisions that have plagued Peru. This concern with reconciliation, even if restricted to characters who belong to Lima’s upper middle class, is further developed in his other major novel, El susurro… . The novel is narrated by Verónica, a successful journalist in her early forties, who supplements her unsatisfactory home life—she has a boring, insecure husband and a doting son—with an attractive, though vacuous, lover. Her life is upended by the appearance of Rebeca, an obese former school classmate. Although in their adult relationship Rebeca behaves as a kind of stalker, Cueto slowly peels the

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layers of skin off their mysterious earlier relationship with a thriller-like tension that perhaps surpasses The Blue Hour’s. As in the previous novel, El susurro… is built on the discovery of and coming to grips with a tragic secret that dissolves the patina of success and sophistication which seems to characterize the protagonist’s life. In El susurro…, the mystery uncovered is a case of high-school bullying. Verónica and Rebeca’s reconciliation is much more than just narrative closure, since it is based on surmounting what are class-specific prejudices against those who look and behave differently. In fact, the ending of the novel, in which the self has incorporated the voice of the other, can be seen as the perfect summation of Cueto’s ethical concerns in this and his other novels. Verónica, after asking for Rebeca’s forgiveness, concludes the novel by writing: “She answers in a whisper. I think I can still hear her. I always hear her” (259). José Miguel Oviedo has praised the novel for the fact that despite “being a first person narration with a feminine voice, one immediately forgets that its creator is male” (67). However, Cueto has used female narrators in several of his works. His second novel, Demonio del mediodía, has passages narrated by Celia and the titular novella in El otro amor de Diana Abril (2002, Diana Abril’s Other Love) includes in alternate chapters a female-centered romantic thriller and first-person reflections on writing and living as a woman by the story’s putative author. Also some of the short stories included in his 1987 collection Los vestidos de una dama have female firstperson narrators, and sections of Grandes miradas, are focalized through Gabriela. El susurro… simply develops and perfects aspects of these earlier female-centered texts. As Oviedo notes, “it is not merely an entertaining novel, because it provides a profound study of its characters and conflicts, and the reality that surrounds it” (68). Although it has been translated into several languages, its lesser international profile than The Blue Hour may reflect the fact that the violence of the 1980s and 1990s has become the internationally preferred, if not expected, topic for Peruvian authors not named Vargas Llosa. La venganza… is, perhaps more than a whodunit, a family saga, in this case of the Hesse’s, owners of one of Peru’s mayor banks. Narrated by Antonio, grandson of the bank’s founder, who investigates his uncle’s killing, the novel concludes with his emotional acceptance of his family, despite the murder and betrayals he discovers. The novel ends with Antonio deciding to tell in the future the truth to his newborn son: “He’ll know all about them. He’ll learn to … know them. Perhaps, he’ll even learn to love them.” (319). Cueto has noted the inter-text to this novel is Henry James’s The American (“Alonso Cueto desnuda”), and critics such as Oviedo and Julio Ortega, among others have pointed out the strong presence of James, in particular in his early stories included in La batalla del pasado (1983, The Battle of the Past) and his first novel, El tigre blanco (1985, The White Tiger). These early texts are characterized by the influence of James in their precise, parsimonious, observation of human behavior, and in their characteristically cosmopolitan settings. (El tigre blanco is mostly set in New Orleans). Although James is clearly one of his major influences, the comparison with him is potentially misleading. Cueto’s mature style is more direct and punchier than

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James’, notorious for his labyrinthine sentences and narrative structures. Moreover, in the specific case of The American, James explores the cultural, ideological, and moral differences between Americans and Europeans. Despite the presence of Black Peruvian characters, any Jamesian concern with intercultural contact and strife is muted in La venganza… . Neither does James’s criticism of European nobility and its values as reactionary and self-destructive find a counterpart in La venganza …, which, as we have seen, concludes in acceptance and reconciliation. A closer cultural analogue to Cueto than James would be Woody Allen. If Allen is the cinéaste laureate of New York City, at least before he started making movies in Europe, after his first novel and short stories, Cueto has become the narrator of Lima in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Like Allen, Cueto shows a predilection for protagonists who cover the social range of the middle class: lower (El vuelo de la ceniza, Deseo de noche, Grandes miradas), upper (The Blue Hour, El susurro…, Cuerpos secretos), and El demonio del mediodía includes characters who cover the whole middle-class spectrum. Cueto also exhibits an Allen-like prolificacy, publishing novels and short-story collections almost every other year, in addition to essays, a play, stories for young people, and a children’s book. Moreover, as is so often the case among filmmakers, his novels run the gamut of ambition from attempts at major artistic statements and social portrayals to detective novels. The author of two of the most accomplished Peruvian novels of the last decade, The Blue Hour and El susurro…, and one of Latin America’s true men of letters, in Cueto’s case the value of the totality of his writings is greater than the sum of its parts. Juan E. De Castro

Works Cited “Alonso Cueto narra los horrores de la sociedad peruana en su libro La hora azul.” El País. 13 December, 2005. Web. Cueto, Alonso. La batalla del pasado. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1983. —El tigre blanco. Lima: Ediciones Andinas, 1985. —Los vestidos de una dama. Lima: Peisa, 1989. —Deseo de noche. Lima: Apoyo, 1993. —Demonio del mediodía. Lima: Peisa, 1999. —El otro amor de Diana Abril. Lima: Peisa, 2002. —Grandes miradas. Lima: Peisa, 2003. —El vuelo de la ceniza. Lima: Seix Barral, 2007. —El susurro de la mujer ballena. Bogota: Editorial Planeta, 2007. —La venganza del silencio. Lima: Editorial Planeta, 2010. —The Blue Hour. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: William Heinemann, 2012. —Cuerpos secretos. Lima: Editorial Planeta, 2012. —“Alonso Cueto desnuda a la aristocracia limeña en La venganza del silencio.” El Comercio. August 8, 2010. Web. Evans, David. “Atonement.” Rev. of The Blue Hour. The Financial Times June 9, 2012. 15.

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Gutiérrez, Miguel. “La hora azul: una novela de la piedad.” El pacto con el diablo: Ensayos 1966–2007. Lima: Editorial San Marcos, 2007. 411–21. Ortega, Julio. “Limeños ofendidos.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 608 (February 2001). 126–8. Oviedo, José Miguel. “Un mundo jamesiano, pero propio.” Rev. of La batalla del pasado. www.alonsocueto.com —“Body and Soul.” Rev. of The Blue Hour. Letras Libres [Mexico] 74 (November 2007): 66–8. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Contra la amnesia.” El País January 11, 2004. Web. Warshaw, Justin. “Redemption Quest.” Rev. of The Blue Hour. Times Literary Supplement July 6, 2012. 21.

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Jorge Franco Ramos (Colombia, 1962) Like other recent Colombian authors, the novels of Jorge Franco Ramos have had their visibility augmented due to film adaptations. Franco joins several peers in this respect: Barbet Schroeder received great public and critical acclaim for his film Our Lady of the Assassins (2000), based on the novel of the same name by Fernando Vallejo. Sergio Cabrera with his 2005 film version of Santiago Gamboa’s* Perder es cuestión de método (1993, Losing is a Matter of Method), and Andy Baiz with his 2007 adaptation of Mario Mendoza’s Satanás (2002, Satan), achieved similar success. Franco’s second novel, Rosario Tijeras (1999), and his third, 2001’s Paraíso Travel (Paradise Travel, 2006) have been adapted into film, the first by Emilio Maillé, in 2005, the second by Simon Brand in 2008, respectively. The commercial successes of Rosario Tijeras, a true best seller translated into several languages, as well as that of the film version, led Carlos Gaviria to transform it into a television soap opera Rosario Tijeras. Amar es más difícil que matar (2010, Rosario Tijeras. Loving Is Harder than Killing). In 2010, Miguel Urrutia adapted his novel Melodrama (2006) to the stage, making notable use of audiovisual resources. It is not far-fetched to see in the ease with which Franco’s novels have been adapted into film the influence of his professional training: after finishing his literary studies at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Franco studied at the London International Film School. The language of film has influenced his writing. For instance, his novels make frequent use of flashbacks. His novels also reflect some of Colombia’s social problems, some of which are perhaps more easily incorporated into film and of greater interest to an international readership, such as paid assassins and drug trafficking in Rosario Tijeras, or immigration to the U.S. in Paradise Travel. Franco’s flirtation with crime fiction and his use of its codes and structures (Rosario Tijeras won the Dashiell Hammett Award at the Gijón Crime Fiction Festival in Spain), and his concern with plotting and taste for melodrama also bolster the interest in his texts on the part of the filmmaking community. Franco’s literary career began in 1996, when he published the stories collected in Maldito amor (Damn Love) which won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa Pedro Gómez Valderrama. His first novel, Mala noche (1997, Bad Night), ignored at the time, already exhibits many of the traits found in his later texts: the presence of strong female characters that take charge of their own lives, the interest in the nightlife and criminal elements, and the impact on individual life of Colombia’s history of violence and social marginalization. But it will be only with the publication of Rosario Tijeras that he will achieve commercial success. If Mala noche dealt with prostitution and violence against women (not only linked to the brothel, but also within an upper-class family from which Brenda, the protagonist decides to escape), Rosario Tijeras presents a female protagonist who has

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suffered childhood sexual abuse and, after having revenged herself on her molester by castrating him, becomes a hired assassin and a prostitute. The novel can be classified as an example of the sicaresque (from sicario, hired assassin), which following the Golden Age precedent of the picaresque, presents the hired assassin as hero or anti-hero. Like the pícaro, the sicario is poor and attempts to climb socially by means of the money received from the druglords for committing murders. Like the pícaro, the sicario is the consequence of social violence and marginalization to which, paradoxically, the hired assassin contributes. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, studies from historical and sociological perspectives on the hired assassins and their literary correlate, the sicaresque, have proliferated. Other voices have risen against this celebration of hired assassins in several Colombian novels, arguing that it is necessary to reclaim an ethical awareness of the plight of their victims. Thus, in Oblivion: A Memoir, Héctor Abad Faciolince* has explored an anti-sicaresque genre in which the victims, not their executioners, are the protagonists, and in an essay in Palabras sueltas (2002, Loose Words) he adds: “The sicaresque is a local literary fad which shows not the poverty of our narrative, but rather the poverty of our reality. It is only short lived stories of street thugs. It is difficult however to demand chastity from a literature born in a brothel” (216). In Rosario Tijeras, as well as in Vallejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins and other sicaresque novels, one finds the confrontation between two worlds—center and periphery—that coexist within the same city, Medellin. In Franco’s novel, even more so than in Vallejo’s, the reader is made to sympathize with the assassin, thanks to the point of view and the version of the events presented by the narrator, Antonio. He belongs to a different social environment to that of Rosario, who seductively enters it. As María Fernanda Lander notes, the narrator feels culpable for the events that have led to Rosario Tijeras’s death, which commences the novel (173), thus causing the reader to sympathize with her without considering her crimes or her lack of remorse (173). The novel, thus, ennobles the outlaw in a romantic manner. This aura reflects, to a degree, the communal mythification of these social actors, in whom are imbricated “innocence and malice, the fragility and the intensity of their lives as assassins, and finally, the coexistence of love and death, which echoes 19th century Romantic traits” (Pobutsky 567). The novel’s beginning leaves no doubt about how this conjunction of Eros and Thanatos structures Rosario’s character: “Ever since Rosario had been shot at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she had confused the pain of death with that of love” (Rosario Tijeras 9). Given these romantic echoes, it is of interest to note the filiation critics have established between Rosario Tijeras and the nineteenth-century sentimental novel (Jácome 148). If María, the homonymous character of Colombian author Jorge Isaacs’s novel, was the paradigm of the angelic woman of the late nineteenth century, Rosario Tijeras can be considered as its negating correlate in the late twentieth century. Both stories are narrated retrospectively by their lovers once the heroine is dead or almost dead. Efraín in María, Antonio in Rosario Tijeras), reveal the impossible nature of a love that

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is surrounded by premonitions or indications of death. The novel claims that Rosario’s kisses taste “like a dead person’s” (167), which given that it is in the final passage, is charged with thanatophilic connotations. Moreover, she is a flat character, with no psychological depth, defined instead by the effects she causes among those around her. The novel represents the process by which the assassin is transformed into a myth; a hero for the inhabitants of Medellin’s poor neighborhoods. This process resembles that experienced by the best-known Colombian drug lord: Pablo Escobar. In the novel, “Rosario Tijeras for President, Pablo Escobar for Vice President” is written on the walls of her neighborhood (73). Like Brenda and Rosario, Reina is the prime mover of the action in Paradise Travel. Motivated by the “American Dream,” Reina convinces her boyfriend Marlon to travel illegally to the U.S., through Central America and Mexico. This narrative situation permits Franco to exhibit the difficulties faced by poor Colombians who decide to emigrate, as well as the abuses associated with the racket of illegal migration. Evidently the novel’s title is ironic. The North American paradise with which the immigrants attempt to replace the hell of Medellin ends up resembling a place of punishment when one is an undocumented Latin American. To Reina’s personal lack of center is added her isolation from alien cultural values (Valero 151). One of Paradise Travel’s main attractions is its focus on the migrant subject and the reproduction of what anthropologists have called “moving roots.” In fact, Reina’s and Marlon’s story and their departure from Colombia for the U.S. is told by the latter, later, as he travels from New York to Miami in search of Reina from whom he has become separated after entering the country. It is a novel that belongs to those studied by Luz Mary Giraldo under the rubric of writings of displacement and which she considers to be a constant presence throughout the history of Colombian literature. The migratory phenomenon described by Franco is no longer the one that leaves the countryside for the city due to the violence of the 1950s, as is still the case in Laura Restrepo’s*A Tale of the Dispossessed (2001), nor of the arrival of European immigrants to Colombia. Instead he relates the story of the immigrant who attempts to reach the U.S., find a job, and get work papers. Franco broaches the topic of Colombian identity under the aegis of what Ángel Rama termed transculturation, pertinent to a time in which territory and identity do not necessarily coincide. As Camacho Delgado notes, “Colombian and Latin American identity are reinforced when faced with the homogenizing pressure of the Anglo world” (104). After exploring Medellin and New York, Franco added the space of Paris, in his fourth novel, Melodrama. The overwhelming presence of death, a characteristic of his first two novels, resurges in the character of Vidal, who writes from within death itself and also addresses himself, on occasion, to his dead mother Perla. As was the case with Rosario’s tale, in Vidal’s story love and death are juxtaposed, when Perla mistakes a cancerous tumor on his neck with the traces of a kiss. By means of the description of the life of a family, the novel traces a fresco of contemporary Colombia, from the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, to Escobar’s death in 1993, including the Violence of the 1950s and the era of the National Front (1958– 74). It is a portrait characterized by the disruption of the family, and by the general

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themes of ambition, vanity, lust, and greed. Melodrama belongs to the sphere of the family (marriage, incest, death, adultery, sexual abuse, family problems of all type); but also more broadly to the entirety of the nation’s recent history. Melodrama’s labyrinthine structure is composed of several superimposed stories that belong to different historical periods. In a similar manner, natural catastrophes are superimposed: “an earthquake destroyed an entire city, a flood swept away five towns, a mudslide buried those who lived nearby” (264). Catastrophes caused by human action are also superimposed: “a bomb exploded nearby, another there, one destroyed a newspaper, another brought down a plane, a bus full of dynamite killed seventy and wounded six hundred, they killed Galán in a public square full of people, and as thousands watched, five hundred were killed when the United States invaded Panama in search of only one man” (321). This is a kind of pandemic which frustrates all projects, whether individual or collective. The unnamed evil which haunts the country is finally described as a monster “who ate the country and picked clean our bones” (264). The monster is also AIDS, from which the protagonist suffers and which kills him. Franco’s interest in female characters continues in both Melodrama and Santa suerte (Holy Luck, 2010). The difficulties faced in trying to get ahead in life, frequently the result of their gender, establish a connection among Franco’s female characters, from Brenda, Rosario, and Reina, in his first novels, to Perla in Melodrama and Jennifer, Amanda, or Leticia in Santa suerte. Their stories, tragic in the early novels, ascend to being tragi-comic in his last two, because although he shows us their dramas—frustrations, anxieties, self-destructiveness, and suicides—the last two novels also include much humor and irony. In them, melodrama prevails, foregrounding what Carlos Monsiváis called the power of fatality. The presence of melodrama in Franco’s extensive fictions links them to the telenovela, one of Colombia’s and for that matter Latin America’s most successful cultural exports. This melodramatic aspect together with the tendency to “narrate Latin America’s social ills and to offer marginal characters tailored for mass consumption” (Herrero-Olaizola 43), is a particular characteristic of Rosario Tijeras and is more or less present in his other novels. But Franco has also garnered acclaim from the most respected literary novelists in the Spanish-speaking world. Gabriel García Márquez said, of Rosario Tijeras, “This is one of the Colombian authors I would like to pass the torch to.” In his Piedra de toque column in Madrid’s El País, Mario Vargas Llosa praised Franco’s ingenuity and vivid language, and recommended Rosario Tijeras to those “with an appetite on the subject of the sicarios.” As another proof of the esteem in which he is held by sectors of the World Republic of Letters, Gregory Rabassa, the premier North American translator of Latin American writing, translated Rosario Tijeras. If for some, Franco is simply a purveyor of bestsellers, a representative of what has been called in Latin America “light” literature, for others he possesses a consummate ability to move easily between the highbrow and the popular, in Vargas Llosa’s words, “avoiding the frivolity of ‘light literature’.” Catalina Quesada

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Works Cited Camacho Delgado, José Manuel. “Fronteras con espinas. El sueño neoyorquino en Paraíso Travel de Jorge Franco.” Con-Textos. Revista de Semiótica Literaria 19.39 (2007): 99–111. Franco Ramos, Jorge. Mala noche. Bogota: Plaza y Janés, 1997. —Paraíso Travel. Bogota: Seix Barral, 2001. —Rosario Tijeras: A Novel. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. —Melodrama. Bogota: Planeta Colombiana, 2006. —Santa suerte. Bogota: Planeta Colombiana, 2010. Giraldo, Luz Mary. “Narradores colombianos y escrituras del desplazamiento. Indicios y pertinencias en una historia social de la literatura.” Revista Iberoamericana 74.223 (2008): 423–39. Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro. “ ‘Se vende Colombia, un país de delirio’: el mercado literario global y la narrativa colombiana reciente.” Symposium 61.1 (2007): 43–56. Jácome, Margarita. La novela sicaresca. Testimonio, sensacionalismo y ficción. Medellin: EAFIT, 2009. Lander, María Fernanda. “La voz impenitente de la ‘sicaresca’ colombiana.” Revista Iberoamericana 73.218 (2007): 165–77. Pobutsky, Aldona B. “Romantizando al verdugo: las novelas sicarescas Rosario Tijeras y La virgen de los sicarios.” Revista Iberoamericana 76.232–3 (2010): 567–82. Valero, Silvia. “Descentramiento del sujeto romántico en la narrativa de migraciones colombianas.” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 15 (2004): 135–54.

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Santiago Gamboa (Colombia, 1965) Santiago Gamboa is one of a number of young Colombian authors whose work has obtained both national and international recognition in the last two decades. He has won numerous prizes for his gritty take on the realities of a nation profoundly transformed not only by armed political conflict and the international drugs trade, but also by urbanization, globalization, and with these, the generation of spectacular new forms of both wealth and social exclusion. Since completing studies in literature in Colombia and Europe, Gamboa has worked as a journalist and held diplomatic positions abroad. He started to write novels at 35 (Mejía Rivera, 160), and has drawn on these experiences in order to forge a distinctly global perspective on his native country that frees him from the compulsion to write about Colombia alone. They are notably reworked in fictional form in a number of works: Vida feliz de un joven llamado Esteban (2000, The Happy Life of a Young Man Called Esteban), a bildungsroman about a young Colombian’s literary and sentimental education in Europe, and later, in the prize-winning El síndrome de Ulíses (2005, The Ulysses Syndrome), a more polyphonic novel on the Orwellian hardships of immigrant life in Paris. After his first work, Páginas de vuelta (1995, Returning Pages), which is composed of three writerly stories that eventually come together, Gamboa was featured in an explosive collection of stories by young Latin American authors, McOndo (1996). That volume challenged, among other things, the expectation that Latin Americans write about their nations in the magical realist style of Gabriel García Márquez that would later be popularized as exotic airport fiction by authors like Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel. Although he would break with the short-lived McOndo movement, much of his work can be read as an extension of the collection’s conviction that the parochial mythical universe of García Márquez’s Macondo has been swept away by the realities of a neo-liberal world order in which “MacDonald’s, Macs and Condos, as well as five-star hotels and gigantic malls built with laundered money” are becoming ubiquitous (Fuguet and Gomez 1996; Fuguet 2001), and in which nation and state are relentlessly uncoupled by flows of global capital (see O’Bryen 2011). His most successful novel, Perder es cuestión de método (1997, Losing is a Matter of Method), has been translated into French, German, Czech, and Italian, and was made into a feature film by Sergio Cabrera in 2004. Both novel and film take us into the underworld of Bogota at the end of the millennium as Víctor Silanpa (a hack journalist and self-styled private-investigator) unravels a complex web of violence, political corruption and intimidation surrounding various efforts to gain access to the title deeds of a piece of undeveloped land. Gamboa’s development of the thriller (novela negra) genre allows him to engage with endemic social problems without recourse to an erudite literary idiom, as with the bibliophile Edgar Miret Supervieille in Necrópolis

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(2009, Cemetery). In this manner he succeeds in capturing the heartbeat of urban life in the Colombian capital. Yet the novel can also be read as a postmodern pastiche both of the conventional whodunit and of the “hardboiled” detective thriller, giving expression to the view of our current age as an age of postmodern disenchantment with grand narratives of progress, revolution, and development. The appearance of a horrifically impaled corpse at the novel’s outset thus leads Silanpa to the mysterious disappearance of the “original” title deeds pertaining to the land on which it is found. In place of these deeds there circulates a series of forgeries and counterfeits, signaling, among other things, the collapse of foundational narratives under the weight of global capital and the loss of those sacred, political and moral “metanarratives” capable of giving meaning to contemporary life. Gamboa later developed his appeal to the writer-as-detective in El síndrome de Ulises, Necrópolis, which was translated into English as Necropolis in 2012, and most recently, Plegarias nocturnas (2012, Night Prayers). In these, we see a movement away from uniquely national themes and a greater interest in the lives of Colombian and other migrants and exiles around the globe, respectively in Paris, China, Israel, and Thailand. This movement is evinced in Hotel Pekín (2008), whose protagonist Francisco Munévar renounces all attachments to his native Colombia before setting out, under the identity of Frank Michalski, to instruct Chinese businessmen in the ways of the West. In later novels we also see an increased skepticism regarding the novel’s role in bringing about social justice, one that is shared by authors across Latin America. As Glen S. Close notes in “The Detective is Dead. Long live the novela negra!,” contemporary Latin American thrillers increasingly decentre “the melancholic modern detective subject” by focussing on “new, abject postmodern subjects characterized by their affectlessness, their consumerist depoliticization and their guiltless and alarmingly free exercise of violence” (155). In Perder es cuestión de método, the writer-as-detective strives to stand in for a state apparatus that is both incapable of righting social wrongs and flagrantly complicit with the violence generated by global capital under the conditions of an unfinished modernity. Yet he is finally thwarted in his efforts to expose such wrongs. As a ‘loser’ he thus comes to symbolize the decline of the historic role of the Latin American writer as arbiter of social and political realities. More importantly, however, his status as a loser is clearly a reflection of the sense that local instances of crime are the expression of the much more ubiquitous and powerful workings of late capitalism. As one character comments to Silanpa in the novel, the machinations of an investment corporation significantly called “LargeCapital” make the figure of the most feared of local mafia bosses, Heliodoro Tiflis, look like “Little Lulu” (276). In El síndrome de Ulises the writer-detective’s search yields only a few unfortunate ironies, but nothing substantial about the disappearance of its most enigmatic character, Néstor Suárez Miranda. In Plegarias nocturnas, the writer-detective is a consul who discovers, in his efforts to reunite a quasi-incestuous brother and sister, a criminal network linking paramilitaries and drug traffickers in Colombia under the presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002–10) to prostitution and sex tourism in Thailand.

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Like the work of his friend and fellow Colombian, Mario Mendoza, he therefore leads us into the globalization of the sort of crime that once seemed unique to Bogota and Colombia in his earlier works (see Mejía Rivera). As the protagonist of Mario Mendoza’s crime thriller, Scorpio City puts it, “We will never be like Paris or New York, rather things will go the other way. Every day those cities begin to look a little more like Bogota, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. We are the future. That is our difficult privilege” (166). Stylistically speaking, Gamboa’s work is beset by a salient and unresolved tension. On the one hand it revels in a kind of dirty, even “monstrous,” realism, that takes the form of a fascination with all that which upsets good old bourgeois sensibilities: prostitution, drugs, sex (lots of it, as with the Italian porno actress Sabina Vedovelli in Necrópolis) and a freak-show-like array of social misfits all of whose existence challenges belletrist paradigms. At times, especially where sex is concerned, these darker realities run the risk of bolstering flagrantly nationalist and racial stereotypes (a paradox that is particularly notable in novels like El síndrome de Ulises, which aims to chart the breakdown of the immigrant’s psyche, and with it, the exilic subject’s reinvention of national identity abroad). At others these realities seem to call out for new paradigms of representation, leading Gamboa to experiment with the thriller (as noted above), the personal diary, and more recently, the language of graffiti, blogging and social networking (Manuel Manrique in Plegarias nocturnas is a budding graffiti artist, and there is a mysteriously-named blogger, ‘InterNeta’, who issues quasi-apocalyptic communiqués throughout). Yet despite the apparent break with high culture, there is a compulsive, almost obsessive amount of high-literary citation at work in his novels, and in his still uncollected journalism. This procedure borders on gratuitous namedropping, especially when it appears—in flagrant contradiction of his interest in social exclusion—to be surprisingly shared by characters from across the social spectrum. This unresolved tension suggests both a deep-seated dissatisfaction with a world from which the gods of high literature have departed and a melancholic desire to resuscitate these gods at the expense of the new realism that has been instrumental in their demise. Rory O’Bryen

Works Cited Close, Glen S. “The Detective is Dead. Long live the novela negra!,” in Craig-Odders et al., (eds) Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction. London: McFarland and Co., 2006. 143–61. Fuguet, Alberto. “Magical Neoliberalism.” Foreign Policy 125 (2001). 66–73. ____ and Sergio Gómez, (eds) McOndo. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996. Gamboa, Santiago [1995]. Páginas de vuelta. Bogota: Editorial Planeta, 2003. —Perder es cuestión de método. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 1997. —[2000]. Vida feliz de un joven llamado Esteban. Madrid: Suma de Letras, 2002.

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—[2005]. El síndrome de Ulises. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2009. —Hotel Pekin. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2008. —Necrópolis. Bogota: Editorial Norma, 2009. —Plegarias nocturnas. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2012. Mejía Rivera, Orlando. “Santiago Gamboa.” La generación mutante. Nuevos narradores colombianos. Manizales: Universidad de Caldas, 2001. 135–61. Mendoza Z., Mario. Scorpio City. Bogota: Seix Barral, 1998. O’Bryen, Rory. “McOndo, Magical Neoliberalism and Latin American Identity.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30.1 (March 2011). 158–74.

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Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia, 1967) In early 2008 Edmundo Paz Soldán published a short story on his blog, Río Fugitivo. The story, titled “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”) and dedicated to Julio Cortázar and Ryan Adams, appears to be an abbreviated version of the classic story, with the brother and sister dealing with the unknown others who take over the house, turning into a pair in a much more ambiguous relationship in a house that seems more unambiguously haunted than the original. The story is prefaced by a YouTube video of the song “This House is Not for Sale” by the alt-country singer Adams. When we examine the story in the light of the video, we see that the Paz Soldán rewriting is, in fact, a mashup of the Cortázar story and the Adams song, with a Menardian repetition of the original story mixing with translated phrases from the song (Brown “Parques tomados”). The story is as much about the sampling and combining of various cultural elements as it is about a house taken over. While this story appeared quite recently, its use of strategies more often associated with blogs and DJ-created music provides a way to think about the Bolivian writer’s overarching strategies in a career that spans nearly twenty years, nine novels and various collections of short stories, critical books and anthologies. Paz Soldán was born in Cochabamba, studied in Argentina in the late 1980s and then moved to the U.S. to attend the University of Alabama, Huntsville on a soccer scholarship. His interest in writing began early, with Paz Soldán dedicating himself to his writing in Argentina first and then even more so in the U.S. after suffering an athletic injury. His narrative production begins in 1990 with the publication of Máscaras de la nada (Masks of Nothingness), a collection of short stories and followed by the novel Días de papel (1992, Paper Days). His short story “Dochera” about a writer of crossword puzzles won the 1997 Juan Rulfo prize, and his 2003 novel El delirio de Turing (Turing’s Delirium, 2006) about codebreakers and antiglobalist hackers in neoliberal Bolivia won the Bolivian National Book Award that year. His reputation began to build in the mid 1990s with a combination of early awards and his inclusion in Alberto Fuguet*’s McOndo anthology, a presence that converted him into a leading spokesperson for the group as he was the only writer then currently living in the U.S. and the object, therefore, of much of the newspaper and magazine stories written about the loosely affiliated group of writers. Interest in Paz Soldán was also helped by the political topics present in his writings, an interest not expected nor developed in the work of other McOndo writers. In the meantime, he had begun his Río Fugitivo series of novels, beginning with the eponymously titled novel in 1998 and including Sueños digitales (2000, Digital Dreams), La materia del deseo (2001, The Matter of Desire, 2003), and Turing’s Delirium. In this series, he explores a contemporary Bolivia dealing with the neoliberalism of the 1990s in the unique situation

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of having elected a former dictator, a President Montenegro obviously patterned on Hugo Banzer. The novels take place in a fictitious city Río Fugitivo, based loosely on Cochabamba and are marked with an interest in the tensions between the importations of digital technologies: computers, cell phones, image manipulation software, and the poverty and underdevelopment still rampant in Bolivia. Following that series, he moved his focus to the capital with a book on speechwriters and the 2000 water wars called Palacio Quemado (2006, Burnt Palace) and then two books based mainly in the U.S. exploring the True Crime genre with Los vivos y los muertos (2009, The Living and the Dead) and Norte (2011, North) without abandoning completely the fiction that he has cultivated over his career. In between these novels, Paz Soldán has also published various collections of short stories. Early on in his career he had begun to develop a kind of mashup aesthetic that arguably grows out of an interest in the linguistic implications of crossword puzzles seen first in “Dochera,” in which the main character develops a new language based on the crosswords he writes as he attempts to send messages to a woman. Crosswords as code appear developed again in The Matter of Desire in which a Bolivian professor trained in the U.S. returns to his home country to explore his father’s leftist experiences in the 1960s. The image of new, powerful meanings appearing at the junction of hitherto unrelated words becomes a key to understanding Paz Soldán’s juxtapositions of pop culture, politics, and information technology in his writing (Brown “Los crucigramas”; Pergoux-Baeza; López). Another key image for understanding his approach to fiction appears in the beginning line of Sueños digitales, the first to receive marked attention in academic criticism. The novel follows Sebastián, a graphics designer in Río Fugitivo, expert in the digital manipulation of photographs and working for an Internet magazine. The line reads: “It all began with the head of Che and the body of Raquel Welch” (2000: 13). The line refers to a game that Sebastián has invented for his employer that consists of the readers’ guessing the identity of the contributing parts of the image. Sebastián is later hired by Montenegro to alter the photographic evidence of the dictator cum president’s criminal past. The novel has been studied on a variety of levels, its political engagement, theories of photography, its articulation of posthuman identity, to name a few (Brown Cyborgs; Montoya Juárez “Ni apocalípticos…”; Ramos). The splicing of the image at the beginning also shows this same kind of crossword aesthetic, joining various cultural expressions in the construction of the hybrid reality the Bolivian author explores. In the case of these two they not only create a ridiculous image, they put into conjunction two individuals already linked by Bolivia, Guevara dying there and Welch’s Bolivian ancestry. Furthermore, they join Paz Soldán’s two driving interests in the novel, politics and popular culture, the power of Guevara’s message alongside the power of Welch’s sexualized pop image. Finally, it invokes another of his continuing interests, the mix of high and low culture, to use an oft-employed but rather limited and unfortunate descriptor for the varieties of cultural production (Tarica). In this case, we move from the Guevara/Welch mix to the phrasing of the line, a line that seems inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s beginning line for “Tlón, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”: “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”

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Indeed, much of the philosophies with which the Argentine writer plays in that story come to bear on Paz Soldán’s meditations and explorations of identity as our ability to perceive our world and document our pasts are destabilized by digital technology. The novel continues along in that vein, with a Baudrillardean accumulation of simulacra in search of referents that many times merely fall away. We see references to porn stars, television shows, video games and literature accumulate as the very real world of corruption and politics in post-dictatorship and neoliberal Bolivia co-exists with the quotidian consumption of popular culture made available through the ubiquity of digital technology. These connections between the virtual and the real appear as Sebastián imagines the head of Fox Mulder, the protagonist of the 1990s TV series, The X-Files, on the bodies of people with whom he interacts, as lines from Philip Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep suggest themselves within Montenegro’s power center, and we know characters only by their computer names (Lara Croft or Pixel). While the novel is as much a political thriller as it is a consideration of these then-new technologies, its very narrative reality emerges from the conjunctions of literature, television, film, video games and photography that saturate the novel. Turing’s Delirium gives another such example on a more complex landscape. The novel follows the intertwining stories of several individuals in Bolivia whose lives revolve around code breaking and hacking in one way or another. Miguel Saenz, nicknamed Turing, is a cryptanalyst for Montenegro’s Black Chamber, an intelligence agency that has survived both iterations of the dictator/president’s regime. Albert is a moribund former Nazi modeled on Klaus Barbie who rambles deliriously from his deathbed about his role in establishing Bolivian intelligence. Kandinsky is an antiglobalist hacker running a group of hacktivists who are being investigated by the Black Chamber. The novel also includes Saenz’s wife and daughter, a judge who is the relative of someone condemned to death in the 1970s because of Saenz’s work decoding communiqués between “subversives,” and various others. The novel is many things: an exploration of the guilt of the government functionaries who survive regimes and just do their jobs, regardless of who holds power; an assessment of the power of globalism and neoliberalism in the construction of an evolving Bolivian culture; and a consideration of the evolving nature of human identity when immersed in an ever-present technological landscape. The novel begins with three epigraphs that exhibit the kind of mixing that we have observed in his other work so far, with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III, one from Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and one from science fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, all three developing the ideas of codes, transfers of information and surveillance. The combination of these three in particular show how Paz Soldán continually crosses high and low culture, creating literary dialectics wherein the juxtaposition of the most canonical writers with cyberpunk novels produces zones of creative interaction and a reconfiguring of the literary aesthetic experience. This move is made more powerful by the fact that Stephenson’s novel uses the Borges story to great effect in a narrative that provided the framework for subsequent Internet games like Second Life and World of Warcraft.

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The mixing of epigraphs, the sampling of these authors, also provides a framework for understanding the structure of the novel itself. One finds, for example, in the ramblings of Albert, a series of borrowings from other texts. When Albert introduces himself, he quotes liberally, without attribution, the beginning of Borges’s “The Immortal” even as he names himself, again without attribution, an electric ant, after the Philip Dick short story of the same name. Albert serves as a connecting figure, his deathbed ramblings providing backstory for Saenz’s career even as he promiscuously combines history, mythology and literature in a delirium that casts Albert as a spirit of cryptography inhabiting historical figures and literary characters, sometimes simultaneously. This constant juxtaposition brings into relief the various other combinations, samples and mashups that run throughout the novel and the presentation of the various characters that navigate a neoliberal Bolivia coming apart at its digital seams. Paz Soldán’s most recent novel to date, Norte, while not overtly technological like his previous work, still collects and combines various levels of cultural and historical material as he elaborates a story of three Latin Americans adrift in the North at different moments. One is a Mexican artist Martín, interred in an insane asylum in 1950s California and based on the real life Martín Ramírez. A second character and the one who receives the most attention in the novel is a serial killer named Jesús, patterned on the notorious Mexican “Railroad Killer” Ángel Reséndiz, active during the 1980s and 1990s. The third character, in the present and fictional, is a former Bolivian graduate student (the descriptions of Spanish department culture are priceless) who now writes graphic novels. As she navigates her affair with an Argentine professor who is slowly losing his mind, she works on her latest work, a narrative that focuses on zombies, both as monster and metaphor. Paz Soldán executes a neat nesting move in by placing a work of speculative fiction within the realistic narrative that then provides a central metaphor that unites the otherwise unrelated characters. But it goes further than that, our writer of graphic novels digs in her sf crates like a hiphop DJ looking for samples as she creates her character. She muses, “That was the origin myth of my character. Neil Gaiman via the Transformers. It was also a meta-comic. The kind of comic that a former Ph.D. student can draw” (63). Later, she references Neil Gaiman again, “I reread the first volume The Sandman. Of those chapters, I was still impressed by the blue of ‘Sleep of the Just,’ the nightmarish background of ‘Imperfect Hosts,’ a phrase from ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’—Dream dream dreeeeam... whenever I want to... All I have to do... is... dreeeeam...–, the dark colors and the framing vignettes in ‘A Hope in Hell’.” (151–2). She models here the artist’s work on a consumer of popular culture, one who reads, listens, absorbs and then combines in her own artistic production, a DJ that samples various sources, mixes them and then produces. This kind of active, knowledgeable consumption of popular culture links up with a related aspect of sampling aesthetics, this time with the practice of “digging in the crates” in which DJs engage as a way for discovering the beats that they will use in the construction of their music. Over the course of his career, Paz Soldán has constructed novels that serve both as creative narratives made of pieces of popular culture, science fiction and literature as well as calling cards for the kind of “cool” associated with a type of cultural connoisseur-ship based on one’s knowledge of the genre.

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Mario Vargas Llosa, in a blurb that appears on the back of most of Paz Soldán’s novels has written: “Edmundo Paz Soldán is one of the best writers of the new generation.” Indeed, Paz Soldán serves as an essential figure in both Bolivian and Latin American narrative. As he has quite deftly extended many of the interests of his McOndo cohort (even as he has articulated a unique voice there), he has also set the narrative stage for a next generation of writers like Chilean Álvaro Bisama and Argentinean-American Mike Wilson Reginato who have extended on Paz Soldán’s examples in their early production. As these and other new writers go ever further in their incorporation of various levels of cultural production, they look to the continuing example of Bolivia’s most distinguished living novelist. J. Andrew Brown

Works Cited Brown, J. Andrew. “Los crucigramas de Edmundo Paz Soldán.” Otro lunes 4 (September 2008). Web. —Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. —“Edmundo Paz Soldán and his Precursors: Borges, Dick and the SF Canon.” Science Fiction Studies 34 (November 2007): 473–83. —“Parques tomados: Julio Cortázar y Edmundo Paz Soldán.”Fisbach, 57–66. Fisbach, Erich, ed. Tradition et Modernité dans l’ouevre d’ Edmundo Paz Soldán. Angers: Angers University Press, 2010. —Escritura, reescritura y manipulación en la obra de Edmundo Paz Soldán.” Fisbach, 37–46. López, Pierre. “La materia del deseo o la memoria en crucigrama.” Fisbach, 95–106. Montoya Juárez, Jesús. “Escritura, imagen y realidad virtual en El delirio de Turing.” Fisbach, 133–44. —“Ni apocalípticos ni integrados: medios audiovisuales en tres narradores del Sur de América.” in TecnoEscritura: Literatura y tecnología en América latina. J. Andrew Brown, ed. Revista Iberoamericana 73. 220 (Julio 2007): 887–902. —“La narrativa de Edmundo Paz Soldán o cómo llegamos a ser Sueños digitales.” Revista electronica de estudios filológicos. 13 (July 2007). Web. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. Sueños digitales. La Paz: Alfaguara, 1999. —El delirio de Turing. La Paz: Alfaguara, 2003. —“Casa tomada.” Río fugitivo, January 15, 2008. Web. —Norte. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2011. Pergoux-Baeza, Catherine. “Laredo, un crucigramista desdichado. Una lectura de ‘Dochera,’ de Edmundo Paz Soldán.” Fisbach, 73–80. Ramos González, Rosario. “La ‘fábula electrónica’: Respuestas al terror político y las utopías informáticas en Edmundo Paz Soldán.” MLN 118 (2003): 466–91. Tarica, Estelle. “Fragments of a Dream: Che’s Image in Contemporary Bolivian Literature.” Chasqui 32.2 (November 2003): 96–114.

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Laura Restrepo (Colombia, 1950) Long revered by a loyal readership, Laura Restrepo has only begun to receive scholarly attention. She has now achieved the rare feat of reaching vast audiences both local and international, and both academic and general. Of major national and international standing, Restrepo is celebrated for the oblique focus she brings to recent and contemporary Colombian history, as well as for engaging with the wider panorama of Spanish-American political history. Translated into over 20 languages, and recognized by major international prizes and awards, Restrepo is not only a key figure of contemporary Colombian literature, but of Spanish-American as well as world literature today. Born in Bogota into a middle-class family well equipped with an abundant cultural and intellectual capital, Restrepo studied literature and philosophy at the prestigious private Universidad de los Andes before being assigned a teaching post at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Perpetuating a paternal tradition of self-driven intellectual curiosity, Restrepo veered from the academic path that awaited her to become involved in militant socialist activism through her contact with leftwing students. Leaving Colombia to join militant activists abroad would set a precedent for her recurrent future transnational mobility and her involvement in political struggle both within and beyond Colombia’s borders, firstly joining the Socialist Workers Party in Spain in the aftermath of the end of Franco’s reign and then militant groups in Argentina opposed to the military dictatorship. Upon returning to Bogota in the early 1980s, Restrepo began working as a political journalist, and her experience of militant activism and intimate knowledge of Colombia’s political climate led to her participation in pioneering peace negotiations in 1983 between Belisario Betancur’s government and leftwing guerrilla groups (mainly the M–19). That involvement would have an immense personal and professional impact, leading to her subsequent six-year exile in Madrid, then Mexico, and to the publication of her first book on the eventual failure of the peace negotiations to achieve their aim, Historia de una traición (1986, History of a Betrayal). The original title was changed to Historia de un entusiasmo (1999, History of an Enthusiasm) in the second edition, reflecting the optimism with which the first negotiations were hailed in the climate of escalating violence in the mid–1980s. Initially intended for publication as a series of 34 newspaper articles recounting the development and eventual collapse of those negotiations, Historia de una traición set a precedent for all of Restrepo’s subsequent works. From a journalistic impetus of investigation and witness, her fiction and nonfiction testify to periods of (predominantly Colombia’s) recent political history, and seek to disseminate this information through their accessible style, thus inscribing herself into a wider tradition in Latin American writing that is both political and plot-driven (Boldy 2012). Historia de una traición

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recounts the stages of the negotiations from a perspective of personal involvement and evidently increasing sympathy for the M–19 and a sense of betrayal towards the government that failed to respect ceasefire agreements, assassinating guerrillas who had laid down their weapons. Written in a state of urgency upon her sudden flight to Madrid after receiving threats following the breakdown of negotiations, the didactic drive of this first book seeks to provide a detailed and vivid account of the background and context of the negotiations and their principal protagonists. Largely overlooked by critics, Historia de una traición establishes one of the principal dilemmas that Restrepo encounters throughout her corpus: the negotiation of objectivity and subjectivity of the narrative voice. Restrepo’s second book, 1989’s La isla de la pasión (Isle of Passion, 2005), is similarly concerned with recounting a period of history in order to preserve it from cultural amnesia, although in this work her focus shifts to Mexican history—reflecting her engagement with the history and culture of the country in which she was living at the time—and her style more overly to fiction. Restrepo’s transition from journalism to fiction and the ongoing heterogeneity of her style reflect a pronounced tradition of the journalistic leanings of many Latin American writers, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Cristina Peri Rossi. Restrepo recounts actively searching for an undocumented historical period to unearth and narrativize in order to connect with the culture and history of the country that had become home while in exile. Characteristic of her approach of making up for the silences and omissions of historical archives, Restrepo imagines those missing details in order to bring the characters and episodes of historical records to life. Recounting the struggle for survival of a group of Mexican soldiers and their families left to their fate on the tiny Clipperton Island in the Pacific Ocean, long disputed over by the English, French, Mexican, and U.S. governments, Restrepo writes herself into a literary tradition of tales of adventure in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe, while staking out a space for herself in the literary representation of Mexican history. However, unlike Defoe’s eponymous hero, Restrepo’s heroes in La isla… are women, the wives of the soldiers, who are shown to be intelligent, resourceful, and highly socially organized, and through whose perseverance the whole island community finally manages to prevail. While immediately popular in the Spanish-speaking world, this novel received little media or critical attention abroad at the time of its publication, and had to wait until the publication of later, more high-profile novels to be translated into English and to receive the acclaim it so richly deserves. 1993’s Leopardo al sol (Leopard in the Sun, 1999), Restrepo’s subsequent novel, lauded in Spain (Marco 2001) if not universally (Håkansson 2010), relates the drama of two rival families from the criminal underworld who menace an entire community in Colombia’s La Guajira peninsula. The dialogue-heavy, fast-paced plot is related in two narrative strands. The retrospective narration of the two warring families, whose ill-begotten fortune is only exceeded by the bad taste and recklessness with which they dispense it, is interspersed with the present-day reminiscence of elderly villagers who recall the conflicts of the past. Often compared to García Márquez’s News of a Kidnapping, which appeared shortly after Leopardo… and similarly attempts to come

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to terms with recent violence through narrative rooted in social and historical reality, Restrepo’s novel not only traces the rise of drug-related violence in Colombia, but also demonstrates the highly complex impact of this on local communities. Lending a tone of orality to the work, the villagers recollect this period of lawlessness, overseen by the big-spending, gun-toting family dynasty from behind the tinted windows of their white-leather-upholstered Cadillac. Largely overlooked for its proximity to flashy soap opera and the melodramatic rendering of the conflict between the Monsalve and Barragán families, Leopardo… deserves more sustained critical attention for the focus it brought to the rise of drug-related violence and the masterful parallel of the outcome of such violence to the fateful unfolding of Greek tragedy. If the male protagonists occupy center stage in the violence at the center of Leopardo…’s action, male characters are moved downstage in her subsequent novel where Restrepo shifts to an almost entirely female cast of characters. 1995’s Dulce compañía (The Angel of Galilea, 1998) explores the exploitation and abuse of a group of marginalized, impoverished women by religious institutions and their leaders, and the women’s attempts to resist marginalization and find autonomy. The narrative focus distinguishes between the Church as an institution complicit with corrupt state authorities and paramilitary groups, and religion as a form of personal and communitarian spirituality which is all that remains for a community bereft of economic, political, or any other kind of power to exercise any kind of self-determination. Incorporating into the narrative the investigation, fact-gathering, and witness of the kind the author herself carries out, Dulce… tells the story of La Mona, sent to investigate the appearance of a so-called angel in one of Bogota’s slums. Eventually revealed to be the son of Ara, one the slum residents, conceived after she was raped by the local priest who removed the baby after his birth and sold him, Dulce… explores the extreme vulnerability of Colombia’s poorest women while attempting to negotiate the representation of the underrepresented Other, unable to represent— or defend—herself. Class tensions subtend the surface of this novel, and Restrepo demonstrates their entrenched nature in that by the novel’s conclusion, these remain largely unchanged. The first of Restrepo’s novels to receive considerable international acclaim, Dulce… was awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico and the France Culture Prize. The focus on a female reporter sent to investigate a marginal community is once again central in 1999’s La novia oscura (The Dark Bride, 2001), which resulted from Restrepo’s own interviews with prostitutes in the Magdalena Medio region. In La novia oscura, the plot centers on a group of women economically and sexually exploited by the Church, the government and a foreign oil company to tell the tale of the legendary prostitute Sayonara, daughter of an indigenous woman and a white man, whose tale emerges through the accounts of the ageing prostitutes some 40 years later. In this novel, Restrepo fictionalizes the impact on the local community of the exploitation of the oil fields in the province of Santander by the U.S.-based Tropical Oil Company which operated in the region from 1919–51. While brothels have been a popular setting for exploring identity and power in Spanish-American novels, La novia oscura takes more after José Donoso’s Hell Has no Limits (1966) than

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Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (1966) in eschewing a dominant masculine viewpoint and illustrating the exploitation of those disempowered by race, gender, and class, as well as the pernicious effect of the interventions of foreign interests on local communities. Foreign intervention can also be said to be the issue at the heart of her 2001 novella La multitud errante (A Tale of the Dispossessed, 2003): perhaps nowhere else in her corpus does Restrepo attend to the disastrous consequences of historical events and political violence than in this slim volume. She examines the effects of the violent uprooting and internal displacement that affects vast numbers of mostly rural Colombians that is one of the consequences of the violence fuelled by the U.S.-backed ‘war on drugs’. Relating the story of “Siete por Tres,” who seeks the woman who raised him from whom he has been separated, this novella raises one of the most significant yet underrepresented consequences of Colombian violence in recent years. Restrepo’s characteristic stylistic traits become fully realized in her 2004 novel: the carefully crafted intersecting narrative strands, the portraits of individuals embedded into a wider historical and social reality, and the impact of History on individual histories of Delirio (Delirium, 2007) earned her international recognition and overwhelming critical acclaim. In the second of her two novels that deal explicitly with illegal drug-trafficking in Colombia and its ensuing violence, Delirio recounts Aguilar’s quest to find his wife Agustina, who has disappeared from their home after suffering a mental breakdown. Gradually piecing together the steps that led to her disappearance, Delirio reveals the complicitous links between the protagonists in Colombia’s complex system of narco-capitalism—the ruling elite, the drug cartels, and international politics and the “war on drugs”—in a novel that reads like classic detective fiction (Bollig 2007). Set in the 1980s at the height of a particularly violent period, Restrepo’s novel departs from other novelas de narcotráfico, such as Fernando Vallejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins (1994) in depicting a female protagonist caught in a debilitating state of madness that is reflective of a society that is not characterized by violence, but by delirium, on the brink of disintegration due to the hypocritical alliances between its criminal underclass and its social elite. Earning her significant feathers in her writer’s cap—Spain’s Alfaguara Prize and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for best foreign fiction in Italy, as well as being shortlisted for major prizes in France, Ireland, and the UK—Delirio is by and large the novel which made Restrepo known to foreign audiences. Following up such a feat has proven difficult, and Demasiados héroes, in 2009 (No Place for Heroes, 2010), met a mixed reaction. By far the most autobiographical of her novels to date, Demasiados héroes recounts Restrepo’s time spent as a militant activist in Argentina, albeit through the voice of a protagonist named Lorenza. When she takes her son to Buenos Aires to find his estranged Argentine father, Lorenza is compelled to recount her story—the story of her involvement in organized resistance to the military dictatorship and that of her relationship with Mateo’s father—to her disinterested son. Signaling a positional shift from one of protagonism in events related, to revisiting them in a narrative present, Demasiados héroes appears more concerned with history and memory, and (like La isla…) with preserving recent history from cultural amnesia while confronting the

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dilemma of how to transmit this to a younger generation who dismiss the struggles of the past as bearing little relevance to the present and their own experience. Having firmly established her reputation as a journalist, writer, speaker, political activist and public intellectual, it is due to her engagement with issues of widespread humanitarian relevance to Latin America, and indeed more widely, and through her accessible style that Restrepo is a key figure in the Spanish-American novel today. Stating in an interview that the principal objective behind both her writing and her politics is to communicate in such a way as to reach as wide an audience as possible (Lirot 2007), her style denotes a shift from previous generations of SpanishAmerican novelists, such as Diamela Eltit,* who used challenging formal structures to give expression to complex social realities, often alienating readers along the way. Deconstructing the myth that popular literature “tends to be viewed as more transparent than the intellectualized texts of the postmodern era” (Carvalho, 3), Restrepo explores new ways of introducing issues of fundamental national and international significance that sees her follow in the footsteps of other Colombian intellectuals. Restrepo’s latest novel, Hot sur (Hot South), due to be released in 2013, indicates an ongoing drive to introduce issues of national and regional significance into the wider public debate. This novel, which examines the lives of three Latin American women as they cross geographical and political borderlands to build their lives in the U.S., can hardly fail to bring a new perspective to the U.S.’s uneasy relationship with its Latino population and bring Restrepo to the attention of a new body of readers. Kate Averis

Works Cited Boldy, S., “Political Violence Revisited: Intellectual and Family in Five Latin American Novels, 2006–2009”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 48.3 (2012). 336–50. Bollig, Ben, “A Searing Slice of Madness,” Delirium review, The Guardian, November 4, 2007. Web. Carvalho, Susan E., “In the Commercial Pipelines: Restrepo’s La novia oscura,” in Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women: Mapping the Narrative Woodbridge; Rochester: Tamesis, 2007. 42–74. Håkansson, Gabriella. “You’re so cool! On hard-boiled masculinity in Laura Restrepo’s Leopard in the Sun.” March 18, 2010, Eurozine. Web. Lirot, Julie, “Laura Restrepo por sí misma,” in El universo literario de Laura Restrepo, Elvira Sánchez-Blake and Julie Lirot (eds). Bogota: Alfaguara, 2007. 341–51. Marco, Joaquín, “Leopardo al sol, de Laura Restrepo,” El Cultural, October 17, 2001. Web. Restrepo, Laura. Historia de una traición. Madrid: IEPALA, 1986. —La isla de la pasión. Bogota: Norma, 1989. —Leopardo al sol. Bogota: Planeta, 1993. —Dulce compañía. Bogota: Norma, 1995. —2nd ed. Historia de un entusiasmo, Bogota: Norma, 1998. —The Angel of Galilea. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: Crown, 1998.

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—Leopard in the Sun. Trans. Stephen A. Lytle. New York: Crown, 1999. —La novia oscura. Bogota: Norma, 1999. —La multitud errante. Bogota: Planeta, 2001. —The Dark Bride. Trans. Stephen A. Lytle. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. —A Tale of the Dispossessed. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. —Delirio.Bogota: Alfaguara, 2004. —Isle of Passion. Trans. Dolores M. Koch. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. —Delirium. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Doubleday, 2007. —Demasiados héroes. Bogota: Alfaguara, 2009. —No Place for Heroes. Trans. Ernest Mestre-Reed. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru, 1975) In April 2011, a news item surprised the Republic of Letters: Red April, a detective novel by a relatively unknown Peruvian, had been awarded the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, beating books by Pers Petterson and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. In fact, Roncagliolo is the youngest writer to win the award. Perhaps influenced by the enthusiasm of the moment, the chair of the jury, respected cultural journalist Boyd Tonkin, compared the novel favorably to current and earlier classics set in Latin America by Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene and, Roncagliolo’s countryman, Mario Vargas Llosa, concluding: “Red April, it could be argued, digs deeper and strikes harder than works by any of those august excursionists.” With hindsight, the award seems less surprising. After all, Red April was translated by Edith Grossman, responsible for English versions of novels by García Márquez, Cervantes, and, more apropos, Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes, another whodunit dealing with the Shining Path and ritual murder. (The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is shared by the author and the English-language translator). When the translation came out in 2009 Publisher’s Weekly declared Red April “a stunning debut”—it was actually his third novel—and “it merits comparison with the work of J.M. Coetzee.” In fact, the Spanish original, Abril rojo had already surprised the cultural establishment when it won the 2006 Alfaguara Prize, one of the most important literary awards in Spain and Spanish America. Roncagliolo, until then known as the author of successful commercial novels—the Amazonian adventure El príncipe de los caimanes (2002, The Prince of Alligators) and the bestseller sex tale Pudor (2004, Prudishness)—became the award’s youngest winner to date. Red April is set in Ayacucho, the Andean city which bore the brunt of the Shining Path insurgency that caused the deaths of nearly 70,000 people between 1980 and 1992. The novel narrates the attempt by Assistant District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana to solve a series of grisly, probably ritual, murders during the celebrations surrounding Holy Week, which may or may not be the product of a Shining Path resurgence. Widely, though not unanimously, read as an attempt at coming to grips with Peru’s recent history of violence and its aftermath, it was seen as broadening and deepening the author’s social analyses. Like Pudor, Red April draws from popular culture, in particular movies such as David Fincher’s Seven and Alan Moore’s comics From Hell; and like El príncipe de los caimanes, it clearly dialogues with Vargas Llosa’s novels, mainly Death in the Andes. Red April also shows the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass” and the detective genre which the Argentine master transformed. While the stories collected in Crecer es un oficio triste (2003, Growing Up is a Sad Job) and, perhaps, Pudor had tapped into his experiences as an upper-middleclass Peruvian, Red April’s characters belong to the Andean lower-middle classes and

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peasantry. This broadening of his fictional world made use of his past experience in the Defensoría del Pueblo, a governmental human rights office, and the research on The Shining Path undertaken for his book-length reportage La cuarta espada. La historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso (2007, The Fourth Sword: The Story of Abimael Guzmán and The Shining Path). Like Death in the Andes, Red April resituates the classic whodunit in the Peruvian highlands. But instead of taking place during the Shining Path’s heyday, as in Vargas Llosa’s novel, Red April is set during the 2000 elections, which marred by fraud, contributed to the ultimate fall of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. Roncagliolo presents Ayacucho and, by extension perhaps the country as a whole, as a chaotic environment in which grotesque crimes are expressions of a generalized irrationality, rather than exceptions. Thus, the solution of the crimes does not lead to reestablishing an acceptable social order, as is generally the case in Agatha Christie’s better-known novels or in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Not surprisingly, Chacaltana, unlike Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes, does not embody reason. Like the society to which he belongs, Chacaltana’s rationality is undermined by the presence of pre-modern traditions and ways of thinking. For instance, he has reconstructed his mother’s bedroom, placing all her belongings there and talks daily to her as if she were alive. Instead of reason, Chacaltana is identified with the law, perhaps, more exactly the penal code. However, again contradicting the classic whodunit for which, as in the words of Sir John Powell, “nothing is law that is not reason,” the law is shown to be an incomplete guide to understanding a reality that is characterized by the presence of pre-modern traits. Thus Chacaltana finds that in rape cases the legal solution was “that rapists be imprisoned, according to the law” (10). But if the penal code were implemented: “the injured parties protested: if the attacker went to jail, the victim would not be able to marry him and restore her lost honor” (10–11). The persistence of pre-contemporary values and traditions undermines the applicability of modern law; a law always already incomplete. When faced with the possibility of homosexual rape, “He realized he could not marry them because there was no relevant procedure to do so” (22). Perhaps due to his partial modernity, Chacaltana is trapped by the words of the law and unable to comprehend and apply the rational legal principles imperfectly present in the penal code. Again, unlike the classic detective, he is incapable of understanding the rationality underlying the law; a flaw which rather than individual is presented as social. Ayacucho is presented as a space characterized by primal violence, of which the criminal is only its most overt representative. The grotesque nature of the crimes, including mutilations, expresses human impulses that can never be repressed or sublimated in the novel. Somewhat incongruously, given the criminal’s identity, even grammar and orthography are unable to discipline his voice, an expression of subconscious desires: “Its time for you to free yourself. Its time for you to fly. they had you too long counting hours, days, seconds. You had to wate. you have to wate for important things, but you dont have to no more” (182). The crimes are thus only the public manifestation of social irrationality shared by all, including Chacaltana

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and the military and police authorities, the latter of which are shown to have been responsible for much of the region’s violence during the anti-subversive struggle. The claims of the Fujimori regime to have restored social rationality, as if it were a classic detective, even if by violent and authoritarian means, are implicitly debunked in Red April. The novel also expands its dialogue with the Peruvian literary tradition to the writings of another great Peruvian novelist, José María Arguedas. A member of The Shining Path interviewed by Chacaltana mentions “The Servant’s Dream” (“El sueño del pongo”), the folk story of class reversion brilliantly retold by Arguedas (176). It also references the myth of Inkarri—the idea that the severed limbs of the Inca were reassembling underground and that their reunification would entail the return to hegemony of the indigenous population—central to Arguedas’s anthropological research. However, as would also be the case in La cuarta espada, Roncagliolo mistakenly attributes its origin to the dismemberment in 1781 of José Gabriel Condorcanqui (a descendant of Inca Emperors who led a peasant revolt) rather than to the 1572 execution of Túpac Amaru I, the last of the Inca Emperors who resisted the Spanish conquest. While translated into English in 2009 Red April’s reception in the English-speaking world began the year of its original publication in Spanish. In August 2006, after the Alfaguara Prize, The New York Times’ Simon Romero celebrated Lima as “one of Latin America’s brightest literary scenes,” and singled out Red April, together with Alonso Cueto’s* Herralde Award winning Blue Hour (2005) and Etiqueta Negra, the magazine that has Daniel Alarcón* among its editors, as examples of this renewed excellence (C4). More significantly, Red April’s Spanish original was reviewed that December in The Times Literary Supplement by Michael Kerrigan. Despite some reservations regarding the characterization of the novel’s protagonist—in particular Chacaltana’s conversations with his dead mother—Kerrigan describes it as “a tour de force” and praises the manner in which it “teaches us to look askance at its [the nation’s] every expression of identity, from the most atavistic to the most modern and progressive” (21). The extremely positive reaction to the English version of Red April was foreshadowed, probably prepared, by these first responses to Roncagliolo’s novel. Its critical success may also explain why the author was one of the “under 39” writers invited to the Bogotá39 Hay Festival in 2008, and was named one of Granta’s best of young Spanish-language novelists in 2010. Despite the Alfaguara Prize, earlier Spanish-language criticism was less positive. Red April has been almost unanimously praised as a detective novel, exhibiting a mastery of the genre that, one can add, Roncagliolo will again exhibit in his contribution to the collectively authored novel Voces para un blues negro (2011, Voices for a Black Blues). However, critics have generally questioned its status as “a more complex investigation of unpredictable literary forms” (50), in the words of Spanish novelist Francisco Solano. For many commentators, the novel is merely a “polished thriller,” “a novel seasoned according to the market requirements for success” (Cárdenas 92), or even proof of the commercial imprint on literary awards (Ágreda). However, the fact remains that the Alfaguara is a major prize. Despite critical grumblings, there is no

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doubt that Red April made its author a literary celebrity, and for every Roncagliolo foe one can find a supporter, including no less a booster than the late Carlos Fuentes, who inserts Red April in his recent 2011 canon of Latin American novels. After Red April came the autobiographical Memorias de una dama (2009, Memoirs of a Lady), Tan cerca de la vida (2010, So Close to Life), and Óscar y las mujeres (2013, Oscar and Women). Based on his ghostwriter past, Memorias de una dama tells the parallel stories of a young Peruvian writer’s attempt to break into the Hispanic literary establishment, and the memoirs of a rich Dominican jet-setter he helps write. Poorly advertised and distributed, it was rapidly taken off the shelves and Alfaguara’s catalogue, despite selling 20,000 copies in the countries where it had been available (Spain, Mexico, and Peru) (“Santiago Roncagliolo negó haber recibido dinero”). In some news reports the real reason for the book’s banning was its use of a real-life memoir ghostwritten by Roncagliolo (Vargas). Be that as it may, the fact is that despite borrowing the dual narrative structure from Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Memorias taps into its author’s personal experience without the mediation of mass culture. Given the text’s nature, it is not surprising that for some like Enrique Planas, this is the author’s best novel (“Roncagliolo negó”). If Memorias de una dama, Roncagliolo’s first novel set outside Peru, marked the incorporation of his immigrant experiences into his writings, his next novel, Tan cerca de la vida has no precedent in the Peruvian canon. Originally inspired by his experiences in Tokyo while promoting Red April, it is also informed by Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation (2003), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and by the novels of Haruki Murakami (“Tokyo entre el amor y el terror”). Set in Tokyo, Tan cerca de la vida deals with the subject of artificial life. However, Roncagliolo is not concerned with technological issues. Instead the novel explores matters of alienation and the question of what it means to be human. While reviews have usually praised the writing (Satorras), the novel lacks the narrative drive and hallucinatory fervor of the best Philip K. Dick, or the philosophical density and humor that characterizes Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction, authors whose works Roncagliolo’s resembles. Óscar y las mujeres, Roncagliolo’s latest novel, foregrounds his interest in popular culture, since it deals with the romantic travails of a telenovela scriptwriter. The metafictional plot, the novel’s broad comedy, and the narrative retellings of telenovela fragments, remind one of a less delirious version of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the novel is the manner in which it has been marketed: its chapters were available for purchase in sequential weekly e-installments before the publication of the paper book. Perhaps a key to understanding Roncagliolo’s varied career is to see it in filmic terms. In interviews, he has compared himself to a film director “who explores each time a different creative universe,” like an Ang Lee “who directs The Ice Storm, and then Hulk, and then a gay western” (“A mí siempre me ha interesado”). In La cuarta espada, less charitably, he admits “to have always been a mercenary of the word” (23). Among his “mercenary” writings—works he was commissioned to write—one can, in addition to La cuarta espada, include his most recent “non-fiction” novel, El amante uruguayo. Una historia real (2012, The Uruguayan Lover. A True Story), which is a

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mostly speculative exploration of the life of the wealthy Uruguayan writer Enrique Amorim and his affair with the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The idea of the hired director capable of making films about any and all topics—the metteur en scène—was contrasted by Francois Truffaut with that of the auteur, who always found ways to explore her obsessions and concerns in film. Roncagliolo has until now shown himself to be a capable, on occasion brilliant, metteur en page. Juan E. De Castro

Works Cited Ágreda, Javier. “Abril rojo.” Rev. of Red April. May 2, 2006. Libros: Reseñas, críticas y comentarios sobre literatura. Web. Cárdenas, Noé. “Thriller en los Andes.” Rev. of Abril rojo. Letras Libres June 2006: 92–3. Fuentes, Carlos. “Estirpe de novelistas.” El País. August 27, 2011. Web. —“Canon siglo XXI.” El País. August 27, 2011. Web. Kerrigan, Michael. “A Peruvian Christ.” Rev. of Abril rojo. The Times Literary Supplement December 8, 2006: 21. “Red April.” Rev. of Red April. Publisher’s Weekly February 3, 2009. Web. Romero, Simon. “Past War and Cruelty: Peru’s Writers Bloom.” New York Times October 29, 2006: C4. Roncagliolo, Santiago. Crecer es un oficio triste. Barcelona: El Cobre, 2003. —El príncipe de los caimanes. Lima: Planeta, 2006. —La cuarta espada. La historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso. Buenos Aires: Debate, 2007. —Pudor. Madrid: Punto de Lectura, 2007. —“ ‘A mí siempre me ha interesado trabajar con lo que la alta cultura despreciaba’. Entrevista a Santiago Roncagliolo.” Interview by Doris Wieser-Stuttgard. Espéculo 40 (November 2008). Web. —Memorias de una dama. Lima: Alfaguara, 2009. —Red April. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Pantheon, 2009. —“Santiago Roncagliolo negó haber recibido dinero para escribir dinero para escribir Memorias de una dama.” Interview by Enrique Planas. El Comercio February 14, 2010. Web. —Tan cerca de la vida. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010. —“Tokyo entre el amor y el terror.” Prisa Ediciones. Web, 2010. —Óscar y las mujeres. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013. Roncagliolo, Santiago, et al. Voces para un blues negro. Barcelona: Roca, 2011. Satorras, Lluís. “La realidad y su reflejo.” Rev. of Tan cerca de la vida. El País September 25, 2010. Web. Solano, Francisco. “Burocracia y terrorismo.” Rev. of Abril rojo. Revista de libros 117 (Sept. 2006). 50. Tonkin, Boyd. “Red April Wins the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.” The Independent May 27, 2011. Web. Vargas, Lina. “El affaire Roncagliolo.” Revista Arcadia 53 (March 16, 2010). 14–15.

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Iván Thays (Peru, 1968) Iván Thays has been both one of the most popular and polemical figures on the Peruvian literary scene for the last decade. This is in part due to his public visibility from 2000 to 2008 as the presenter of a program aired on Peruvian state television, Vano oficio (Vain Occupation). On Vano oficio, he featured hundreds of Peruvian fiction, poets, and essayists, and introduced the reading public to thousands of books not part of the traditional canon taught in schools and universities. During his time on public television, Thays not only promoted the most recent literary works, but also presented a vast and varied mosaic of authors and narrative styles from throughout the world. He continues this activity in his blog Notas moleskine, which has, during its seven years online, become the most widely read literary webpage in Spanish-speaking America. That blog has now expanded to another not surprisingly called Vano oficio that appears in the Spanish newspaper El País, to which Thays also contributes with articles on literary topics. Thays has also been recognized as a new major Latin American writer, at least since the 2003 meeting in Seville, when he and others in this volume were anointed as such. In 2009, he was invited to Bogotá39 Hay Festival (a conference of the best Latin American writers under 39). The same year, his novel Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro (2008, A Place Called Dog’s Ear), considered his best to date, was also a finalist for the prestigious Herralde Prize. This recognition, however, arrived in a major way only after the cancellation of his television program, which meant that a distinct new period arose in Thays’ literary production. When Thays started Vano Oficio, he had just published his third novel La disciplina de la vanidad (2000, The Discipline of Vanity), actually a collage of literary pieces, essays, and short stories, set during a congress of young writers in Spain. The novel, like others of his generation, reflected on what it means to be a writer and on the reason it identifies as underlying this vocation: vanity. La disciplina de la vanidad is obviously an allegory of writing and a defense of literature, but it is a distinction with a difference, since the novel is also a new take on the affirmation of the writer’s solitary labor. It is surprising that, after having published this novelistic manifesto, which should be read in tandem with his statement in Palabra de América (2004, Word of America), the proceedings of a 2003 gathering of his “generation” in Seville, Thays took nine years to publish his next novel. As he noted in an interview shortly after the publication of the novel, La disciplina de la vanidad marked the end of a stage in his literary production. This first period developed one of the least explored literary topics in Peruvian literature: the portrait of the artist as a young man. The narrators of his first three novels—Escena de caza (1994, Hunting Scene), El viaje interior (1999, The Interior Trip) and La disciplina de la vanidad—represent the artist who constitutes himself through writing and, by means of this activity, searches for the

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causes that led to his sentimental failure and, in consequence, to the beginning of his creative labor. Moreover, Thays’s literary production explored topics little developed in the Peruvian tradition. By ignoring social referents, Thays developed an intimate and introspective literature dealing with the relationship of the artist to his or her art. Throughout the 2000s, a significant number of books published by Peruvian authors continued the topics developed by Thays. Another well-known Peruvian novelist, Alonso Cueto,* put the point aptly: “There is a new generation of Peruvian writers who are trying to distance themselves from the conventional modes of writing realist novels. Iván Thays and Mario Bellatín are the masters of these young writers.” It is, therefore, impossible to ignore the role played by Thays in popularizing among up and coming writers a self-reflexive novelistic practice centered on the literary act itself. However, after a silence of more than seven years, when Thays published his novel Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro, he seemed to have renewed his literary career. The Peruvian writer had replaced the poetic and carefully crafted writing of his earlier metafictional novels, with a laconic and direct narrative about memory, violence, and the social divisions facing Peru of the recent past. Moreover, the romantic drama characteristic of the earlier novels had been substituted by topics such as a mother’s loss of a son in Un lugar… and the discovery of sex, friendship and tolerance in the novel for young adults El orden de las cosas (2011, The Order of Things). As we have seen, his early trilogy centered around the theme of the writer in love. Moreover these novels share a modular pattern built around two principal narrative lines: on the one hand, love, and the exploration of the reasons for the main character’s sentimental failure; on the other, the investigation of the origins of artistic vocation. In all, art will finally triumph over love. Even though at the beginning of each novel we are made aware of the protagonist’s romantic disillusion, the narrative presents the trajectory from union to disunion in a linear way. In Escena de caza and La disciplina de la vanidad both narrative lines—love and art—are jointly developed until the ultimate romantic rupture. In El viaje interior, the absence of a female love interest enables the artistic line to receive full emphasis. In each of the three novels, Thays develops the growing internal struggle between romance, seen as a process from unity to disunity, and art, which develops from disaggregation to unity. In these novels, the protagonist becomes aware of his place in the world after having suffered simultaneously a romantic failure and an artistic revelation. This repetitive structure generates not only the superimposition of art over love, and of isolation over companionship, but also produces in the subject the urgent necessity to represent the past through writing. Thays’ first published novel, Escena de caza, describes the romantic breakup between a teacher of photography and Beatriz, his student. The photographer teaches during the afternoons and spends the mornings working on his own artistic project: a photographic bestiary. As part of this project, he travels with his lover to photograph the paleolithic depictions of animals in the caves of Altamira, Spain. But, while the trip serves its artistic purpose, it does not cement their relationship. Instead it leads

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to their estrangement. The European sojourn leads first to tension between the lovers and ultimately to the protagonist’s loneliness. The protagonist uses writing in order to try to understand the events that led to the end of the affair and, therefore, to his isolation. It is through this act of remembrance that he tries to understand why his relationship with Beatriz had ended. But at the Caves of Altamira he also experienced an epiphany that helps him understand not only the role of art, but also his role as an artist. “This is precisely the main lesson I learnt at Altamira,” he writes, “Art is an attempt at capturing the other.” Thus what the protagonist discovers in Europe is not trivial. He discovers the meaning of art. It is the same process he will experience after his romantic disappointment, when he buries himself in writing with the goal of using words to represent Beatriz. It is as if romantic failure were a necessary precondition for his development as an artist. Through a simulation of the past, he recovers memories, explores partially understood events that through remembrances gain new life, even if their recollection is painful, vague, and temporary. The narrator calls this process the work of nostalgia, and such work is both theme and mode of this novel. El viaje interior is Thays’ second novel. It is a love story between two young historians who travel through Europe. In this work Thays takes to the limit his concern with the craft of writing. (However, in several recent interviews and statements, he has stated that he is no longer interested in such extravagant and poetic writing). In the novel, we are told that the beloved is named Kaas, though we never find out the name of the protagonist. As in Escena de caza, the romantic relationship between the two historians begins in their native country and during the European visit and, in particular, during their stay in the fictional city of Busardo, where the protagonist experiences both romantic disappointment and artistic revelation. Unlike the earlier novel, where the tensions between love and art are developed simultaneously and presented linearly, in El viaje anterior, the two thematic lines are narrated in alternate counterpoint to each other, even though they take place successively. The protagonist first separates from Kaas, and then discovers his vocation as an artist. In both novels, however, these events are part of the protagonist’s past. Beyond superficial details, the similarities between Escena de caza and El viaje interior are obvious. In both novels there is a couple whose artistic or academic interests coincide, romances that begin in their native countries, and trips to Europe where the relationships end. But if in Escena de caza, infidelity is the cause for the couple’s breakup, in El viaje interior, the tensions of everyday life and jealousy undermine the romantic attachment. From the perspective of the female character, the male protagonist’s poetic relationship with his surroundings is the cause of romantic disappointment. For Kaas, this disillusion originates in the experience of an impractical lifestyle unsuited for the maintenance of a normal affective relationship. The novel demonstrates that the alternate lifestyles determined by art and love are ultimately incompatible. If, at the start of El viaje interior, the protagonist abandons his native city in order to pursue an academic project, what is manifested after the couple’s breakup is the revelation that his true vocation was never as a historian or economist, but, instead, as

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family, friends and lover had pointed out, as an artist. The discovery of the protagonist’s vocation as a writer is aided by the tense relationship he establishes with the painter Dicent, the most famous foreign artist in the fictional Busardo. In both novels we thus find an agent that plays a catalyzing role in the protagonist’s discovery of his artistic vocation. In Escena de caza, the Caves of Altamira fulfill this catalyzing function. La disciplina de la vanidad, published a year after El viaje interior, tells the story of a young writer who participates in a congress of novelists and poets in the Spanish city of Morillo. The Congress of Young Writers is where the protagonist meets other young writers who, like him, are mainly interested in furthering their promising literary careers. As in a collage, Thays adds biographical notes, brief reflections, quotations, and even a book of short stories attributed to the protagonist in this central plot line. This multiform structure revolves around the act of writing, without silencing the central topic of the contemporary writer’s vanity as the discipline of this century. There is also a search that unfolds in a manner similar to those of his previous two novels. The protagonist already knows the facts he narrates and is conscious of his activity as a writer. Even in the first pages, the reader is aware of the pain felt by the protagonist as he unearths the specters that haunt his memory. Although the act of narrating is presented as incapable of fully recovering the past and placing it on the page, the protagonist’s pain overcomes his rational understanding about what writing can and cannot achieve and thus spurs his recollection. Furthermore, in the struggle between reason and feeling, the latter becomes central to his literary practice. Nostalgia is the fuel of creation. Nevertheless, the protagonist no longer believes in art. Excited at first by the writers’ congress he is attending, his stay in Morillo ends up leading to a progressive loss of faith in literature. This disenchantment is manifested through the growing realization that the commercial and artistic success characteristic of the Boom in the 1960s and 1970s is no longer possible. He comes to the realization that the only literature possible today is the allegory of vanity as an antidote to the writer’s abandonment by the book industry. Some contemporary Latin American writers still have to pay for the publication of their works. Nevertheless, writers still have to affirm their vocation and their place in the world. This sort of revelation leads to the constitution of the subject as a writer in today’s world in defiance of all the obstacles. If in previous novels the protagonist generally experienced a long romance before the eventual breakup, La disciplina de la vanidad presents short, superficial erotic relationships. This lack of emotional depth is due to the affairs taking place in a foreign space and during a short stay. There are no significant romantic expectations, only the search for fun and pleasure. Despite the temporary nature of the relationship, the protagonist experiences love with Frances, while the satisfaction of sexual pleasure is pursued with Valenciana. Again Europe is presented as the space where the protagonist’s love and artistic vocation struggle for dominance. In this trilogy dealing with writers in love, Europe is the space of art. Love can develop in the writers’ countries of origin—all in Latin America—but only through their European sojourn will they discover, explore, and solidify their artistic vocation. Europe symbolizes human

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sterility and artistic reproduction. Latin America, instead, is presented as the space where love can take root, where families can be constituted and society reproduced. Nevertheless, in these novels, romance and family are only vain hopes. There is no place for love, only for nostalgia, pain, and literature. After publishing La disciplina… Thays stated that he had closed a cycle. Un lugar… placed its author firmly among the Spanish-American exponents of the contemporary novel. The novel tells the story of a man’s trip to a place in the Andes that faced the consequences of Peru’s terrorist violence in the 1980s. The voyage is once again a guideline for Thays, although this novel introduces two important changes: Un lugar… weaves history through a fluid albeit laconic speech, focalizing the action on national territory, an almost unexplored territory in Thays’ novels until then. The man is a journalist who has lost his son and is trying to write a letter to the child’s mother. He gets to the place called Oreja de Perro (literally “dog’s ear”) to cover a social welfare event, an inaugural act that will count with the President of the Republic’s attendance. The narrator becomes involved with characters who are at once strange and spectral. If in this novel the social context is more noticeable, there is now a stronger pattern within the voyage theme: the impossibility of love has become the impossibility of family and marriage. As a result we become aware of the protagonist’s relationship with Monica through leaps in time and discover the process of unity and separation through snippets of memory. That rupture is linked to the son’s terrible death and the end of the prolongation of a human being in time. Un lugar…, Thays’s fourth novel, thus comprises the inability to create a nuclear family and the protagonist’s processes of loss and finding himself. Once again, solitude as shelter and reengaging with art are the events that mark the end of the protagonist’s intimate uprooting. This is why in the novel’s last scene, in which the narrator, back in Lima, watches the filming of a movie from his window, he sees himself, in the darkness, looking at himself. It is the end of a trip by an artist in love, and quite possibly a new novelistic beginning by Thays. Edwin Chávez

Works Cited Thays, Iván. Escena de caza. Lima: Pedernal, 1995. —El viaje interior. Lima: Peisa, 2000. —La disciplina de la vanidad. Lima: Fondo editorial PUCP, 2001. —Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2008. —El orden de las cosas. Lima: Alfaguara, 2011.

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Leonardo Valencia (Ecuador, 1969) The trajectory of novelist and essayist Leonardo Valencia’s career has developed in a curious though, in the end, coherent manner. His three novels have mutated unpredictably with respect to each other, while, at the same time, have mounted grand fictional projects, beyond the scope of the mostly shorter narratives of his postmodern contemporaries. Valencia’s novels have also dealt with topics relevant to contemporary Latin American nomads. Is it necessary to belong to a specific place? How much is gained and how much is lost with the disappearance of any sense of belonging? If he is a writer with a high-profile media presence—in part due to his being included in Alberto Fuguet’s and Sergio Gómez’s generation-defining short-story anthology McOndo—he differs significantly in his novelistic writing from many of the other members of the group, as well as from the Bogotá39 Hay Festival event in which he also participated. Valencia has dealt at length with issues such as that of portable countries and the need to build an anchorless literature that is yet still aware of what is being left behind, as well as of the necessity to partially recuperate these identities through the intertextual relationship with earlier works. The key text in the essayistic investigation of these topics is the title essay of his non-fiction collection El síndrome de Falcón (2008 The Falcón Syndrome), which includes several essays that can be construed as his poetics of the novel, in addition to subsequent fine tuning of his ideas (“Donde habitan…” 2009). Valencia has in his own work and life as a migrant writer—first in Peru and then in Spain, where he currently lives—strived to both maintain a distance from his local literary tradition, which nurtured his first literary forays, and to become extremely knowledgeable about it. It is in his novels in which this discussion is expanded to include world literature, which becomes both metaphor and allegory, and is apprehended in all its rigor and weight. Self-assured and courageous in his recreation of spaces he left behind decades ago, the Ecuadorian writer has been willing to take risks in his literature. Thus he has broken with stereotypes and archetypes, including those developed within the flexible field of contemporary Latin American prose. He has also been able to participate in what Pascale Casanova has called “The World Republic of Letters,” though always in dialogue with national literatures and with his personal experiences as an Ecuadorian with an Italian background who has lived throughout Latin American and Europe. An emblematic example of this perspective is his trenchant review of some essays by the canonical academic critic Josefina Ludmer (2010). With El desterrado (2000; The Exiled), El libro flotante de Caytran Dölphin (2006; The Floating Book of Caytran Dölphin) and Kazbek (2008), Valencia has been able to make a name for himself in the Ecuadorian, Spanish, and Spanish-American literary

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fields. He has, however, not affiliated himself with any obvious genealogy that would link him with a national tradition that has not been able to recover from the death of Pablo Palacio, the brilliant avant-garde writer of the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, the rise of Valencia in the midst of a half-dormant literature and criticism gains interest in that his success has neither depended on friendships or favors, as is so often the case in Spanish America, nor responded to literary or cultural fashions. In fact, even though he has resorted, on occasion, to writing metafiction, in his three novels, his short story collection, and in his essays, he has both criticized and praised the fashion of writing that depends exclusively on the author and work analyzed. Valencia is now an established writer. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze his work with standards unrestricted to national boundaries, but, at the same time, to see in his innovations both the connections and divergences from the foreign traditions that have nurtured him. His novels, as well as the rest of his prose, his ingenuous newspaper articles, and even his translations from Italian authors, seem to point to two possible sources for his literary inspiration. The first one, present in almost all his fiction, is the experience of extraterritoriality—rootless, international, parricidal and cosmopolitan—as the key to developing a distinct literary vision. In Valencia’s novels, characters always are returning from a visit to some distant land, are settling in a new, occasionally hostile, city, or lack clear cultural referents. They miss their friends, but also keep their distance. They wander by jetties; struggle with jet lag; dream about going somewhere else. This extraterritoriality, it must be noted, separates Valencia from the frequently romanticized view of Europe characteristic of Latin American writers in the 1960s, who found inspiration in the cities of the continent. In fact, due to his national origin, Valencia feels the need to struggle with his country’s twentieth-century realistic literary heritage, which has not been etiolated by the influence of modernity. Valencia finds in the hallucinatory and unpredictable Palacio an alternative to that conventional view of representation. If contemporary literary aesthetics prefers fragmentary writing, this novelist recuperates long-form narrative. If there is a demand to be trendy, he returns to Austen, Dickens, and the self-aware writing of Flaubert. He reads—and understands better than most Spanish-American critics—Italian literature. As with Kazuo Ishiguro, who was the subject of Valencia’s dissertation, and as with Roberto Juarroz, the Argentine poet he so admires, for Valencia to write is to create a poetics of unpredictability that has as its starting point the departure from the first letter, that of the homeland. The second aspect of his writing is the trope of distance from the origin. As Foschi, one of the characters in El desterrado states: “What should make you think … is that they have taken that mask from the place for which it was created, and that now we admire it for invented reasons. They separated it from its destiny. It’s as if that mask was suspended in time until it returns to the place it belongs” (16). This can serve as an example of the idea of the journey Valencia’s narrative takes, both in its national and international contexts. One must note the care with which the author has designed the dislocation of his work, and has, also, set its wider contexts. Not only is his narrative suspended within a set of obligatory national literary references. Valencia’s

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literature, as will be shown, is unique when compared to that of his Latin American contemporaries. In fact, his unprejudiced textual exploration raises the need to rewrite the conventional Latin American canon, recognize the new digital media (his blog spot allows for the altering and commenting of his novel El libro flotante…) as sources for literature, and reconsider the borders between literary genres. The essay no longer seems enough; neither does the short story, or the collection of these which constitute what he calls a “floating” book exemplified in his La luna nómada (1995 Nomad Moon) which to date has had four editions with different content (Lima, Guayaquil, Cádiz, Quito); even less the novel, that obsolete artifact with its nineteenth-century traits, and which Valencia knows how to discerningly renew or omit. Each step in his fiction is like a jump without a net, even if in reality it is carefully planned. The results are not always perfect. But this does not really matter, because, as in the case of his novella Kazbek, published first in Spain, but also in Ecuador and with a prestigious publisher for contemporary authors in Argentina, his writing is a tentative and approximate map of affect. Valencia’s novels thus frequently include self-criticism. In Kazbek, the narrator asks one of the characters about a novella, and the latter answers: “it’s a book about which no one knows the genre to which it belongs, what the reviews say, or even what press has published it” (17). The text is, therefore, its own judge and censor. It enumerates its own limitations, and even points to current work he is doing, such as writing about a German artist. This obvious inbetweenness, which is the true land of the cosmopolitan citizen, has led Valencia’s writing to be described vaguely as “postmodern.” However, if it is so, it is in a non-conventional manner. His “will to style,” which is previous and superior to the topic of each novel, and the mutation of his Spanish into one unaffected by any localism, makes one consider Valencia as belonging to the same generation as Rodrigo Fresán,* Jorge Volpi,* Alberto Fuguet* and Iván Thays,* among others included in this book. His writing is also characterized by a few traces of the culture of mass consumption, by the ease of travel (for Europeans), and by an encyclopedic accumulation of cultural data that some Ecuadorian critics have at times criticized as being recherché. But a closer analysis of this novelist’s writings undermines any strict identification with postmodernism and its traits. Although he has been venturous enough to develop and set his novels in foreign or even little-known lands, his description of Guayaquil, the bustling port of his birth, for instance, is clearly recognized by those who have lived there. The atlas of his narrative is not only found in the writings of the Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas and his precursors—Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Calvino—but also in urban anthropology, and in the psychology of migration. Starting with the initial version of his stories and first novel, El desterrado,Valencia avoids narrative commonplaces, as well as making all places and persons resemble each other. In that sense, his characters, locales, and times in which the narratives are set are unique and unrepeatable, and that approach is also different from many of the novelists of his cohort included in this book. It is probable that in his search for the particular, Valencia has embraced a quieter and more careful version of one of the key

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branches of Latin American literature, that of a renewed cosmopolitanism, which has been practiced since the start of the twentieth century. Despite being written early in the twenty-first century, El desterrado recreates Fascist Italy. It tells the story of a wise old sage, Nebbiolo Bentornato, perhaps the most compelling character created by Valencia. Bentornato’s anachronistic encyclopedic knowledge contrasts with the irrational brutality of the militaristic regime, the superficiality of a dying aristocracy and a historical period in which military ambition is leading to total debacle. Bentornato is able to recreate the life of the rich Roman families who are still convinced of the importance of their surnames and that their city is the center of the world. As Christopher Domínguez Michael notes, El desterrado resembles Italian Neorealism in its ability to provide an interpretation of the period not only through its imaginative story, but also in the small, apparently insignificant, though telling, details. In addition, El desterrado is not a moralistic novel. It is, instead, a literary stratagem. Not surprisingly, in his Afterword to El desterrado’s 2013 edition Valencia explains the autobiographical elements he excluded. It is as if Valencia were telling us that not only one can write about distant lands, but also about how people wrote in distant times. In various passages El desterrado reminds one of the careful recreations of place, memory, and character found in late nineteenth century realist novels such as Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. These are invocations in favor of the imagination, and also attempts to cast doubt on today’s fashionable minimalist, fragmentary and elliptical narrative. Valencia’s well-received next novel, El libro flotante …, attempts to provide answers to these doubts. One could argue that this is an unfinished novel, since its author is still playing with it online, providing fragments purportedly excluded from the published version, which author and readers modify, play with, and comment. The novelist is thus experimenting with displacement, incompleteness (based on the possibilities afforded by new media) and with aphorisms, the most fragmentary of all the supposedly “simple” literary forms. This extensive, not totally metafictional novel, on the one hand, tells the story of the writer Iván Romano, a Guayaquil writer of Jewish Italian background. On the other, it is a tale about the brothers Ignacio and Guillermo Fabbre (all the surnames are winks at the readers). As part of an obscure narrative game, one finds a flooded Guayaquil threatened with destruction, and described as an apocalyptic urban space always at the mercy of tides, visitors, and even the author. Valencia thus structures the novel as a futurist puzzle that is always missing one last piece. Even as the novel implies the literary origins of its characters, it is the readers who have the last word. El libro flotante… takes narrative risks, and there are times when they are not successful, if one thinks in conventional terms. Beyond its explicit interest in writing an atlas of its influences, the novel continues the tradition of the marginal commentary. As if it were a postmodern Talmud, El libro flotante … seems to be revision, interpretation, or commentary on an unnamed and, to the reader, unknown book. The last word, the true text, is never made visible. We are only shown its basic scaffolding, and can thus only approach the narrative totality asymptotically. This is why the novel is “to be continued” on the web (libroflotante.net):

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When one tells one’s own story one is already other and the one narrating the story knows the other has died, even if one wishes to recover or, alternatively, to forget her. One is trying to bring her back to life by means of a spell. It doesn’t matter who speaks, who has died, who lives, and who listens. What matters is that the spell is pronounced correctly, that it has the right words, and that it has power.

This fragment, a long aphorism, or a short midrash, exemplifies the novel. It is an apocryphal writing, or, perhaps an interpellation regarding the limits of authorship and of a closed text. Valencia’s criticism can be construed as more sentimental than illuminating. Fiction proves that the lesson of experience is always incomplete. One can say the same about his most recent novel, the superb Kazbek. Kazbek is an allegory of nomadism and permanence; it is also a translation of affect from art to friendship; and a book that, as previously noted, asks the question whether a text can be read as a critical work on itself. Kazbek’s length, the explicit nature of its questions about textuality; its temporal dislocation as a memory machine and trip diary; its investigation of the possible combinations between words and graphics; makes it a portable map of contemporary literature and pictorial art. Kazbek, a writer who is visiting his native land, receives a request from a German artist to write captions for his graphic work. The writer, inspired by what he considers the small books and libraries found in the graphics, writes a brief poem or running commentary for each picture. As with Sebald, pictures complement the word, without diminishing the latter, or implying its insufficiency. In Kazbek, the novel’s postmodernism is only partial. As Fernando Castanedo noted in El País: Kazbek, at the same time that it narrates the fulfillment of the request, contains it with delicacy. In addition to the drawings of the artist friend and the poems the writer pens for each one, there is a theory about art and a practice that goes beyond Harold Bloom’s ideas. If the latter proposed that the artist developed struggling against an invincible poetic forebear, here it is proposed that the artist is secretly looking for a non-existent master. Because if there is a master, she is inside oneself and, therefore, can be discarded (14).

Valencia mentioned in one of his essays that a homeland should not be privileged over a novelistic project, but relating this novel to his 2008 essay, at least one critic sees in both works echoes and a mirror of Ecuadorian literature (Carreño). One can add that, as Valencia is still arguing in essays and newspaper articles, that the novel is the bridge to all possible homelands, not just one. And, these homelands are, at least in Valencia’s texts, more active memory than mere discourse. This approach to the construction of fiction, that is inextricably attached and distant from imaginary homelands, is to be welcomed within the frame of the contemporary Spanish-American novel. Antonio Villarruel

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Works Cited Carreño, Óscar. “Ecos y espejo de la literatura ecuatoriana.” Quimera 311 (October 2009). 74–5. Castanedo, Fernando. “Biblioteca en una página.” El País, Babelia 900 (February 21, 2009). 14. Domínguez Michael, Christopher. “Variaciones sobre el cosmopolitismo.” Letras libres II. 24 (December 2000). 100–1. Valencia, Leonardo. La luna nómada. Lima: Campodónico, 1995. —El desterrado. Barcelona: Debate, 2000. —El libro flotante de Caytran Dölphin. Madrid: Funambulista, 2006. —Kazbek. Madrid: Funambulista, 2008. —El síndrome de Falcón. Quito: Paradiso, 2009. —“Donde habitan novelas imposible.” El País, Babelia 931 (September 29, 2009). 14. —“Aquí Argentina.” Letras Libres XI. 144 (December 2010). 93–4.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia, 1973) Juan Gabriel Vásquez readily admits that his decision, as a youth, to leave his hometown, Bogota, and move to Paris in hopes of fulfilling his vocation as a writer, had much to do with that city’s mythic status in Latin American literary history. Would he, during that transatlantic flight, have dared to dream that his future novels were to be praised by Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, two of the Boom writers in whose footsteps he was aspiring to follow? In any case, Vásquez would soon realize that the romance between Paris and Latin American writers had come to an end. At the moment of his arrival, in the mid-90s, the city had indeed already handed the torch to Barcelona. Thus it is hardly surprising that Vásquez, after spending two years in the French capital and one in the Belgian Ardennes, chose to settle in Barcelona, the current center of Spanish-language literary life. Vásquez has since become one of the most acclaimed Latin American writers of his generation. His novels have been translated into at least a dozen languages and have been nominated for major literary awards both inside and outside the Spanish-speaking world: Los informantes (2004, The Informers 2009) was short-listed for the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011, The Sound of Things Falling 2012) was awarded the 2011 Alfaguara Prize. Accordingly, academic interest in his work is steadily growing. Besides his five novels, Vásquez also published a collection of short stories, 2001’s Los amantes de Todos los Santos (The Lovers of All Saints), a brief biography, Joseph Conrad: el hombre de ninguna parte (2004, The Man from Nowhere), and a book of essays, El Arte de la Distorsión (2009, The Art of Distortion). Among other journalistic activities, he is a weekly columnist for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In the late 1990s Vásquez published Persona (1997) and Alina suplicante (1999, Alina, Begging), two novels he himself soon labeled as immature and preferred to ban from the notes on the author that accompany his later works. Even though they are certainly not representative of his present quality, these early works contain some of the seeds of his short-story collection and later novels. As Quesada (77) notes, Persona, set in Florence, already displays a tension that would become essential in Vásquez’s work, namely the opposition between light and darkness. Alina suplicante, on the other hand, not only prefigures the discordant father-son-relationship—a key element in both The Informers and Historia secreta de Costaguana (2007, The Secret History of Costaguana 2010)—but also includes some passages in the historic center of Bogota, a scenery he would foreground in The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling. Indeed, the tales of Los amantes de Todos los Santos can be seen as a turning point in Vásquez’s career as a novelist. The misty atmosphere, the precise and restrained language broken open at the right moment by an expressive metaphor or a breathtaking phrase, the quasi perfect dosage and timing when it comes

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to concealing and disclosing information, as well as the psychological depth of the characters set the tone for The Informers. Moreover, in these stories set in Belgium and France Vásquez introduces some of the themes he develops in his later novels, where he indistinctly applies them to his homeland’s context. For instance, the antithesis between rooted and uprooted people that will dominate the rest of his oeuvre is announced by the contrast between the characters of the stories, who are deeply attached to the soil of the Ardennes, and Oliveira, the wandering protagonist of the last tale, “La vida en la isla de Grimsey” (Life on the Island of Grimsey). Even more so, by exploring “that terrible property of the past, its refusal to go by, its eagerness to stay and accompany us” (86), “El inquilino” (The Housemate) announces Vásquez’s main concern as a novelist. In fact, John Banville tagged The Informers in a very similar way. In a blurb for the book, Banville praises the novel as “a fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present.” Since The Informers Vásquez starts providing his stories with a historical bent. By systematically shedding light on the darkest spots of Colombian history, his three “mature” novels are part of the same quest for understanding the foundations of the country’s reality of violence. As such, in line with Philip Roth’s x-ray of contemporary U.S. society, Vásquez’s The Informers, The Secret…, and The Sound… could be read as a kind of Colombian Trilogy. Roth’s influence, acknowledged by Vásquez in many interviews, is most palpable in The Informers, a novel that revolves around the destabilization of present-day lives by the sudden intrusion of a withheld past. Much like the Zuckerman character in Roth’s American Trilogy, Vásquez’s narrator Gabriel Santoro is driven by an irrepressible impulse to unravel intimate dramas. The seemingly personal conflicts he stumbles upon turn out to be destinies profoundly marked by one of the most contentious and obscure periods of Colombian history. Santoro sets the ball rolling by publishing A Life in Exile, a book based upon the testimony of Sara Guterman, a Jewish-German immigrant and friend of the Santoro family. Santoro’s book deals with the 1940s, when numerous German immigrants suspected of Nazism were persecuted and blacklisted in Colombia. Initially Santoro does not understand why his own father, who shares the same name, reacts so viciously to the publication of A Life in Exile. Shortly after his dad’s death, Santoro discovers that as a youth he had betrayed his best friend Enrique by testifying against his father, the German Konrad Deresser. The younger Santoro thus assumes that his dad had feared that the publication of A Life in Exile would bring to light this betrayal. He decides to undertake a new investigation, focused on unfolding his father’s secrets and finding a proper means to narrate the ambiguities of history, during which he gradually becomes obsessed with notions of forgiveness and guilt, confession and silence, remembrance and oblivion, and truth and falsehood. Carlos Fuentes included The Informers in La gran novela latinoamericana, his canon of Latin American novels, eulogizing the book as follows: “What Vásquez offers us, with great narrative skill, is that grey area of human actions and awareness where our capacity to make mistakes, betray, and conceal creates a chain reaction which condemns us to a world without satisfaction” (391). Or, to put it in Santoro’s

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words: “To become aware: that was my intention, at once simple and pretentious; and to think about the past, oblige someone to remember it, was one way of doing it, arm wrestling against entropy, an attempt to make the disorder of the world, whose only destiny was a more intense disorder, stop, be put in shackles, for once defeated” (24). This use of the metaphor of entropy is a clear trace of Thomas Pynchon’s imprint on the metahistorical vision implicit in The Informers. On the other hand, Santoro’s desperate efforts at bringing order to the historical chaos make him reminiscent of some of the characters of Jorge Luis Borges and W. G. Sebald (Vervaeke). While the narrator is tormented by questions regarding the (in)convenience of memory, the German-rooted characters struggle with their hybrid identity (Giraldo). And yet, the novel does not supply the reader with the reassurance he or she may be yearning for. In doing so, The Informers evidences Vásquez’s conviction that literature, instead of providing comforting answers, should leave the reader with disquieting questions. The success of The Informers made Vásquez the rising star of Latin American literature. Ironically, his entry into the literary scene coincided with Gabriel García Márquez’s leaving: 2004 was also the year of publication of Memory of My Melancholy Whores, the novel that will in all likelihood go down in history as the Nobel Prize winner’s swan song. Even though in The Informers Vásquez clearly dissociated himself from García Márquez’s magical realism, for a contemporary Colombian novelist obviously there is no getting away from the comparisons to the patriarch. In a way, The Secret…, his following novel, stands as Vásquez’s jocular and eloquent reply to the assumption that Colombian and, by extension, Latin American novelists, should necessarily carry on the saleable but clichéd topics and tricks of magical realism. Joseph Conrad is the master Vásquez openly challenges, but between the lines he draws a bead on the Colombian Nobel Prize winner and jibes at those readers for whom the exotic settings and wondrous events of One Hundred Years of Solitude have become a byword for Latin American literature. As well as the extremely sagacious intertextual dialogue with Conrad’s Nostromo, the nods to García Márquez are brought up in nearly all critical approaches to The Secret... . In The Secret… José Altamirano tells his own story and that of his father, Miguel Altamirano. Again, the protagonists’ lives prove to be harmed by Colombian history. Whereas in The Informers the reader gradually becomes aware of how, as Vásquez explains in an interview, “public events manage to invade our private lives, how they succeed to penetrate into our bedrooms and start conditioning our behavior” (De Maeseneer and Vervaeke), from the opening lines of The Secret… Altamirano explicitly ascribes his misfortunes to the caprices of Colombian history: “I came to London because I was expelled by the history of my country” (15). In London, in 1903, Altamirano entrusts his story, a poignant testimony on nineteenth-century Colombia, to a certain Joseph Conrad. Days later he reads, in T.P.’s Weekly, the first pages of Nostromo. He recognizes the exotic setting and the unending battles between Conservatives and Liberals. But he does not find his name nor that of his country: Conrad distorted his testimony, eliminating his name, changing Colombia into the fictitious Republic of Costaguana, the port of Colón (Panama) into Sulaco, and the Panama Canal into a silver mine. Twenty years later Altamirano, still furious

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at Conrad’s “robbery,” decides to write down his own version, his secret history of Costaguana. Needless to say, The Secret… is a highly sophisticated, multilayered metahistorical and metaliterary speculation. While Montoya and Carpio concentrate on the former aspect, setting the novel against the tradition of the historical novel, Semilla, unfolding its multiple intertextual layers, calls it a cannibalistic tale. The Secret… can indeed be considered a palimpsest, even of Vásquez’s own writings: much like V. S. Naipaul, who in A Way in the World (1994) absorbed several of his earlier works, notably the historiographical The Loss of El Dorado (1969), in The Secret… Vásquez fictionalizes his biography of Joseph Conrad. Both writers share a similar purpose: in the same way that Naipaul is aiming to see Trinidad as part of the globe, Vásquez’s novels try “to bring universal history to Colombia, to place Colombia in the panorama of great stories” (Plaza 105). As a matter of fact, in line with Bernard Levin’s characterization of Naipaul, when referring to his experience as an expatriate writer Vásquez refuses to speak in terms of exile or diaspora and prefers to call himself an inquiline. In The Secret… the author’s cosmopolitanism and aversion to all kinds of nationalism is filtered through José Altamirano, who gradually turns his back on his home country, disgusted as he is by the rhetoric of patriotism: “Yes, once again patriotism impregnated the air, and yes, once again it became difficult for me to breathe” (231). All critics agree that the ironic, clever-clever, roguish, self-conscious and misleading voice of the narrator stands out as one of the major achievements of the novel. Compared to the gravity and poise of Santoro, the narrator of The Informers, Altamirano’s grandiloquent and picaresque (Quesada 83) tone is indeed striking. Towards the end, however, more and more bitterness can be heard in his words: his vain attempts at sheltering his family from the cruel arbitrariness of history fill him with despair. Still absent in The Informers—Santoro is childless—Altamirano’s concern for protecting his partner and daughter from the surrounding violence ally him to Antonio Yammara, the narrator of The Sound… . And yet, The Sound… is more related to The Informers than to The Secret… . In harmony with The Informers, Vásquez’s latest novel is for the most part set in late twentieth century Bogota, a city stricken by paranoia due to the constant threats of narcoterrorism attacks. This violence, lurking in the background of The Informers, comes to the fore in The Sound…. Those who have read the former novel will also recognize the gloomy atmosphere, the precise and balanced prose, the gravity of the narrator’s voice, and the suspense built on the progressive revealing of an enigma. Héctor Abad Faciolince,* one of Vásquez’s admirers, celebrates the fact that in The Sound… Vásquez drops the “ballast” he tended to overcharge his earlier novels with. According to Abad, in The Sound… the writer reaches a point of equilibrium and maturity close to perfection. Other avid readers of Vásquez’s books might miss the density and strong metaliterary and metahistorical turns of his previous novels. In any case, thanks to the intensive promotion Alfaguara Prize-winning books receive, it is through The Sound… that many new readers will get acquainted with Vásquez’s prose. And reading it like them, without prejudices, as a book in itself, the novel stands as an intimate and moving account of a generation of young people that grew up under the dark shadow of drug violence.

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With The Sound… Vásquez succeeds in giving an original twist to a subject that, after 20 years of dominating Colombian literature, many already considered time-worn. His approach to the drug-related violence contrasts sharply with the poetics of the sicaresca genre. Instead of highlighting its bloody consequences, Vásquez probes into the origins of the drug traffic that brought Colombia to the brink of ruin. Through the unraveling of the life of Ricardo Laverde, a man he encounters in a dusky billiard bar in the historic center of Bogota, the narrator Antonio Yammara rips open the scars of his generation. Yammara’s obsession with the “fatiguing practice of memory”(244) is not the only aspect of The Sound… that makes the novel akin to Abad’s Oblivion: A Memoir. Both books also contain several poetic references. While in his book on his father, who was assassinated by paramilitaries, Abad invokes verses of Borges, Vásquez inserts the voices of three major Colombian poets: José Asunción Silva, León de Greiff, and Aurelio Arturo. Not surprisingly, Abad was the first to praise the euphony and serene poetry of Vásquez’s prose, and, in particular, of his novel’s title. Thanks to their emotional charge and intimate slant, books such as Oblivion… and The Sound… offer a counterbalance to the often sensationalistic sicaresca novels and confirm Vásquez’s view of the writer as a “historiographer of emotions” (Vervaeke and De Maeseneer). Jasper Vervaeke

Works Cited Abad Faciolince, Héctor. “La música del ruido.” El Espectador May 6, 2011. Web. Carpio Franco, Ricardo. “Espejos, simulacros y distorsiones: Hacia una tipología de la metaficción historiográfica en Historia secreta de Costaguana, de Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Espéculo 44 (2010). Web. De Maeseneer, Rita, and Jasper Vervaeke. “Escribimos porque la realidad nos parece imperfecta. Entrevista con Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Ciberletras 23 (2010). Web. Fuentes, Carlos. La gran novela latinoamericana. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011. Giraldo, Luz Mary. “Del lugar de paso al lugar para el olvido: Bibliowicz, Schwartz, Vásquez.” En otro lugar: Migraciones y desplazamientos en la narrativa colombiana contemporánea. Bogota: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. 2008. 115–28. Montoya, Pablo. Novela histórica en Colombia 1988–2008. Entre la pompa y el fracaso. Medellin: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 2009. Plaza, Caridad. “Diálogo de la Lengua. Mano a mano entre el novelista peruano Santiago Roncagliolo y Juan Gabriel Vásquez, escritor colombiano.” Quórum 16 (2006). 105–18. Quesada Gómez, Catalina. “Vacillements: Poétique du déséquilibre dans l’oeuvre de Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Les espaces des écritures hispaniques et hispano-américaines au XXIe siècle. Ramos-Izquierdo, Eduardo y Marie-Alexandra Barataud, (eds). Limoges: Pulim, 2012. 75–85. Semilla Durán, María Angélica. “Le récit cannibale: Historia secreta de Costaguana, de Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Hommage à Milagros Ezquerro. Théorie et fiction. Michèle Ramond et al, (eds) Paris: Rilma 2, 2009. 545–61.

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Vásquez, Juan Gabriel. Historia secreta de Costaguana. Bogota: Alfaguara, 2007. —Los amantes de Todos los Santos. Bogota: Alfaguara, 2008. —The Informers. Trans. Anne McLean. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. —El ruido de las cosas al caer. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011. Vervaeke, Jasper. “Una mirada en los abismos de la historia. La impronta de Pynchon, Borges y Sebald sobre Los informantes de Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Revista de Estudios Colombianos 39 (2012). 30–5. —and Rita De Maeseneer. “Un fósforo en la oscuridad. Conversación con Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” Forthcoming in Confluencia (2013).

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5

Southern Cone Introduction This area is demonstrably producing the most challenging and varied novelistic prose in Spanish America, following and frequently enriching its long tradition in the genre. That does not necessarily square with the overrepresentation of, say, Argentinean or Mexican novelists in this book, or with issues of ultimate literary quality, perceptions in Spain about what “small” countries with “minor” literatures produce in fiction, or with clear differences in the availability of resources. Similar objections, subjective and defensive for the most part, frequently appear in countries outside the Southern Cone, which, paradoxically, had similar and canonical literary traditions in the nineteenth century. Still, the social, economic, and intellectual histories that have enhanced latetwentieth-century literary production in the Southern cone are amply known, as is the absence of Paraguayan narrative that would enhance the attention Augusto Roa Bastos brought to the country, for example. Not surprisingly, political history has frequently impeded some of the Southern Cone’s younger writers from reaching beyond testimonial narratives, along the fashionable lines of mourning, memory, and violence, making metaphors of what is still very real to the victims, generally not part of the readership interested in that type of vindication. It is also more of a cliché, particularly in Argentina, to attribute any stagnation to novelists’ inability to bear the burden of a past like Jorge Luis Borges’. Obviously, those novelists may not have read the master’s “On the Novel I Will Never Write,” one of his last essays, and if they did, there is certainly no guarantee that they would have heeded his advice. Thus, César Aira and others have written critically about Borges, Julio Cortázar, and even about novelists not at their level of achievement or impact, like Ricardo Piglia. Certainly, the notion of the master has not worked for all Chilean novelists, since they have had conflictive relationships with the prose of the great José Donoso, like Roberto Bolaño. But then others, a few included in this book, attended Donoso’s writing workshops (Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Franz) and write well of him. Others attended Antonio Skármeta’s “Heinrich Böll” workshop (Andrea Maturana, Rafael Gumucio), and went on to better things. Abroad, Bolaño was dismissive of those workshops and guides, at home, Alberto Fuguet went to Donoso’s and Skármeta’s workshops, Alejandro Zambra did not. The Southern Cone then, has had many masters, and it is natural for the disciples to rebel.

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Bolaño perhaps complained too much about Chilean literature, and his rants have to be put in the context that, even though he was a voracious reader, he had been out of the country too long not to accept other perspectives, or to know firsthand what the development of the novel was really like. Zambra, a great admirer of Bolaño, writes novels that clearly distinguish that a novel on the literary life is not the same as metafiction. He is also aware that his contemporaries produced or are producing a different kind of fiction, and his view should be well taken. However, after Isabel Allende, to non-specialized critics, and certainly to the reading public, the most visible novelist of recent years is Marcela Serrano (b. 1951). Closer to the notion of “literary fiction” is Maturana (b. 1969), whose debut novel El daño (1997, The Damage) has been underestimated by the sobriquet “feminist novel.” An excellent short-story writer whose work appears in the most representative anthologies of the genre, Maturana has not written another novel, but her fiction is still a force to be reckoned with. Now, the Chilean novelist who is not just promising—despite academic ignorance, which perhaps is to her benefit—is Carla Guelfenbein (b. 1959). An earlier novel, 2002’s El revés del alma (The Soul’s Inside), is praised in Zambra’s 2011 Ways of Going Home (2012). Her most recent Nadar desnudas (2012, Swimming Naked), which intertwines the meanings of September 11 1973 and 2001, was published simultaneously in Spanish and German. In between she published two much translated novels, La mujer de mi vida (2005, The Woman of My Life) and El resto es silencio (2008), whose English version The Rest is Silence (2011) has been praised by J. M. Coetzee. At a different stage in their novelistic careers, something similar is happening to Gumucio (b. 1970), whose fragmentary novel Memorias prematuras (1999, Premature Memoir) has received less attention than his trenchant nonfiction; and to Carlos Labbé (b. 1977), author of Navidad y matanza (2007, Christmas and Slaughter), a much better metaliterary and surrealistic effort than a “hypertext” novel he published in 2001. Labbé is among Granta’s 2010 Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. From these novelists one can leap to the ones included here, and Bolaño could of course not guess what his contemporaries are accomplishing, much beyond the trite novels of immediate predecessors like Ariel Dorfman and Luis Sepúlveda. If Bolaño wanted to act as a bold go-between of Chilean narrative, Aira fulfills the same function in more subtle ways. Different from the Chilean, the Argentine has expressed his dislike not of individual novelists, but of contemporary writing. This is odd for a novelist who for all intents and purposes has achieved canonicity by upending whatever was fashionable in Argentine narrative, and by creating new paradigms based on really innovative manners of perceiving the world, without resorting to “avant-garde” techniques. This might be a felicitous situation, since despite the various economic and political crises Argentina still experiences, there is no letup in novelistic production, whether by novelists in the country or abroad. Argentine production has fluctuated in recent decades between novels that want to be unorthodox modernist (in the “first world” sense), late testimonial memoirs, iterations of novels that still have the power to surprise and unsettle (some attached to the great tradition of literature of the fantastic), and the diverse types presented in this book.

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This is another felicitous condition that makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. Despite any compilation’s best intentions, at this juncture some novelists have not had academic consideration, despite the wider press attention that our contributors decipher for them. This is evident in the Argentine and Uruguayan cases. For example, a novelist like the Argentinean Oliverio Coelho (b. 1977) is widely admired by his peers. His novels, from his first, Tierra de vigilia (2000, Land of Vigil), published simultaneously in Mexico and Argentina, to the recent Un hombre llamado lobo (2011, A Man Called Wolf) are still put out by small publishers, with little distribution. Yet, he is one of Granta’s 2010 Best Young Spanish-Language novelists. By the same token, Marcelo Cohen, included here, spent a good part of his life abroad, yet published with larger houses upon his return to his native Argentina. Some of these discrepancies have to do with internecine squabbles, frequently fostered by the press. Thus, in its October 6, 2007 issue, La Nación’s cultural supplement, ADNCultura conducted a survey with the premise “Ya son grandes,” i.e., “They are already older,” or “They are already great.” The authors interviewed were Leopoldo Brizuela, Guillermo Martínez, Alan Pauls, and Pablo de Santis; the first three are included in this book. The questions are predictably about generational attachments, and strictly Argentine contexts. When they are asked about the state of national literature from the 1990s on, Pauls mentions Coelho; the others mention, however briefly, two authors whose novels appear landlocked, Juan Forn (b. 1959), influential as an editor and journalist, and Marcelo Birmajer (b. 1966), author of numerous novels for young readers, and others that center on Jewish-Argentine themes. The developments above can be put in perspective by Spain-based assessments that intensify the imprecise results of subjective criticism. The journal Insula’s September 2011 issue devoted all its pages to Latin American “Malas escrituras,” which could mean evil or poor writings. The great majority of the authors—examined by conventional critics oblivious to the possibilities of the theme that purportedly gathered them—are from the Southern Cone. Of the ten articles published, two, respectively on Aira and the Mexican Mario Bellatin, included in this book, problematize the illegibility that is the nominal conceptual thread of the issue. That most of the other authors whose “good bad writing” is examined is precursory, the fact remains that no connection is made to contemporary novelists, even when writing about the great Uruguayan prose writer Mario Levrero (1940–2006). Further complicating the difficulty of trying to find fairly stable links in the development of contemporary Southern Cone fiction is the area’s late twentieth century impulse to find a long-lasting form for the twenty-first century novel. During the time the novelist and short-story writer Cristina Peri Rossi (b. 1941) came of age, the Uruguayan novel and its few novelists still had to reckon with the force of nature that were, and are, the novels of Juan Carlos Onetti. Levrero, perhaps the Uruguayan novelist with the greatest conceptual reach, saw very little of his work published during his life, and now a little of it has been translated into French and Hebrew. He is now a cult figure, admired and written about by critics like Ignacio Echevarría. Levrero is a solid and worthy precursor, similar to his countryman

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Felisberto Hernández (1902–64), especially in Spain, where his books are being published with the major houses. Levrero is certainly not yet an influence but an important discovery for some of the novelists included in this book, like Zambra. In 1989 Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (b. 1947) published Maluco. La novela de los descubridores (Five Black Ships: A Novel of the Discoverers, 1994), an epic narrated by a Jewish jester in Magellan’s fleet, to justly great acclaim. But the Uruguayan’s subsequent historical novels have not kept pace. If visibility outside their own countries is still a valid criterion for a country’s novelistic production, the next Uruguayan to be reckoned with is Tomás de Mattos (b. 1947). His fine re-writing of Uruguayan identity in new historical novels of essayistic content, like ¡Bernabé, Bernabé! (1988) and El hombre de marzo: la búsqueda (2010, The Man from March: The Search), which is the first part of a biographical novel, are the peers of other prose writers from the continent. No less important is his first novel, which has seen various reprints, La fragata de las mascaras(1996, The Frigate of the Masks), using Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, itself a fictionalized version of a real-life adventurer, as a palimpsest for a polyphonic quest that ultimately provides no answers. That is the immediate context with which contemporary Uruguayan novelists like Pablo Casacuberta (b. 1969), a participant at the Bogotá39 Hay Festival in 2009, have to negotiate. Casacuberta is well-known among his colleagues, and his novel Aquí y ahora (1992, Here and Now) was published simultaneously in Mexico and Uruguay, with various reprints. But his Ahora le toca al elefante (1990, Now is the Elephant’s Turn) and Una línea más o menos recta (2001, A More or Less Straight Line), perhaps his better known novels, have not had the same fortune. If there is no inkling of where the Southern Cone novel is going, the complexity of its development and trends bodes well for its continued prominence in the contemporary novelistic production of the continent. Will H. Corral

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César Aira (Argentina, 1949) The 2012 English version of Aira’s Varamo (2002) was reviewed positively in The New York Times Book Review by Ben Ratliff, who compared him to Haruki Murakami and others in terms of their stealth entrance into the rarefied atmosphere of world literature. An anonymous March 12, 2012 review of Varamo in The New Yorker called Aira “a man of preposterous fecundity” whose slapdash but delightful prose reminds readers of how furtively he may move into world canonicity. For his habitual Spanish-language readers he is not a wizard of odd, even if in his authorial embodiments (not style) he seems an upgraded magical realist who soars effortlessly from one enigmatic aesthetic stance or generic experiment to another. He assumes his readers are as smart as he, will sign his mimetic contract, and believe his apparently baroque fiction. An unconventional stylist, he is associated with improved views of the avant-garde and humor, with scattering philosophical digressions; eliciting admiration for telling entertaining stories. In an emblematic “Dadaist fairytale” or “experiment” (his preferred genres), 1999’s El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference, 2010), the narrator, a wealthy mad scientist, develops the need to clone the preeminent living sample of a writer’s writer. So he attends a conference in Venezuela hoping to replicate Carlos Fuentes’ genius and form an army of committed intellectuals. Inscrutable, admired by literati but ostensibly read by few, Aira publishes mainly in small but significant Argentine presses, and in recent decades his novels have appeared in Mexican and Spanish editions or reprints, and in translation. Attracting the attention of prestigious foreign periodicals now adds to the disassociation about his being an eccentric, and to the futility of a strictly chronological reading of his prose. Respected if not wildly popular among Spanish-language readers, he is absent from recent canons; and his contempt for such groupings is evident: “I lost my taste for reading my contemporaries many years ago. It is an insurmountable indifference, a mix of distrust and disinterest that paralyzes me before novelties.” (2002: 59). Nevertheless important contemporary novelists like Guillermo Martínez,* Leonardo Valencia,* and Patricio Pron* write thoughtfully about him. In “Foreign Literature,” a May 2007 online note for The New Republic about foreign authors whose domestic reputation exceeds their U.S. standing, Chloë Schama avers that Roberto Bolaño* “is not the only author who was regarded as something of a sensation in his mother country before becoming known in the United States.” For her Aira’s fictions “also exhibit his distinctive hallucinatory style, which blends reality and fiction, the waking world and the dream world.” Similarly, Michael Greenberg overemphasizes that Bolaño’s importance rests on the fact that “he was able to shift the axis of Latin American literature from the magical realism of the tropics, which had exhausted itself by the 1980s, to the more cerebral, European traditions of the Southern

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Cone,” and that Aira benefited from that shift (2011: 36). If so, what distinguishes both novelists from recent “magical urbanism” or Hispanic avant-garde precursors from the 1920s and 1930s? Schama was also off by about 50 percent regarding Aira’s productivity. Since 1975’s Moreira to early 2013 he has published about 80 novellas. There are copious nonfictions; a representative selection of them in Portuguese, Pequeno manual de procedimientos (2007, Brief Handbook of Procedures). Of the published nonfiction Las tres fechas (2001, The Three Dates), on outsider English-language writers, Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos (2001, Dictionary of Latin American Authors), and Edward Lear (2004) embrace a poetics of baring the device. The Diccionario…, to whose writing the narrator alludes in Cumpleaños (2001, Birthday), is an exhaustive albeit idiosyncratic reading of five centuries of the continent’s literature. Each entry seems to ask “What is literature?” and Aira responds that literature is whatever a writer says it is. Despite assuring one of his finest critics that his translations are “the cause of my deplorable style. The first and last thing demanded of a translator is correction, and with the years, my prose has become atrociously correct. I tried to free myself at some point, but it was useless and I have resigned myself ” (Echevarría 111–12), the Lear essay is a diligent study of the practice. Given the legibility of his ornate prose, his “style” actually means pausing to synthesize or analyze, judging his characters’ delivering information in double time, preferring the close-up of the voice that is narrating, which much too often seems to be his own. An exhibitionist of the creative act, he reveals how unconscious mind processes can become a narrative, while arguing that analyzing those processes commonly says more about how one reads narrative than how one creates it. In choosing 2000’s Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, 2006) as a masterpiece and a 2010 [sic] Book of the Year for The Times Literary Supplement, Greenberg summarizes Aira’s writing as: “What he composes one day cannot be changed the next. ‘La fuga hacia adelante’ he calls it—the escape forward: the story must move ahead, never backward, forcing him to come up with ever-new ideas and plot twists. The results are apt to be mixed—hit or miss confections that rely heavily on chance occurrences and the author’s raw imagination” (2010: 10). Following that Baudelairian dictum, Aira does not connect the dots, and a partial poetics for his procedure is Cómo me reí (2005, How I Laughed). This essayistic novel starts: “I deplore readers who come to tell me they ‘laughed’ with my books, and I complain bitterly about those readers; I have done so orally or in writing as many times as I have had the chance” (7). A third into the book one reads “My literary vocation, about which I was always sure, must have been a vocation ‘against’ literature. In any case: the power of self-realization that words have cannot be disdained” (39). Two thirds of the way the narrator professes: “The aesthetic games or stylistic maneuvers to which my literary vocation led, the ‘beautiful asymmetries’ of which I spoke always had as background real life, which is irreducible” (83). Cómo… ends without resolving its paradoxes and contradictions, a stance akin to “relational aesthetics” in performancebased literary art. Rhetorically Aira’s procedures entertain brave complexity instead of seizing ideological solutions. For Greenberg “[This] isn’t automatic writing or ‘first thought,

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best thought,’ as other experimentalists have engaged in: composition is slow, deliberate, rarely more than a page a day” (2011:36). Aira does not overpromise or under deliver: in 1997/2009’s illustrated Dante y Reina (Dante and Reina), which narrates the wedding of a dog and a fly, surrealism, magic, oddness, rape (reported as a discursive action, 24–7), art, and delirium are blissfully combined. At one point the bride’s father, a fly named “SxPxTx,” screams about the urgency of founding a magazine that would be called “Something Has to Be Done for Art!” and proposes that all avantgarde sculptors join the crusade (46). In Festival—like the collector’s edition Los dos hombres, one of four 2011 novellas—Aira fictionalizes his participation in a film festival for a tale (later published by the organizers and Austria’s Viennale in 2012 as its second Useful Book, and in Galician-Portuguese in 2013) about his caustic views on film, centering on Alec Staryx, a Belgian director harassed by a grant holder who has written a book about Staryx’s B-movie science fiction, a genre evident in The Literary Conference and El juego de los mundos (2000, The Game of the Worlds). His nonfiction further demonstrates a palpable affinity for uncommon literary visions and an obsessive partiality for self-referential statements. His fiction does no less, particularly since La serpiente (1998, The Serpent), during which the protagonist “César Aira” writes a self-help book titled Cómo salir bien en las fotos (How to Look Good in Pictures). There is also a Liliana, who despite sharing the real author’s wife’s name, may not be as real as the references to the writers Daniel Molina and Arturo Carrera, and the protagonist. The resulting quaintness muddles attempts to offer “representative” overviews of his prose. Further obfuscating such efforts, he scarcely recognizes sources or possible influences, although Patricia Highsmith, the Argentines Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges, and Marianne Moore come up in interviews (Moreno). Raymond Roussel, the deliriously subversive precursor to Duchamp, is a safer palimpsest. Aira’s worldview was internationalist from the start, but projected from a homemade lower-middle-class atmosphere (Coronel Pringles, where he was born, and Flores, the Buenos Aires district where he lives, are frequent locales for his fiction). He argues that oddity and wonder begin at home, waiting to be unleashed by accident or whim, without having to leave Latin America. In Varamo, set in 1923 Panama (at least two of his other novellas take place there), the protagonists are Varamo, a government hack; two older Panamanian sisters who smuggle golf clubs, and Varamo’s midget Asian mother—Aira is politically incorrect with Asian stereotypes in La abeja (1996, The Bee), Una novela china, (2005, A Chinese Novel), and El mármol (2011, Marble). To replace a counterfeit bill he receives as salary Varamo accepts to write (in one day) what becomes the most famous poem of late nineteenth-century Spanish-American modernismo; an apocryphal work one never reads. The novel is ultimately about chance’s role in fashioning literature and literary fame, the randomness of inspiration and vocation, or how the accidental or arbitrary can trigger larger significant actions; and not surprisingly absurd events constantly distract Varamo. Aira also elucidates that certain fictions can and should be too complex and not for everyone. Consequently some of his hybrid briefer narratives focus on artists (while commenting on the wider world), travelogues, exotic tales with touches of idiosyncratic

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ethnography, self-begotten tales, and bildungromane; a mix found to varying degrees in Ema, la cautiva (1981, Ema, The Captive), Varamo, Los dos payasos (1995, The Two Clowns), and Parménides (2006). He also writes serene novels like An Episode…, and the thoughtful La mendiga (1998,The Beggar), in which women fathom deeper into the nature of identity than men, yet move away from it, deleting their agency. There is much more apropos gender, and the “Aira girls” acquire very different veneers as protagonists in Los fantasmas (1990, Ghosts, 2009), La prueba (1992, The Test), and 2010’s El divorcio (The Divorce) and El error (The Mistake). The “Aira girls” return in Yo era una chica moderna (2004, I Was a Modern Girl) and Yo era una niña de siete años (2005, I Was a Seven-Year Old Girl), as if gender transgressions were dictated by age. El divorcio and El error are made up of interpolated stories, the ones in El error set in El Salvador, bandit adventures included. Along with the campy nature of such novels his versatility extends to elegant and highly complex works like 1994’s La costurera y el viento (The Seamstress and the Wind, 2011), and the longer Canto castrato (1984, Castrato Song) and Las aventuras de Barbaverde (2008, Green Beard’s Adventures), the latter composed of four uneven novellas that share the same characters, inspired in the world of superheroes to simplify good and evil. La costurera… combines digressions on gambling, madness, travel to Patagonia, and Paris, where the narrator finds himself at the start searching for a “plot for the novel I want to write: an adventure novel, consecutive, full of prodigies and inventions. Nothing has come to mind up to now other than the title, which I have had for years and to which I cling with the obstinacy of a void: ‘The Seamstress and the Wind’” (1996: 111). In Cumpleaños the “I am an Other” concept turns into a canard in the first sentence: “A while ago I turned fifty, and had amassed great expectations about the date. It was not so much for taking stock of my life that I could have had them, but because of the renovation, the new beginning, the change of habits” (7). Contrarily, the narrator provides a balance sheet of his life and ongoing projects, especially of the mistakes he has made. The rest of the novel contains rambling reflections and longer digressions, interesting in and of themselves, but not as a unified whole. As in most novellas in which “Aira” is a character, Cumpleaños cogitates on creativity, with frequently self-referential suggestions that all sensations of experiential finitude are associated with a feeling of achieving something. Cumpleaños also provides the fullest view of the lackadaisical and circumstantial nature of narrative: In the long run I became aware that the problem laid in what has been called the ‘invention of circumstantial traits,’ which means precise data about place, time, characters, clothing, gestures, the staging itself. Those details of fantasy started to seem ridiculous and childish to me, information about things that really do not exist. And without circumstantial traits there is no novel… (2001: 98).

By the time of Cumpleaños Aira had a cultish following, not least because it is easy to blur his metanovels with frivolous efforts at self-discovery, mainly in earlier ones like El sueño (1998, The Dream), not to be confused with 2001’s El sueño realizado (The Fulfilled Dream). In this one realism is parodied by the protagonist’s aim to relay a life

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of crime “with realism,” a purpose undone by vertiginous digressions that may be the most real aspect of El sueño realizado. A chronological view of his development was further complicated when he started publishing in Spain in 1997. There his betterknown works appear in different sequences, sometimes conflating various novellas under one title, as with 1998’s Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira (The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, 2012), and only in mid–2012 was The Literary Conference’s original published in Spain. With increasing success he is making individual and social amalgamation unobjectionable, like in El tilo (2003, The Lime Tree). The incoherence and cyclical nature of his plots are actually signs of life, because the characters, never hopelessly alienated, are vital and are given space and time to explore their idiosyncrasies. Thus, in La villa (2001, The Slum) and La guerra de los gimnasios (1993, The Gym Wars), inevitable spatial changes alter the cultural life of slums. But it is unconvincing to extrapolate from such novels that Aira reproduces structures of domination; if only because all his novels exhibit similar procedures to varying degrees. Politics in general and national affairs in particular are absent or relegated in his prose. Some progressive critics force feeble political connections, enhanced by the ease of reading narrative as allegory, and feel compelled to provide one-sided primers of Spanish-American politics or history; manipulating facts to fit a mindset (Valdes). More thorough individual studies and critical collections about Aira (see Works Cited) emphasize how he prioritizes the creative process over its results. More than submitting political tales, he banks on the specious present need for everyone and everything to have a “narrative,” and the right to tell it, not pondering that the public also has a right not to read it. In La vida nueva (2007, The New Life), the protagonist has finished his first novel, yet at the end of the frame novel the publisher has not managed to distribute it, even though every part of the tale indicates he is trying his best. Aira, who makes pithy statements about publishers and publishing in La trompeta de mimbre (1998, The Wicker Trumpet), is positing that readers fail to understand that typing what one writes, or having it printed, is not difficult. The real work is thinking about how these activities gell. Readers see the finished product, so they might think that writers are lounging or loafing, as intellectual slackers. The question is really not what but why one writes, a query whose arc continues in El náufrago (2011, Marooned), in which a shipwrecked man finds a foot and daydreams (7–53) about its origin, concluding he’s found his own body double (46). Any possibility of ample narrative realization is obstructed by fits and starts that, while inventive, become aphoristic observations (37), and the survivor’s fantasizing is deconstructed by “literary antecedents” (13, 50, 56–8). The last quarter of the novel (60–82) is a digression on the meaning of sub-tropical New Year’s eves, like Ghosts. In Parménides the Greek heresiarch hires the writer Perinola (spinning top) to help him compose a book “about nature.” Perinola, no spin master, agrees, but spends most of the novel questioning his own skills, the egotistical Parménides’ motives, and his own; everything coming to a standstill. This is different from the “magic” journey the poet undertakes in the original philosopher’s poem, on which Aira could be basing his novel, since it verges on the tautologies about the way of truth in “On Nature.”

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Aira may be closer to Karl Popper’s assessment of Parmenides’ contribution to science: “Literature and science both begin with story telling, with myth making, and especially with the making of cosmological myths. I suggest that story telling or myth making is one of the earliest fruits of the emergence of specifically human language” (105), a view which broadly comprises Aira’s ability to capture the expressiveness of the inarticulate, as with the protagonist’s found objects in El mármol. In The Miracle Cures… the protagonist, who conceivably shares with his creator more opinions than biography, has a metaphysical folding screen that allows him to parcel reality as he pleases, and always coherently. He has a nemesis, Dr. Actyn, a hospital chief who attempts to destroy Dr. Aira’s prestige through public ridicule. Like many other novels, particularly in the virtual veracity of El sueño, The Miracle Cures… conflates metaphors about truth versus fiction, verisimilitude against fictive constructs, competing literary genres and evil vis-à-vis what is reasonable; a procedure enhanced in the superbly replicated speech of 1993’s Cómo me hice monja (How I Became a Nun, 2007). Aira says How… is a partial autobiography (El tilo, in which he speaks about “real allegories,” would complement these fragmentary memories), dealing with the protagonist’s life from age six to seven, and his views on sexuality. There are no major plot complications, but the narrator refers to himself in the feminine; while her mother, father, and a teacher (who calls him César Aira) address him in the masculine. The precedents provided by How… and La serpiente (wherein the narrator suggests taking a Brazilian drug called Sodomol, that turns one into a homosexual) are richer and deeper than the sequels. Another precedent about sexual indistinctness may be La prueba, made into the film Tan de repente (2002, Suddenly). In this nouvelle Mao and Lenin, two hard-core young women who say they are lovers, begin a road trip by kidnapping the plump Marcia after asking her “You want to fuck?” La prueba ends romantically and brutally; the film meanders into psychoanalyzing to justify the women’s feeling comfortable among women. In How…—which has nothing to do with nuns, although nuns appear as enterprising purveyors of techno-religious “nunsense” in El sueño—a girl goes out for strawberry ice cream with her abusive father. He forces her/him to have decomposed ice cream, and is taken to a hospital where (s)he has wild dreams that reveal subconscious desires and fears. While Aira toys with readers by narrating from an improbable adult point of view for a child, there is no connection to the spiritual bildungsroman the title announces, and the religious association is more carnivalesque, in the sense that doubt makes art vital and religion beautiful. As customarily occurs, apparently insignificant subtexts are what really matters: deception, fantasy and the grotesque, fear and guilt, horror, illusion, literary allusions, violence and to some extent sexual identity; components that can amount to nil, because the “Aira girls” are compulsive liars. In Ghosts the narrator asks if literature is the architecture of what is not built. Within the main plot the author inserts historical notes about the growth of cities, suggestions for other books that the readers may want to write, and enough psychological references to write a treatise about Chilean and Argentine idiosyncrasies.

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While construction workers try to finish an apartment building on a sweltering December 31 in Buenos Aires, two chatty and lascivious ghosts float and walk through the site, and the families of the building’s caretakers celebrate the arrival of the New Year telling ghost stories. Similarly, in El mago (2003, The Magician), the Argentine prestidigitator “Hans Chans” (a.k.a. Pedro María Gregorini) wonders what it means to be a true magician among illusionists. At an illusionist convention in Panama, afraid that his authenticity (his powers are real) and repressed desires could be discovered and change the world’s nature, he opts for writing novels, which he produces by gesturing “Presto,” churning them in rapid succession. Writer, narrator and narration become performance, transformations that demonstrate Aira’s great ability to easily bump realism into surrealism, with well-placed dialogues, as in 2007’s Las conversaciones (The Conversations) which brings a first-person monolog to extremes. In An episode…, an impact akin to Warhol’s “jump effect” centers on the fictionalization of the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–56), renowned for his ethnographic paintings of South American landscapes. Aira seizes that fact to perform an analysis of a principle central to abstract expressionist art: action painting and its goal of capturing the act of creating a work of art, a process whereby art (the novel in this case) is perceived as representing the act of producing it, a very noticeable practice in the earlier Moreira, and an arc can be drawn to the recent El náufrago. Similarly, in Festival the permanent connection between literature and pictorial art is rampant in the fiction/autobiography dialectic, much like in A Brick Wall (2011), a 48-page art book in Spanish, illustrated with film clips for a signed edition of 100 copies. Not surprisingly, about four decades ago Aira wrote Moreira, an “anti-novel” full of anachronisms about a “bad gaucho.” Its five taut sections include phrases like “the current’s sound made him ‘sleepy with happiness’, like Joyce” (7, my emphasis). Incongruous surrealist images abound: a garden “is replaced. Carboard, landscapes. In one or the other, materialists speak; speak to one another. Comics. Total figuring” (12–13, my emphasis). In the theatrical dialogue with which the third section begins a character utters, “It’s him! I knew it! Better yet: I supposed it! No matter how painting’s conventions change, those who look are signals to redo the universe: Theory and practice! Signs within our words ….” (29). Like An Episode …, the duality toward art in Moreira has its basis in the landscapes’ having character and the characters’ having an inner landscape. Ostensibly a brief examination of Juan Moreira—a mythical nineteenth-century gaucho forced into lawlessness who is part of Argentine literary (Borges) and popular culture (Leonardo Favio’s 1973 film)—the novel dialogs indirectly with Juan Moreira (1879), a novelized biography first published as a newspaper serial (1879–80) by Eduardo Gutiérrez, who revised it and adapted for the theater in 1884. Gutiérrez’s work deals with how patriotism and cosmopolitanism started to fuse under the burden of modernity, thematic concerns that weigh heavily on Aira. The intertextual links with the gaucho genre are endless, and besides Ema, la cautiva, Aira augments them in 1991’s La liebre (The Hare, 1998) and El bautismo (The Baptism), and in the endless crisscrossing real and fantastic tales of a gaucho and a Russian Count challenged by a “secret” in La confesión (2009, The Confession).

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La vida nueva, a novelized version of his development since Moreira, forsakes habitual metafictional disclaimers about any relationship between authors’ lives and their work. It is a nostalgic and coy first-person account, not devoid of commentary on cultural politics, or on the beginnings of an author who does not very much care about the accoutrements of producing a first book like Moreira. As the narrator, eventually identified as “Aira” (58) peels away the myths he sees as pacifying an overwhelming majority of new authors in the interest of a manipulative minority of publishers, readers may ask why the story is appealing. (His lack of attachment to a precise aesthetic has led critics like Villanueva to speak of a “double beginning” for Aira’s career, the second incipit being Ema, la cautiva, another novel based on Argentine cultural avatars). A re-reading of Moreira alongside La vida nueva shows otherwise. Besides How…, his most reprinted and read novels are The Hare, An episode…, and Ema, la cautiva. Of the eight novels translated into English to date, The Hare and An episode… deal with Europeans and Latin Americans as fish out of Latin American waters, thus giving a twist to nationalist views of the exotic and avoiding making exoticism a cross to bear. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s often repeated idea that cosmopolitanism and patriotism, unlike nationalism, are sentiments more than ideologies fits seamlessly within the thoughts that are Moreira’s true scaffolding, and the template of Aira’s later prose. As El mago and the quirky Varamo demonstrate, unpredictability is just as important in determining what kind of tourists or vagabonds human beings can be when they cannot control the folly or whims of others. In concert with these issues, in The Hare Clark, an English industrialist and naturalist, roams the Argentine pampas in search of the elusive and uncommon Legibrian hare, along with a young water colorist and a local guide. Clark’s is an expedition of self-discovery, in the most remote of places, contained within an atypical historical novel whose exploits conflate irony and paradox, the absurd and the logical. Clark meets Amerindians who report recent sightings of the hare, and on further inquiry finds more than he wanted. The hare is an emblem for the tale’s manifold mutations, its coherence tethered to development and denouement, not to adventures dealing with colonial dependency, language, or love. Aira prefers nineteenth-century novels because, unlike “anachronistic” twentieth-century ones, they never resolve the tension between thought and decisive action. Writing about Amalia, an 1851 Argentine “national” political novel, Aira bases himself “on the hypothesis that a literature becomes national and is assumed as their own by the readers of that nation when you can speak ill of it, not when you can speak well of it; which anyone can do with or without the feeling of belonging” (2012: 25), concluding that whether foundational or a curiosity, such works are simply available for recovery (2012: 34). Aira’s Argentine critics, still dependent on Duchampian notions, tend to produce local readings, underestimating his international reception. The anonymous reviewer for The New Yorker (June 7, 2010) of The Literary Conference eschews such interpretations, emphasizing that “Aira’s writerly self-reference, while hardly subtle, is disarming, and the result is amusing, self-conscious camp” (79, my emphasis). The spirit of that novel and others is so nonsensical that it is artless and retro avant-garde, and hardly national. If Moreira was a template for his subsequent novels, then Aira

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has cut a stencil into many momentarily unrecognizable fragments, as in the fusion of literary and television fiction in La mendiga, a bewildering tale about doubles (in her remembrances Rosa the protagonist is also Iris). Aira privileges these stances, knowing they serve as impenetrable shields against the too real actions of life. Actions can lead to distress or happiness, pain or pleasure, but such utilitarian views of actions are trumped by Aira’s belief that words and art speak louder, actually an expansion of the trite notion that art works can look different from the way the actual entity appears. If his novels are art with an aura, it is apparent they wield powers analogous to those of the class for whom they have meaning: the bourgeoisie. He writes without any sense of furthering his career, out of passionate interest in his subjects. It is thus hard not to think that when his prose divulges, gives a contrary answer, illuminates a philosophical given, includes a deadpan joke, makes earnest screeds or obscure cultural references, mystifies, or withholds a response, Aira is filled with satisfaction or a leer, and his readers benefit. His novels challenge his new readers, and those who have read a representative number of them. Will H. Corral

Works Cited Aira, César. Moreira. Buenos Aires: Achával Solo, 1975. —Cómo me hice monja/La costurera y el viento/“El infinito”. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1996. —Cumpleaños. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2001. —“Los libros del pasado.” Guaraguao VI. 14 (Spring-Summer 2002). 59–62. —Cómo me reí. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2005. —Parménides. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2006. —Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira/El tilo/Fragmentos de un diario en los Alpes. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2007. —La vida nueva. Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2007. —Dante y Reina. Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2009. —El naúfrago. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2011. —“Amalia” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 743 (May 2012). 25–35. Contreras, Sandra. Las vueltas de César Aira. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2002. Echevarría, Ignacio. “César Aira: ‘En la literatura, no hay cosa peor que el humor.” Desvíos: un recorrido crítico por la reciente narrativa latinoamericana. Andrés Braithwaite, ed. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007. 111–15. García, Mariano. Degeneraciones textuales. Los géneros en la obra de César Aira. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2006. García Díaz, Teresa, ed. César Aira en miniatura: un acercamiento crítico. Xalapa: CILL, Universidad Veracruzana, 2006. Greenberg, Michael. “I read several…” The Times Literary Supplement 5618 (December 3, 2010). 10. —“The Novelist Who Can’t Be Stopped.” The New York Review of Books LVIII. 1 (January 13, 2011). 36–8.

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Moreno, María. “César Aira.” Trans. Phillip Penix-Tadsen. Bomb 106 (Winter 2009). 66–72. Popper, Karl R. The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment. Arne F. Petersen and Jorgen Mejer, (eds). London: Routledge, 2001. Ratliff, Ben. “The Embalmer of Small Things.” The New York Times Book Review March 8, 2012. BR9. Valdes, Marcela. “Unmanageable Realities.” The Nation 294. 18 (April 30, 2012). 40–5. Villanueva, Graciela. “Generación y degeneración del relato en César Aira.” América: Cahiers du CRICCAL. 34. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. 2006. 17–26.

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Álvaro Bisama Mayné (Chile, 1975) Álvaro Bisama was born in Valparaíso and moved when very young to Villa Alemana. Both cities will become the settings for some of his works. A PhD. in Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, he is a professor at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado and a well-known literary critic and commentator in diverse media. He has published novels, books of chronicles, and a collection of essays titled Cien libros chilenos (2008. One Hundred Chilean books) which reviews Chilean literature from Alonso de Ercilla’s La araucana (1569) to Jorge Baradit’s Ygdrasil (2005). Cien libros explores literature from the perspective of a novelist considering the craft of writing and his relationship with his culture and literary tradition. In his chronicles, Zona cero (2003, Zero Zone) and Postales urbanas (2006, Urban Postcards), Bisama recovers minutiae, as well as forgotten moments, of the national scene, concentrating on episodes localized primarily in Santiago or Valparaíso. His participation in Freak Power (see Jara), a literary movement that also includes Mike Wilson, Jorge Baradit and Francisco Ortega, is coherent with his writing project. These authors attempt to disseminate their works on multiple platforms in order to reach new readers. They also distance themselves from Chile’s literary canon, revising the nation’s history by combining elements characteristic of fantasy and science fiction, as well as by incorporating references from vernacular culture, movies, comics, pop music, everyday events, and historical arcana. However, Bisama’s latest novels distance themselves from this aesthetic project and attempt, in a more realist vein, to reconstruct memory constituted from the daily experience of pop culture. These novels reveal a more mature writer who, in order to develop his own vision, no longer needs to continuously debate his country’s literary tradition. Bisama has stated that, after having to systematically reread many books for for Cien libros, his writing changed. He realized “that the moment of quotation, homage and Freak Power had passed, and I started to think things from another perspective” (“Escribo los libros que…”). One can thus classify his novels into two periods. The first one, following the aesthetic associated with Freak Power, includes Caja negra (2006, Black Box) and Música marciana (2008, Martian Music). The second, which begins with Estrellas muertas (2010, Dead Stars) and continues with Ruido (2012, Noise), is characterized by the representation of national events in a manner that continues the use of pop referents characteristic of the first period, but in which “metageneric hybridity” is developed in a less manic and more measured manner. Bisama’s work can be described in its totality, in the words of Macarena Areco, “as fibers of paraliterary forms, combined with historical narrative … with intertextual and metafictional proceedures.” (181–2). All of his novels are characterized by structural, spatial, and temporal fragmentation, as well as by the incorporation and critical resemantization of elements from popular culture, including subliterary genres.

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Bisama can consequently be described as the creator of a unique body of work that appeals to an unusually wide range of readers. Underlying this appeal is the fact that his writings, despite their metafictional aspects and their play with narrative and memory, are presented without any aura of academic theory and always linked to everyday experience. Nevertheless, these are not simple texts. They require active readers capable of identifying links among the most diverse referents and able to make connections within dispersed plots that frequently suggest more than what they actually say, using heterogeneous voices to tell stories that cannot be narrated from a unified point of view. In these frequently depressing narratives, the plot often moves towards an imminent end of the world, for Bisama’s novels are peopled by characters devastated by the grey environment of the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. Yet critics have responded favorably to Bisama’s intertextuality. He has developed a personal style in a genre that lacks specific characteristics. Moreover, it is one that permits him to easily move between a mass cultural space and one more academic, between theory and its pop assimilation. Bisama’s work thus offers readers multiple entries not only into his own work but also into a whole corpus that may be unknown to them. The task of selecting works for literary criticism, which has been part of his craft as writer from the beginning, implies the creation of a path of readings and the decision to expand and modify the literary field. Bisama has admitted that through his work as critic he came to the realization that “I didn’t like anything I was reading. Nothing. I was working on some fiction, thinking about it. They were only sketches… I ended up writing the books I wanted to read” (“Escribo los libros que…”). Bisama’s skill as a literary critic is evident in his first novel, Caja negra, which is practically defined by quotations, fragments, and the confluence of diverse genres. The novel begins with an epigraph from Rodolfo Wilcock’s short story “Los amantes” (“The Lovers”). As we know, Wilcock liked to hand out a business card which read “inventor of authors on demand.” Thus, from the start Bisama makes clear the novelistic tradition to which he wants to belong and the position from which the novel is narrated: that of an unreliable narrator, capable of lying and questioning the veracity of his own story. Each chapter begins with a countdown from twelve to zero, accompanied by quotations from such diverse sources as David Bowie, Juan Luis Martínez, Enrique Lihn, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alberto Laiseca, Amos Oz or Elvis Costello. This amalgam of writers, filmmakers, and musicians follow Bisama’s usual juxtaposition of names from the margins of the literary system, as well as from pop, rock, or punk music and culture, in order to propose a new way of interpreting reality. This reality, moreover, never leaves behind the physical and symbolic violence that defines Chile’s history and the cultural registers that characterize it, but that is relevant beyond the country’s borders. Many of Caja negra’s episodes are set in Chile, yet they could take place anywhere else in the world. There is an absence of any clear linearity, stable setting, or even a defined story. As the novel itself states: “this is not a novel, but it should be” (102). We have called it a novel, but its extreme fragmentation and hallucinatory nature put the classification into question. The combination of interviews, lists of B movies,

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fictitious biographies, and narrative jumps, transform Caja negra into a text difficult to place within a specific genre. It reveals, in form and content, the negative effects of the violence that permeates each event, narration, and remembrance. Even though the combination of genres, voices, characters and stories permits us to get a fuller picture of the consequences of political and economic violence, these elements are also the existential guarantees of a world built on chaos. This is why the only evident connecting thread in the book is the regressive count that opens each chapter and guides us through the explosions that originate the shrapnel and fragments that make up the story. The novel describes the burning of books of which only one exemplar survives; the fire which consumes the letters of a glam rock star’s father; the loss of Kenji’s original graphic novel Caja negra in a fire; libraries with rotting books; hotels that crumble with their memories. In this manner, we only access partial versions of events, in which the narrators question their own stories, or inform us that they are only reporting hearsay. This is how we are informed of Kenji’s suicide attempt: “‘There he tore out his eyes,’ said Osu that Kaori told him” (208). As crime novelist Pedreros comments about his own story: “I was unconscious for two weeks. I don’t remember anything. What I’m telling has been reconstructed from the testimony of those who were there. I don’t know who placed the bomb, nor the reason why. Things like that happened then. We lived in the land of death” (120). The overwhelming premonition of a catastrophic end also characterizes Bisama’s second novel Música marciana. The novel is a road map to apocalypse composed of tragic destinies and purposeful lack of information. In fact, a concern with memory and how it is expressed throughout time, as well as with the search for some kind of common narrative on which to ground identity, characterizes Música marciana. One not only finds the recurrence of topics already mentioned in Caja negra, but also of structures used to relate the biography of characters or the act of forgetting. One thereby begins to understand the author’s obsessions and poetics. Música marciana describes in part the life of a famous Chilean artist, partially resembling painter Roberto Matta, and his descendants, who seem destined for suffering. The narrator is one of the artist’s sons, writing from a nursing home in the resort of Reñaca (on the coast of central Chile). During a raging storm, he narrates the lives of his brothers, stepbrothers, and other relatives. Many of the family members do not know each other, and the narrator, an elderly former drug addict, and the only living son of the painter, attempts to tell the story of each brother, while attempting to stave off the end of his family line. This work again deals with the issue of writing and reflects on the reasons for telling stories, although with less interruption by extraneous literary citations than in Caja negra. Thus the narrator, on many an occasion, indicates the reasons why he is telling this story and enunciates the direct relationship between memory and writing. As the only surviving sibling, he notes: “I am alive but am only a voice. Or, perhaps, I am all the voices, what remains from them, from my brothers’” (20). As if he were a detective, the narrator interprets clues and reconstructs crimes and unexplained deaths. This is a novel difficult to classify. It could be a postmodern crime novel, or a biographical

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novel. Música marciana also deconstructs the classic magical realist narrative à la García Márquez, as it presents a fictional world approaching the apocalyptic ending characteristic of science fiction. Música marciana is however less explicitly complex than Caja negra, even as it develops the same narrative structures and developmental lines, which will be continued in the later novels. The second stage in Bisama’s writing begins with Estrellas muertas, a novel that garnered two major book awards in 2011. Estrellas muertas continues to leave behind the “insane, delirious, and excessive” aesthetic characteristic of the Freak Power group found in Bisama’s first works. However, though in a less obvert manner, some of the same tendencies and dark hopelessness remain. The novel begins with an epigraph taken from the British post-punk band Public Image Ltd: “This is not a love song.” This disenchanted lyric sets the tone for the novel and for its characters who find in punk the soundtrack of their hopelessness. The novel is set in a port city (apparently Valparaíso) during the postdictatorial 1990s. A female narrator, in dialogue with a second narrator, tells us the story of Javiera and Donoso, two students who, despite their age difference, become a couple. She is in her forties and is considerably older than he. A militant in her youth, she experienced the calamities caused by the dictatorship. She has been tortured, exiled and been witness to several crimes. Because of his youth, Donoso knows this tragic past only by hearsay. Both meet in a sordid Chile that, despite the reestablishment of democracy, seems unable to recover from the atrocity. It is a country that has lost its ideals and that has turned its back on any ideology that could bring back optimism to its citizens. The novel notes that both city and country are “living in a frozen time” (135). Javiera, Donoso, and all the other characters live in this frozen time, showing the permanent scars of what the country experienced during Pinochet’s almost 17year-long dictatorship. The city has been destroyed and its inhabitants live in dirty and decrepit motels. Much of the romance takes place between the grimy walls of the motel, a kind of non-place that, like the Hotel Saudade in Caja negra, functions as a metaphor of a Chile from which all want to escape (141). The characters’ lives unfold in this transient motel, with the cacophonous music of the Dead Kennedys as the ideal background for an environment lacking in harmony. Thus the narrator’s memory will have gaps, which will help her to forget those moments she does not want to remember, though not all of them. There are no detailed descriptions of characters and no specific data in this novel. The story is constituted by means of the smallest fragments of information, as if the gaps in the narrative were not meant to be completed through narration. It is as if Javiera and Donoso, or even the narrators themselves, could be anyone else. Javiera represents those who have experienced directly the repression of the dictatorship, “the age of blood and vertigo” (49); Donoso and the narrators represent those who came too late to experience the Pinochet regime, the generation of “tide and undercurrent” (49), the outsiders. Javiera’s life represents a heroic tale that many would like to forget. She causes everyone discomforts because she is the living testimony of a period the dictatorship tried to erase. She tells everything she saw and experienced, even if in an incomplete manner. This affects her surroundings, causing Donoso, their friends, and

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the narrator anguish. It is a burned out and muted world, in which one only hears disturbing sounds. In this it resembles the world described by Bisama in his last novel Ruido, in which the boredom of a provincial town in the 1980s reminds one of the earlier novel’s port city tedium during the 1990s. One of the defining factors for Bisama’s narrative is his training in other genres like the chronicle and literary criticism, in addition to his work in other media. The immediacy of those genres combines to produce a hybrid of journalism and literature, in which voices converge to grant brief but important meaning to the everyday, without wanting to be totalizing. This is evident in Ruido, which recuperates the true story of Miguel Ángel Poblete, the young visionary of Villa Alemana who claimed to have seen the Virgin of Peñablanca during the 1980s. These claims created such a commotion that hundreds of military personnel and even some members of Pinochet’s government went to Villa Alemana. Twenty years later, Miguel Ángel returned to Chile as a transsexual. It seems the episode is of great interest to Bisama since he had already written a chronicle on the topic and had mentioned it in his earlier novels, for instance, near the start of Caja negra. Nevertheless, Ruido is far from a chronicle of the events, since there is no attempt to explain the mystery surrounding the vision and the visionary. Bisama shows no interest in discovering whether the whole event was a careful hoax created by Pinochet’s intelligence service in order to distract public opinion from political concerns. Neither is he concerned with the possible collaboration of the Catholic Church. He is not at all interested in the reality of the event. Instead, the novel focuses on what surrounds the event, which though taking place in an isolated location in the Chilean provinces, could also be taking place anywhere else in Chile or any other Latin American country under a dictatorship. Ruido describes the children and youth, who grew up during the dictatorial regime, especially those living in rural sectors, far from where the events they heard about in news reports or stories took place. They belong to places where time moves slowly, as in the post-dictatorship world previously described in Estrellas Muertas. As Bisama writes: “the light of the Chilean province swallows up time, deforms space, eats up sound and vomits it. It decolorizes color, melts the shape of things” (Ruido 11). Thus the characters spend their time in monotonous occupations: watch “Don Francisco” every Saturday, look at family photo albums, listen to music, and ride bikes. These are boring lives that not even the visions make exciting. The novel deals with everything that happens around Miguel Ángel: the purported apparitions of the Virgin and the official versions of these “miracles.” It narrates that which was not mentioned in newspapers and television news programs, thus chronicling contemporary society. Bisama deals with the minimal moments and names the events and characters that are normally silenced. Moreover, he does not try to reconstruct the chronicle of Miguel Ángel, but, instead, the hundreds of stories of loss of those who in the provinces suffered the silence and the oppression of the dictatorship. No one cared to reconstruct the antecedents to the visionary’s story, because the official story silenced all. Nevertheless, ultimately a unique story emerged that is identified by Bisama with the living presence of the marvelous real or magical realism in that town, where he once lived.

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Ruido is thus also concerned with memory. Again one is presented with reflections regarding how memory is experienced and shaped, and the similarities between our way of making sense of memory and the fragments that constitute the family photo album. It is also interested in those blank spaces that are necessarily filled with fictional fragments, because: “Memory is that, even for ghosts: trash that travels sidereal distances, dilapidated buildings on empty lots, the remains of shipwrecks that sail the frozen sea, ruins floating on time” (20). This work has a unique narrator who speaks in first person plural and collectively portrays a time period and constructs a discourse capable of explaining such an unusual event as the apparition of the Virgin in a Chilean town. As the novel states: We grew up receiving long distance calls from Germany or Belgium from exiled friends of our parents. When they called from a phone cabin near Alexanderplatz, they used counterfeit coins, or someone tricked up the phone (49).

And: We grew up listening to our parents talking with their friends trying to recover the casualness erased by rifles and machetes, as if Europe or Mexico were just around the corner. We grew up. We always wanted to hear the bombs bursting here, in the center of the town, and that the roar would leave us deaf forever. (50).

These fragments show clearly Bisama’s poetics as well as his thematic preoccupations. He is becoming an important writer and critic who, with each new publication, enhances his technique and approaches his goal of “making memory” and disseminating it through literature. Florencia Henríquez C.

Works Cited Areco Morales, Macarena Luz. “Cartografía de la novela chilena reciente.” Anales de literatura chilena. 12. 15 (June 2011). 179–86. Bisama, Álvaro. Zona cero. Valparaíso: Ediciones del Gobierno Regional de Valparaíso, 2003. —Caja megra. Santiago: Bruguera, 2006. —Postales urbanas. Santiago: El Mercurio-Aguilar, 2006. —Música marciana. Santiago: Emecé, 2008. —Cien libros chilenos. Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008. —Estrellas muertas. Santiago: Alfaguara, 2010. —Ruido. Santiago: Alfaguara, 2012. —“Escribo los libros que me gustaría leer.” Revista Ñ. Clarín. September 27, 2012. Web. Jara, Patricio. “La nueva literatura fantástica chilena: Freak power.” Revista El Sábado. December 13, 2008. El Mercurio. Web.

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Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953–2003) No other Latin American author after the Boom of the 1960s has received so much praise and international attention as Roberto Bolaño. Mainstream media, literary supplements, and numerous blogs throughout the world place him as the most visible figure in contemporary Latin American literature. The San Francisco Chronicle called him “the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since Gabriel García Márquez.” Paste affirmed “not since the Latin American Boom of the 1970’s [sic] has a South American writer generated such buzz north of the Río Grande” and The New York Review of Books confirmed him as “one of the most talented and inventive novelists writing in Spanish.” There are articles, by some of the best-known contemporary authors (Susan Sontag, John Banville, Jonathan Lethem) and critics (James Wood, Francine Prose) in English, dossiers devoted to him, constant reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and Paris’ Le Figaro, and weeklong conferences on his work at the University of Tokio and Madrid’s Casa de América. In 2009 his first posthumous novel, 2004’s 2666 (2008), received the U.S.’s National Book Critics Circle Award. At the 2003 meeting of the most visible young Spanish-American writers in Seville, whose proceedings were published as Palabra de América (2004, Word of America), the recognition for Bolaño was unanimous. He would die a short time later from liver failure. His wide acceptance among the public, critics and fellow writers grew significantly, and if during his life at least two collections of essays about his work were published, the present scholarly attention is constant, including current anthologies (Ríos Baeza, Moreno, Rodríguez Freire). Corral (2011) has recently examined in detail how Bolaño enters world literature through English translation of his works, and in 2013 there are numerous international conferences on the Chilean. As tends to occur in these cases, qualms and suspicions about his work begin to appear, and deserved or not they serve to confirm Bolaño’s centrality in contemporary Latin American literature. In fact, blurbs by him are used to enhance the reception of his contemporaries, Horacio Catellanos Moya* and César Aira* among them. There are no dispassionate examinations of the still uncertain “biographemes” available for him in his nonfiction and interviews. Bolaño spent his childhood in Chile and was diagnosed with dyslexia, which according to him was never an impediment for his education. At 15 he immigrated to Mexico with his family, where he continued the secondary education that he abandoned definitively at 17. During his adolescence he was an assiduous reader of poetry, the genre that always held his heart and in which he published his first writings in various Mexican journals and literary supplements. His literary career begins to develop in the literary Mexico of the time, which also became the great setting for several of his books. In 1973, he claims he returned to Chile to support Salvador Allende’s socialist government. Arrested by Augusto

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Pinochet’s military as soon as he arrived, he was freed a week later thanks to some former schoolmates. He fled Chile by land and stopped at El Salvador, where he claims he met the poet Roque Dalton and the members of the Ejercito Revolucionario Popular (Popular Revolutionary Army), one of the political groups that made up the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and that would later kill Dalton. These Chilean and Salvadoran experiences have been belied by some of his acquaintances from those years, although both inform several of his poems, short stories, and novels. Back in Mexico, Bolaño started the “Infrarealist” movement with the poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, the inspiration for Ulises Lima in 1998’s Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, 2007). More than a literary movement with specific postulates that its members applied to their works, the “infras,” as they were known in Mexico City cultural circles, devoted themselves to questioning the hierarchy of the Mexican literary field and its dominant figures. They frequently sabotaged readings, conferences and other public events by what they thought were the more visible figures of the literary “establishment.” According to Bolaño, their main target was Octavio Paz. If “Infrarrealismo” did not produce major works (Bolaño and his partners published poems included in some anthologies of the period), one can affirm that the spirit of that time is significantly captured in Los detectives salvajes (SD), one of his major works. The first years after Bolaño moved to Barcelona in 1977 were difficult, and he held menial jobs, ranging from garbage collector to night watchman at a camp site. He read voraciously and wrote when he could, and on the advice of the Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto entered small literary contests in Spain and earned enough money to survive. The short story “Sensini” is a vivid portrayal of that period and his relationship with di Benedetto. In 1984 he published his first novel, Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Fan of Joyce’s), written in collaboration with the Catalan writer Antoni García Porta. That same year his second short novel, La senda de los elefantes (The Elephant Path) was published, later titled Monsieur Pain 1999 (translated into English under same title in 2012). Despite both novels winning awards Bolaño’s critical and public recognition was still sparse. In the following years he wrote intermittently and with difficulty, publishing La pista de hielo (The Skating Rink, 2009) a decade later. In 1995 he publishes Los perros románticos, published five years later as Los perros románticos: poemas 1980–1998 (The Romantic Dogs: 1980–1998, 2008), an anthology of the poems he wrote in Spain in those years. He later entered the well-known Herralde/Anagrama fiction prize with the manuscript for La literatura nazi en América (Nazi Literature in the Americas, 2008), but withdrew it upon committing to its publication by Seix Barral. Jorge Herralde, director of the Anagrama contest and owner of that publishing house regrets his decision, since he had read the manuscript and become enthusiastic. From then on Bolaño started his friendship with Herralde, who would become his patron and promoter. In 1996 Bolaño’s fortunes change radically. The two books published that year, Nazi Literature… and Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004) receive excellent reviews. The following year he publishes Llamadas telefónicas (Telephone Calls), which like his other short-story collections, has been published partially in English, with a different

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order or titles, such as Last Evening on Earth (2006). His greatest recognition comes when in 1998 SD earns the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos literary prizes. Then come two of his most famous short novels, Amuleto (1999, Amulet, 2006) and Nocturno de Chile (2000, By Night in Chile, 2003), and the stories of Putas asesinas (2001, Killer Whores). After his death come several posthumous books; among them the stories of El gaucho insufrible (2003, The Insufferable Gaucho, 2010) and El secreto del mal (2007, The Secret of Evil, 2012). After 2666 came a couple of novels actually written before or at the same time as 2666 and quickly translated into other languages, El Tercer Reich (2010, The Third Reich, 2011) and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011, The Woes of the True Policeman, 2012). But 2666 guaranteed his international recognition, which had a boomerang effect and further improved his already stellar reputation in the Spanish-speaking world. Nevertheless, in a myriad ways SD represented a true event within Latin American and world narrative (Corral 155–202). The region’s literature was still fascinated by the Boom of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and their contemporaries. It is not that at the time there had not been other authors with important works, like Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Severo Sarduy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro and others published during and after the Boom. But none had managed to attract the public attention SD had at its initial publication. Bolaño always expounded on the impossibility of continuing to write novels in Latin America that were not polyphonic and whose structure did not rely only on plot. His novels, particularly the greatest ones, SD and 2666 are far from relying on a single story line that can be followed with relative ease throughout the entire novel. Yes, both novels begin with a search that can be pursued during the text, but that quest is only a tenuous structure to which an explosion of voices, stories within stories, variable temporalities, and multiple historical and literary referents from Latin American and world cultures is added. SD is full of extremely varied superimposed fragments, and its structure has been compared to Cortázar’s Hopscotch. If both novels share a fragmented narrative world, the Chilean’s hardly calls on any of its characters, or readers, to try to organize and transcend the world the novel portrays. SD does not suggest a “Table of Instructions” like Hopscotch, nor does it aspire to a readerly conscience that could float above those fragments, reweave them and grant them sense. Each fragment has its logic and an internal chronology that loses its strength when one tries to put them together as a totality. What ultimately remains is the difficulty of assemblage. Initially SD’s first narrator, Juan García Madero, tries to give the novel a defined narrative form (1–124). But the recourse he employs, a diary, is suddenly suspended. The novel then gives way to a series of voices and fragments that are multiplied in space and time (125–523). These microstories or vignettes are not gathered in ascending order but discontinually, full of multiple directions. The thread of these vignettes would be the quest for Cesárea Tinajero, but we soon realize that we are really facing a series of tales that, far from leading to a valid clue for finding her, offer a number of assorted testimonials about other characters in the novel, Mexico City,

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and Latin American literature. All these parts are grouped into a disparate tangle that does not try to construct any finished world or allows its reconstruction. There is no internal reality in SD that regulates the functioning of those brief tales but diverse forces that produce unexpected and provisional results. That is why at the end, when García Madero’s diary is retaken and the protagonists find Tinajero (525–77), there is no closure or any reconstruction of meaning. Finding her is no more important than any other fragment. Something similar can be said about 2666. The amount of testimonials it includes, far from leading to a global unambiguous explanation about what occurs in Santa Teresa, create larger questions. Even in novels whose structure is more traditional and linear, like Distant Star or Amulet, Bolaño does not contemplate developing the finished worlds of immediately previous Latin American authors, some replicating magical towns or fantastic nature. He is an author who sympathizes with the unfinished, with the uncertainty of the quest, with roaming, games of chance (as in The Third Reich and the algorithmic possibilities its protagonists present). If Vargas Llosa considers Latin American social realist narrative dishonest and “underdeveloped” because its supposedly omniscient narrators are constantly intruding and opining, such procedures do not present a problem for Bolaño. As in “The Insufferable Gaucho,” the omniscient narrator frequently intervenes in Bolaño’s fictions. Most Boom novels tried by all means to make the author’s voice (mediated in the realist social novel by the omniscient narrator) disappear. They did so in many ways: direct dialog, reported speech, interior monologue, first-person narrator. In fact, those attempts could only increase authorial presence: the author as strategist. New Spanish-American novelists like César Aira,* Bolaño or Mario Bellatin* have returned authors to the surface, making them explicit in the text or, when they fictionalize them, they really make them disappear. The meddler narrators in these contemporary novelists frequently find themselves so perplexed and incapable of explaining the world that they count as much as the rest of the characters and the readers themselves. Following this line of thought, many of those authors do not even present themselves as the origin of their own discourse and sometimes mix existing discourses without much explanation of the illusion. Bolaño himself stated multiple times that he used fragments of his life in his narrative. Arturo Belano, protagonist of SD and many other works, has many autobiographical traits, a fact that has attracted much criticism. This practice, an attribute that may be more “real” than some of the characters, becomes another destabilizing feature, like any other character or fictional situation introduced by the narrator. That juxtaposition of voices, worlds, and characters gradually configures the chaotic city space in SD. The novel’s Mexico City is presented as a variety of radically disjointed and incompatible microcosms, its space not designed as an enigma that could or must be resolved, but as one that spreads out its perplexity completely. The voices that circulate throughout the text are not gathered into one voice, like in Vargas Llosa’s The Cubs. We face a text that neither controls nor guides, but instead contributes to the intrusion of one world into another, allowing the other voices to crisscross. Those voices, so present in SD, Amulet, the short stories collected in English

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as Last Evenings on Earth and The Return, The Insufferable Gaucho, and 2666, belong to characters who frequently are poor devils who move through marginal spaces in Latin American literature (Burgos 2011). Curiously, by being outside the literary establishment these actors spill onto authors, works, and styles that do not always coincide with the canons celebrated by international criticism. Thus, Bolaño’s works provide a way of rereading twentieth-century Latin American literature. In his work we also find many times the theme of the literary career that is frustrated or never takes off. In 1990 Bolaño wrote a poem entitled “Mi Carrera literaria” (My Literary Career) in which the poetic voice enumerates his rejections by well-known Spanish-language publishers: Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, Mondadori, Seix Barral. Writers riddled by rejections, taunts, attending second-rate writers’ workshops inhabit SD, 2666, Distant Star and his stories. But these marginal conditions also mean possibilities or promise, since through the poor devils of his pages one could construct various moments of the last century’s Latin American literature, especially when it was internationalized, its field became strongly hierarchical, and different levels of literary icons began to rise. Bolaño’s work certainly does not question the value of the important authors the Boom internationalized, or of figures like Pablo Neruda, Paz or Jorge Luis Borges. But it does want to limit the field to a few names, styles, or particular representations of Latin America. His poor devils habitually want to connect with other poetics and authors who in good measure had been eclipsed by the internationalization in the 1960s: Di Benedetto, J. Rodolfo Wilcock, Puig, Sergio Pitol, Enrique Lihn, Virigilio Piñera, Silvina Ocampo, and Alejandra Pizarnik. Bolaño’s poor devils rail against icons, and the “Realvisceralism” that creates a few unhappy writers in SD feels deeply attracted to the avant-garde. But more than a specific form of artistic rupture, they are attracted by a communal dimension that sought to break with the unchanging criteria of standard literary institutions. What Realvisceralism takes from the avant-gardes is the need to change art as an institution and the various places that the work of art occupies within it. There are many moments in Bolaño’s works in which his characters make ironic comments about the configuration, features and topography of the Latin American literary field. There is the memorable classification of writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas (in which one can identify several Latin Americans), the one by Auxilio Lacouture in Amulet, or the one by Ernesto San Epifanio in SD. In all of them, as Bolaño manifests a “demystifying poetics” that pretends to destabilize canonical rigidity and call attention to other genealogies of writers is constructed. Through Wilcock, di Benedetto and Pitol, among others, Bolaño constructs a wide angle lens to gaze at literary tradition, and an attempt to get out of its straitjackets. In By Night in Chile, considered his best short novel, through the priest and critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, Bolaño problematizes the forms in which literary taste and value are established, puts the literary institution in crisis mode, reflects on it, opens doors, and exhorts to handle it with care. In the story “Encuentro con Enrique Lihn” (“Meeting with Enrique Lihn”) the literary space is described as a minefield through which new generations must pass, and in The Insufferable Gaucho’s “The Myths of Chtulhu” he warns: “In fact, Latin American literature is not Borges, Macedonio Fernández, Onetti,

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Bioy, Cortázar, Rulfo or Revueltas, not even the old macho duet made up of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa” (170). His characters clearly see the different mechanicisms for “closing” or to “deadlock” the field’s orthodoxy. That is why it is revealing that Bolaño uses the margins of literature in which these characters move to fathom the different dynamics that move toward the internal space he wants to negotiate. Nomadism and mobility are essential aspects of a great part of his characters, who move at will without great qualms. Their fixation is not on their departure or arrival but in the journey itself, since the stops on the road are subordinated to their trajectory. This is why the characters are always more nomads than migrants. The migrant goes from one point to another, even if that point may be doubtful, unpredictable or inaccessible. But the nomad goes from one point to another as a consequence and necessity: in principle the points are only stages of his trajectory. The nomad’s life, as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out in A Thousand Plateaus, has a trajectory that always has two points but it is the “between two” that has acquired consistency and has its own autonomy and direction. The nomads’ space can be localized, but hardly limited, and therefore they are not fertile territory for religion or any kind of institutional worship, whether political or cultural. This view has consequences for the way in which Bolaño approaches the past. It is evident that part of his success is sustained by the way in which he insistently revises many of the great Latin American traumas of recent decades: Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay) dictatorships, narcotrafficking, social violence, marginality. Through this revisionism, as Edward Said has argued great works do, his writing gains importance in the cultural tradition and historical experience of the region. Regarding Southern Cone dictatorships, it is important to note that Bolaño’s work is not limited to denouncing authoritarian regimes. His fiction transcends mere enumeration or description of the violence committed by those governments. The different characters in the novels that take place partially or totally in that area during the 1970s—By Night in Chile, Distant Star, most of SD, Amulet, and parts of Last Evenings on Earth (2006) and The Return (2010) and 2666—are immersed in a violence that aspires to become a “founding” and “purifying” principle, which acts as an “irredeemable chaos” that must be repaired and pretends to establish a new order. Bolaño is not only going to limit himself to denounce an injustice but to try to penetrate the forms in which the power structures into which his narratives submerge work. As a matter of fact the idea of “foundational violence,” which comes from Walter Benjamin, wants to position itself at the birth of a new era. Different from the violence in, say, El Tercer Reich, Pinochet’s violence, as outlined in works like Distant Star or Nazi Literature has an intimate connection with origins. Let us remember the verses from the book of Genesis that the ineffable Carlos Wieder writes above the Santiago sky. In this sense Bolaño also tries to take distance from the Latin American dictator novel, so typical of the region’s literature. By Night in Chile despite reproducing part of the thematics (the dictator and his collaborators as characters) and format (absence of punctuation periods and its respective feeling of interminable accumulation) of works like García Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch, really wants to distance itself from them. It is no longer the

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middle-aged exile writing from Europe about the auratic figure of the dictator, because between his generation and the Boom’s are the Southern Cone genocides. In this regard Bolaño deflates the dictator’s literary aura and takes away the depth that many mid-twentieth century Latin American novels gave it. “Pinochetism,” which Bolaño projects on works like Distant Star, By Night In Chile, or Nazi Literature in the Americas thought of itself as a force that carried out the orders of a superior tribunal (Nature’s, Divinity’s or History’s), and did not present itself as an authoritarian regime but, above all, as a force of nature that was at once necessary and unappealable. The dictator saw himself as a sort of “envoy,” and Chile had to be responsible for its “destiny,” and that end justified any means. Wieder captures the center of this process in some of his verses: “Death is responsibility. Death is love and The Death is growth.” (89–90). In his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), F. W. J. Schelling saw the root of evil precisely in this point: the affirmation of a particular will as identical to an universal one. Any obstacle must be removed so that superior law is accomplished. A process thus understood necessarily entails superficiality, that is: humans as objects at the disposition of an end that is beyond them. Superficiality then extends to the leader and its subjects, to the victims and the killers. It is thus revealing to contrast, for example, the Pinochet of By Night in Chile with the disturbing protagonist of Distant Star, Wieder. There is something unfathomable in Wieder that is never completely revealed, a dimension not exhausted on the surface, an enigma that hides a depth. Pinochet fits perfectly within the regime he directs. Wieder, a more complex, contradictory, and pathological character, is expelled from the Pinochet circles and ends his days in exile, living an obscure life thousands of miles from Chile. Bolaño does not hand over his most sinister and elaborate characters to pro-Pinochet sectors. He also does not create for the dictator or his regime any aura, or weave a complicated psychology through which to project an elaborate figure, nor does he assign him the monstrosity that many Latin American cultural productions still associate with Southern Cone dictatorships. Bolaño erases any complexity, thereby invalidating any psychological or psychoanalytic interpretation of evil surrounding those dictatorships. Undoubtedly, no special quality is needed to practice this kind of evil, and precisely from that, says Todorov, comes its threat: “what made this evil so dangerous was that it was so easy that no exceptional human qualities were required for it” (125). Subtracting the convolution of the dictator and the dictatorships is a characteristic that crosses Bolaño’s fiction, from Distant Star, through Nazi Literature, and By Night in Chile. Bolaño liked to immerse himself in extreme violence, and does so in posthumous novels like The Third Reich and Woes of the True Policeman although to a lesser degree. Santa Teresa, the fictitious border city in 2666 is the prime example of those extremes. If the dictatorship in Distant Star supends civil rights to found a new order based on military power, Santa Teresa portrays a similar condition: rights are suspended in favor of monetary capital, which of course comes from the textile factories, narcotrafficking, and other mafias. Both actions are sides of the same coin: human beings abandoned by the law. The silhouettes traced by the endless testimonies presented in 2666 remind us of an image in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: human beings who

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cannot be sacrificed but whose murder is not a homicide. For Agamben, this is the prototype of people devoid of rights. In this sense a homo sacer experiences something primeval: the city is suspended in an indeterminate space, a zone of indifference and permanent transit between nature and culture. Santa Teresa is part of a territory outside of standard judicial frameworks, in which the law is greatly suppressed and everything is possible. Its citizens have thus lost many of the benefits associated with citizenship and can be annihilated with total impunity. 2666’s homo sacer does not have a friend-enemy relationship, he is totally excluded and as a human being is a residue. All residues, argues Zygmunt Bauman, are the shameful secret of all productions. One has to find ways to cover or get rid of them. 2666, considered by many Bolaño’s most ambitious work, begins with the figure of Benno von Archimboldi, who is a common character in the novel’s five “parts” (he wanted them published as separate novels). But in reality Santa Teresa is the only element that is present in every section of the novel, and it is there that sooner or later all of 2666’s characters end up. It is the common space that acts as background and that in numerous interviews (and from the title itself that links the new millennium to the biblical number for the beast) Bolaño associated with an infernal asphyxiating locale. The novel’s journey through the multiple theories about the murders in Santa Teresa is not set up at all as a traditional police narrative that considers the most convincing theory and tries to find a single culprit and a final solution to resolve all cases. The police genre is similarly subverted in The Woes of the True Policeman adding the re-appearance of 2666’s Amalfitano (161–228) and a “J.M.G. Arcimboldi,” who is not the Hans Reiter Archimboldi of the 2004 novel (635–893). If criminologists and medical examiners are figures presented totally decontextualized in the novel it is precisely because what Bolaño proposes is to enter the space that brings about the crimes, more than embarking on an articial quest that would simplify the complexity of what is going on in Santa Teresa. All the theories that circulate throughout the novel are diminished by the authorities to the need of finding a single culprit acting individually. To do the opposite would mean that those in power would assume culpability in a situation that engages a multitude of spaces and social actors who find themselves inextricably linked to those powers. The crimes of Santa Teresa reflect zones in which the law has been suspended, as occurred before with the disappearances in the Southern Cone countries. But different from that zone in which the absence of corpses was the rule, in Santa Teresa the bodies speak. They are marked all over the place and always delegitimize the official versions of a single guilty party, a single monster in whom evil and the horror of the border city converge. As Bolaño pointed out in his last interviews, the most representative collected by Braithwaite, those bodies frequently point to the industrial Mexican world and its attendant causes. But his novel also offers a prescient panorama of the problematic situation at the border between the U.S. and Mexico and its numerous actors, culture included, and it is a detective story of the first magnitude, precisely because it dislocates the traditional underpinnings of mysteries that are based on finding one or various guilty parties. In its own way, however, 2666, is a police story, but its emphasis is on how that search is inserted into a greater narrative and on

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finding the webs that make it up. In this novel and in his still vastly understudied nonfiction, most of it collected in 2004’s Entre parenthesis (Between Parentheses, 2011), Bolaño tries to distance himself from the type of literary denunciation, frequently marked by political ideology, with which Latin American literature has approached the experience of terror. That type of exegetical discourse dauntlessly seeks a meaning that closes and unifies interpretation, frequently organizing the past in terms of present emotions, further claiming a “realist” authenticity that wants to put in doubt the ability of other types of textual interpretation. In Latin America, especially regarding its novels, ideological underpinnings have been frequently privileged when discussing the topics of violence and repression. Bolaño and his novels and short stories have thrown a wrench into that machine, and his works still have a lot to tell us. Different from testimonial narratives that make “truth” demands, his narrative, no matter how poetic some of his critics have deemed it, aims to expand the senses and to think experience from the outside (Burgos 2009). This procedure establishes a profound difference between the authorial figure that has been created for him and what it is actually telling us. In his narrative there is a view of violence that does not pretend to instruct us nor resolve the enigmas it has presented. Rather, Bolaño’s view allows for truly critical assessments and analysis. That narrative turn consists of entering the nightmare, taking control of it, not only suffering it. Perhaps other works by Bolaño will be published; perhaps there are personal journals besides the notebooks that have been found, correspondence, and even more fiction. Nevertheless, there is ample consensus among his numerous readers, and even among some critics, that most of what he has to say is in his novels. Carlos Burgos

Works Cited Bolaño, Roberto. Nazi Literature in the Americas. 1994. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2008. —Estrella distante. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1996. —The Savage Detectives. 1998. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. —Amuleto. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999. —Monsieur Pain. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999. —Nocturno de Chile. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000. —“Los mitos de Chtulhu.” El gaucho insufrible. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003. 159–77. —Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003. 2004. Ignacio Echevarría, ed. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New Directions, 2011. —2666. 2004. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. —Bolaño por sí mismo: entrevistas escogidas. Andrés Braithwaite, ed. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2006. Bolaño, Roberto and Antoni García Porta. Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1984.

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Burgos, Carlos. “La violencia, el mal, la memoria: una aproximación a la narrativa de Roberto Bolaño.” Nuevo Texto Crítico XXII. 43–4 (2009). 123–44. —“Hacia una teoría del pobre diablo: Los detectives salvajes y el realvisceralismo.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 37. 74 (2011) 305–28. Corral, Wilfrido H. Bolaño traducido: nueva literatura mundial. Madrid: Ediciones Escalera, 2011. Herralde, Jorge. Para Roberto Bolaño. Barcelona: Acantilado, 2005. Moreno, Fernando, ed. Roberto Bolaño: la experiencia del abismo. Santiago: Ediciones Lastarria, 2011. Ríos Baeza, Felipe A., ed. Roberto Bolaño: ruputura y violencia en la literatura finisecular. Mexico City: Ediciones Eón, 2010. Rodríguez Freire, Raúl, ed. Fuera de quicio. Bolaño en el tiempo de sus espectros. Santiago: Ripio Ediciones, 2012. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Trans. Arthur Denner. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

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Leopoldo Brizuela (Argentina, 1963) Leopoldo Brizuela wrote his first novel, Tejiendo agua (1986, Weaving Water), at the age of 19. Four years later, when published, it won the First Fortabat Award. Since then his works have shown a strong political angle while dealing with significant themes of social oppression, though none of them has been translated into English yet. Tejiendo agua and Una misma noche (2012, The Same Night) delve directly into recent Argentine history: the period of the last dictatorship and its social and political consequences such as the War of the Malvinas (1982), the search for the kidnapped children of the disappeared, and the notorious scandal involving Daniel Graiver’s company Papel Prensa, which still affects the country’s political landscape. Another constant is Brizuela’s conscientious focus on Argentine Native American cultures, an interest he developed while working with researcher Leda Vega who exposed him to folk narrative (Chiaravalli). Finally, there is a robust influence of two types of music in all his writings—tango and fado. They appear in different forms throughout his works, and Brizuela singles out this music as the way he has identified himself since childhood (La Nación, 1 May 2010). Since his first novel he established himself as a creator of claustrophobic spaces of existential anxiety and constant oppression as well. In the 1990s another key element of his literature became evident: an engagement with homoeroticism that both torments and saves many of his characters. This aspect is pronounced in his poetry collection Fado (1996) where he links fado, seas, and ports with the liquid state of desires, emotions, and sexuality. He claims that fado is music of the coast, of the fluctuating frontier between land and water (Fado 8). In one of the poems, “Danza,” the narrator and another man are joined in an erotic underwater dance that liberates them from heteronormative proscriptions. Inglaterra. Una fabula (1999, England. A Fable), which won the Clarín Award for Best Novel, solidifies Brizuela’s exploration of homoeroticism. At the same time, this work introduces another crucial feature of his style—a concern with History. In fact, all his prose, except for his first novel, is mainly historic in nature. He introduces central homosexual characters who influence historic events and challenge the suppression of non-heteronormative sexualities from traditional history books. As William Turner points out, within the field of history this type of reevaluation was only possible after Foucault’s work on “historicizing ‘homosexuality’” in the 1970s (62–82). In Inglaterra, which tracks the turbulent fate of a Shakespearean theater company over the span of four centuries, the man who changes the course of history is an Oscar Wilde-like character. Despite being in love with another man, he purchases a young bride and grooms her to become the link that splices civilization and barbarism, the New and the Old World, past and present. She achieves this by

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sailing with her husband’s troop to the newly-constructed Panama Canal and later on to Tierra del Fuego. There she discovers the origins of the man who inspired Shakespeare to create Caliban and write The Tempest. Guillermo Saavedra describes this final destination of the company’s ship as a land of “wild children” where the other half of culture flourishes, the complementary truth of Western culture’s civilizing ostentation. Brizuela’s collection of short stories, Los que llegamos más lejos (2002), is his most critically analyzed work. Several articles engage the historical, mythical, sexual, and subversive elements of its different tales that focus on the history of Argentine’s native population, particularly the Mapuches, while examining the lives of some of its important leaders: Calfucurá, his son Namuncurá, and his grandson Ceferino Namuncurá (Elizalde; Esteso Martínez; Jostic). The first of the short stories, “El placer de la cautiva,” revisits the theme of the female captive, well-explored throughout Argentine literature and in contemporary novelists like César Aira,* and presents Namuncurá in pursuit of a white girl in a mystical journey of constant repetitions, awakening sexualities, and submission reminiscent of Borges’ style. Dolores de Elizalde identifies some of the most distinctive features of the storyline as mythical temporality, narrative transmutations, as well as the presence of mirror-like and labyrinthine elements (64–6). In his last two novels, the writer uses as a backdrop the nighttime with its environment of darkness and terror. Despite its more than 700 pages, the events in Lisboa: Un melodrama (2010, Lisbon: A Melodrama) occur over a single night in 1942 in the Portuguese capital, when that country is nearly dragged into World War II. The plot mixes fictional cabaret singers, bohemians, and homosexual characters with real-life events and people. Brizuela intertwines the destinies of several queer men who are trying to escape the Nazis’ concentration camps and the fall-out of the infamous scandal of the cadets at the Military College in Buenos Aires in 1942 (for more details on this last event, consult Bazán [219–23]). Finally, some of those men find redemption and even a chance of happiness in one of the darkest hours of human history. Redemption is also feasible at the end of the second of two nights that mark the life of Leonardo Bazán, an openly gay writer, in Una misma noche, a book that won the Alfaguara Award for Best Novel. This second night takes place in 2010, while the first one happens in 1976 when a group of armed men enters his family’s home in search of their neighbor. Brizuela admits that the novel contains autobiographical elements and his aim is to explore the fear and cowardice people exhibit under such circumstances (Premat). Later it becomes clear that the neighbor, a Jewish employee at Papel Prensa, was imprisoned and tortured once the paramilitary units were able to find her. The narrator’s memories of his family’s willingness to collaborate with the woman’s captors define the course of events in the novel. Brizuela’s elegant style portrays the man’s attempts to come to terms with such collaboration and once again offers an opportunity for redemption. It also exposes the indifference of a significant part of the country’s middle class during the dictatorship when horrible atrocities were committed in the name of peace and prosperity.

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In conclusion, it is important to point out the writer’s elaborate, yet intelligible style (Quereilhac; Saavedra). Brizuela’s oeuvre shows a firm compromise with the rights of marginalized groups—sexual and ethnic minorities, indigenous populations, and political dissidents, among others,—and gives them a voice and place within History. As Esteso Martínez notes, his writings unequivocally resist norms that subdue, distribute, and exclude members of these groups (403). There is no doubt that Brizuela’s endeavors are well-developed and received as evidenced by the multiple prizes his novels have obtained in Argentina and abroad. After receiving the prestigious Alfaguara Award in 2012, it is quite likely that his works will continue to probe some of the darkest moments of human history challenging the official archive, identifying those erased from History’s annals, and surprising his readers with original and thoughtful plots and style. Assen Kokalov

Works Cited Bazán, Osvaldo. Historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina: De la conquista de América al siglo XXI. 2nd edn. Buenos Aires: Marea, 2010. —Tejiendo agua. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1986. —Fado. Buenos Aires: La marca, 1996. —Inglaterra. Una fábula. Buenos Aires: Clarín, 1999. —Los que llegamos más lejos. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2002. Brizuela, Leopoldo. “El amor, entre el tango y el fado.” La Nación. May 1, 2010. Web. —Lisboa. Un melodrama. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2010. —Una misma noche. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2012. Chiaravalli, Verónica. “Fábulas en los confines del mundo.” La Nación. December 1, 2002. Web. Elizalde, Dolores de. “El placer de la cautiva: una lectura hermenéutica.” Letras [Buenos Aires] 54 (2006): 59–75. Esteso Martínez, Santiago. “Sentidos bárbaros. Nación y sexualidad en disputa.” Río de la Plata 29–30 (2004): 391–403. Jostic, Sonia. “El relato exasperado: iconización de la palabra y narrativización de la imagen.” Alba de América 29.55–6 (2010): 277–93. Premat, Silvina. “Brizuela, premio Alfaguara 2012.” La Nación. March 27, 2012. Web. Quereilhac, Soledad. “Cadencias de una melodía sentimental”. La Nación. May 15, 2010. Web. Saavedra, Guillermo. “Shakespeare como guía.” La Nación. February 16, 2000. Web.

Turner, William. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

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Marcelo Cohen (Argentina, 1951) One of the defining characteristics of Marcelo Cohen’s novelistic oeuvre is the readily apparent disassociation with concrete geographies and temporal frames of reference, which leads to a privileging of the imaginary—often dystopic—spaces that his characters inhabit. Furthermore, while there are no overt autobiographical elements in his novels, it is not difficult to perceive how the circumstances of his life have shaped his writing. He lived in Barcelona from 1975 to 1996, working as a journalist, editor, and translator before ultimately returning to his native Buenos Aires. While Cohen’s fiction reveals the obvious, and practically inevitable, influence of Argentine masters such as Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar, it is his engagement with a wide range of writers that, in part, explains why his work transcends the local and occupies a truly transnational space. Cohen’s translations of authors as diverse as Jane Austen, Clarice Lispector, J. G. Ballard, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Italo Svevo—to name only a small sampling—have clearly become infused into his own writing to differing degrees. Furthermore, his rather prolonged absence and distance from Buenos Aires during two decades provided him with what he has called a kind of independence: “I didn’t feel the need to locate myself within any given tradition and therefore I was able to take many years, write slowly and give voice to a kind of internal rumbling formed by emotional magma and ideas that arise from reading” (Speranza 73). Being at a geographic and literary remove from Buenos Aires, together with the fact that many of his early novels were published in Spain, meant that he remained somewhat at the margins of the Argentine literary landscape. Since his return to Buenos Aires in 1996, he has come to occupy a more prominent place within the national literary culture. His earliest publications consist of three short-story collections dating from the 1970s and early 1980s, which were all met with favorable recognition of his talent as narrator. His first novel, El país de la dama eléctrica (1984, Electric Ladyland), appeared just one year following the return to democracy in Argentina and went relatively unnoticed upon publication; probably due to the fact that by this time Cohen had been living in Spain for almost ten years and it was but one in a tidal wave of postdictatorship novels. Notwithstanding, Dama eléctrica did serve to launch Cohen’s career as a promising young novelist whose contemporary outlook and pop culture references eventually caught the attention of readers and critics alike. Proof that this novel has stood the test of time, and can even be read as a classic novel from a generation of writers that includes César Aira,* Ana María Shua, and Reina Roffé, is made evident by its subsequent reprints (2000, 2004). In a certain sense, Cohen did with rock music what fellow novelist Manuel Puig had previously done with cinema by making it a central axis of his novel, which, it should be obvious, takes its title from rock legend Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 double

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album Electric Ladyland. Cohen’s protagonist Martín Gomel, a would-be rock star, unravels two parallel versions or possibilities for the telling of the same story. In his creation of Gomel and the world of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and above all violence, that he inhabits, Cohen lays the foundation for what will become his novelistic universe. As he undertakes the search for Lucina, the missing woman who has the money he needs to get his rock band back together, he takes on a transnational identity, travels to an unnamed Mediterranean island, undergoes linguistic and cultural transformations, and learns to question ingrained belief systems and his very perception of reality. The novel not only takes the name of Hendrix’s album, but as Silvia G. Kurlat Ares points out, Cohen also structures his text to ideologically emulate the famed musician’s aesthetic and political message. She states that in Dama eléctrica “like the songs on Hendrix’s album, the same story is narrated not only from diverse points of view, but also as if it were about two different stories, although in each case, the events constitute two possible options within the universe of what is possible” (281). In their representation of postnational geographies, futuristic societies, and dystopian realities Cohen’s novels are decidedly postmodern. His imagined postindustrial communities of Lorelei in El oído absoluto (1989, Perfect Pitch), Bordas de Krámer in Insomnio (1986, Insomnia), or the Delta Panorámico in the trilogy of tales Los acuáticos (2001, The Aquatics), Casa de Ottro (2009, The House of Ottro), and Balada (2011, Ballad) are spaces in which the current models of nationhood, government, and power structures have been rendered useless as archaic social systems. These novels present not only the dissolution of geographical and political borders, but also the suspension and reappropriation of language itself as an exercise in the reformulation of literary meaning. Cohen’s narrative style constantly calls into question the function of language, its limitations, and ultimately its inadequacies. It has been observed that Cohen engages in narrative distancing techniques such as defamiliarization and semantic imprecision so that “once the image or the action is established, language disrupts them, negates them, and therefore impedes them from taking definite shape” (Ferman 89). His novels seem to emerge directly from cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo’s description of Argentina in Escenas de la vida posmoderna (1994, Scenes from Postmodern Life 2001) as a space in which the First and Third worlds collide, where the dehumanizing effects of a culture of “zapping” driven by the superficiality of mass media, popular culture, and shopping malls shape and define (post)modern Argentina. In this sense, many of Cohen’s novels add to a corpus of anticipatory fiction in Argentina that speaks directly to the anxiety-ridden national psyche in the collective portrayal of the not-sodistant and not-so-implausible future. The previously mentioned novels by Cohen, then, join forces with such texts as Daniel Gutman’s Control remoto (1994, Remote Control), Shua’s 1997 La muerte como efecto secundario (Death as a Side Effect, 2010), and Eduardo Blaustein’s Cruz diablo (1997, Devil Cross) in the creation of an alternate Argentine universe that mirrors the distorted reflection of contemporary reality. The elements of genre fiction—fantastic literature, science fiction, the mystery novel—are often key components in his novels. The plot of El sitio de Kelany (1988,

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The Site of Kelany), for instance, is based on the conventions of the detective novel at the same time that it functions as a psychological novel. Insomnio, El oído absoluto and Inolvidables veladas (1996, Unforgettable Evenings [first published in French in 1995]) can all be classified as pertaining to Latin American science fiction, which is often described as being “soft.” That is, it does not rely heavily on technology or science per se either for its plot development of thematic content. This is certainly true of Cohen’s novels, which are generally lacking any kind of treatment of future technology or scientific advances and adhere more closely to the type of science fiction modeled by Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and primarily Ballard who, Cohen states, “wasn’t interested in outer space of the distant future. The future was today” (Speranza 77). Echoes of Bioy Casares’ 1940 classic novel La invención de Morel (The Invention of Morel, 1964) are readily apparent, though updated, in the youthful holographic images of a now geriatric tango singer that are projected by a multinational corporation as part of a scheme to revive the mythical tango and its bygone values. Among the most critically acclaimed and studied of Cohen’s novels is El oído absoluto, in which the seemingly innocent, pleasurable, even utopian space of Lorelei masks the disturbing forces that operate just beneath the surface. As the title indicates, music again plays an important part in the overall development of the novel. Lorelei is a Disney-like theme park constructed on an island and intended as a vacation getaway where citizens from around the globe are exclusively selected to experience a free-of-charge utopian world. The main plot of the novel revolves around the troubled relationship of young woman and her estranged musician father. However, the characters are somewhat overshadowed by the grotesque characterization of Lorelei itself as a Mecca for vacationers all-too-eager to leave the troubles of the outside world behind them. Their only contact with life outside of Lorelei comes in the form of sound bites and headlines that indiscriminately scroll by on large screens as revelers amble about enjoying the many attractions of the island. The dark side of Lorelei is that it serves as much as a reformatory as a vacation destination. So-called dangerous emotions such as anger are monitored and controlled by the use of bracelets that all the visitors must wear. The ugly underbelly of Lorelei is revealed most effectively in the huge garbage dump that exists on the outskirts of El Recinto, the result of the rampant consumerism that is practiced within the walls of the park. The toxic stench that the dump exudes stands in stark contrast to the artificial pristineness that Lorelei pretends to provide for its visitors. Critic Fernando Reati underscores the fact that Cohen “purposely satirizes the postmodern notion of culture as a hybrid conglomeration of remnants and multiple influences, high and low culture, mixed and heterogeneous aesthetics, to suggest that postmodernity thusly understood is more an accumulation of trinkets and ideologies than a broadening of cultural options” (155). Gabriel Ignacio Barreneche studies El oído absoluto in direct relation to modern-day theme parks such as Disney World, and underscores how in very real terms truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The bizarre world of Insomnio is also situated in an imaginary postindustrial locale, Bardas de Krámer, loosely identified as being somewhere in Patagonia. Springing up as an international oil boomtown, in just ten years Bardas de Krámer

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falls into rapid decline and decay once the oil wells dry up. There is a clear condemnation in Insomnio of the neoliberal economic policies that were put in place in most Latin American countries that were coming out of dictatorships in the 1980s. Economic crisis brought on by deregulation, ecological disaster, the privatization of natural resources, the invasion of multinational corporations are all part of the grim reality of Insomnio. The most disturbing aspect is the depiction of Krámer as dehumanizing space in which the remaining inhabitants are under the close watch and constant control of the “International Forces of the South Atlantic Treaty.” The main character, an aptly named prophet figure, Ezequiel Adad believes that he is destined to make an important revelation. Plagued by extended bouts of insomnia and strange dreams, he is preoccupied with the idea of leaving the city and when the opportunity finally presents itself he chooses to remain. In the dreary world of Krámer, art, literature, and music are the sole sources that give meaning to an otherwise bleak existence. In her detailed study of the novel, Adriana J. Bergero connects the fictional world of Krámer to the real-world political and sociohistorical circumstances and events that Cohen indirectly addresses. She summarizes that Insomnio “recalls the political history of a libertarian Patagonia, addresses the interference of the global upon the regional, the economic recessions caused by the speculative withdrawal of global capital, the effects of migration and unemployment caused by political adjustment, as well as the resurgence of the internationalism of labor forces” (47). The self-conscious act of writing a novel about the act or process of writing itself appears in at least two novels by Cohen. The philosophically inclined El testamento de O’Jaral (1995, The Testament of O’Jaral) is a vehicle fo