Latin American Boom
Encyclopedia
The Latin American Boom (Boom latinoamericano) was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar
of Argentina
, Carlos Fuentes
of Mexico
, Mario Vargas Llosa
of Peru
, and Gabriel García Márquez
of Colombia
; but it also brought fame to older writers like Jorge Luis Borges
, Pablo Neruda
and Ernesto Sábato
. Influenced by European and North American
Modernism
, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, often very political. "It is no exaggeration", critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution
and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World
generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba
between 1959 and 1971."
The sudden success of the Boom authors was in large part because their works were among the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe, by publishing houses such as Barcelona's avant-garde Seix Barral in Spain. Indeed, Frederick M. Nunn writes that "Latin American novelists became world famous through their writing and their advocacy of political and social action, and because many of them had the good fortune to reach markets and audiences beyond Latin America through translation and travel—and sometimes through exile."
. This climate formed the background for the work of the writers of the Latin American Boom, and defined the context in which their sometimes radical ideas had to operate. The Cuban Revolution
in 1959 and the subsequent USA attempt to thwart it through the Bay of Pigs Invasion
can be seen as the start of this period. Cuba's vulnerability led it to closer ties with the USSR, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis
in 1962 when the US and USSR came dangerously close to nuclear war
. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s military authoritarian regimes ruled in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and many others. For example, on September 11, 1973 the democratically elected President Salvador Allende
was overthrown in Chile
and replaced by General Augusto Pinochet
who would go on to rule until the end of the 1980s. Chile under Pinochet became "infamous for [...] human rights abuses and torture techniques", and in Argentina
the 1970s brought the Dirty War
, notorious for its human rights violations and the disappearances of Argentine citizens. Many of these governments (which were supported by the US) cooperated with each other in terms of torturing or eliminating political opponents and "disposing of their bodies" in "the so-called Operation Condor
."
The period between 1950 and 1975 saw major changes in the way in which history and literature were approached in terms of interpretation and writing. It also produced a change in the self perception of Spanish American novelists . The development of the cities, the coming of age of a large middle class, the Cuban Revolution
, the Alliance for Progress
, an increase in communication between the countries of Latin America, the greater importance of the mass media, and a greater attention to Latin America from Europe and the United States all contributed to this change. The most important political events of the period were the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Chile
an coup d'état
in 1973. The fall of General Perón
in Argentina
, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay
, and the unending violence in Colombia
also affected writers, as they generated explanations, or testimonies, or provided a troubling background for their work.
The greater attention paid to Spanish American
novelists and their international success in the 1960s, a phenomenon that was called the Boom, affected all writers and readers in that period. What mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Spanish America was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution
in 1959, which promised a new age. The period of euphoria can be considered closed when in 1971 the Cuban government hardened its party line and the poet Heberto Padilla
was forced to reject in a public document his so-called decadent and deviant views. The furor over Padilla's case brought to an end the affinity between Spanish American intellectuals and the Cuba
n inspirational myth. The Padilla affair is thought by some to have signalled the beginning of the end of the Boom. However, in a significant sense, the Boom has not ended; the writers associated with the Boom have continued to publish books that have been read by audiences far larger than those enjoyed by Latin American writers prior to the Boom. The books of such writers as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (both of whom are still active as of 2011) are widely distributed and translated into other major European and Asian languages to a much greater extent than those of such significant pre-Boom writers as José María Arguedas
, Eduardo Mallea
or Manuel Rojas.
began with the writings of Jose Martí
, Ruben Darío
and José Asunción Silva
's modernist
departures from the European literary canon. European modernist writers like James Joyce
have also influenced the writers of the Boom, as have the Latin American writers of the Vanguardia movement. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez argues that the writers of the Vanguardia were the "true precursors" to the Boom, writing innovative and challenging novels before Borges and others conventionally thought to be the main Latin American inspirations for the mid-20th century movement.
In 1950, Spanish American novelists were tolerated but marginal in the literary landscape, with Paris and New York representing the center of the literary world; by 1975 they were celebrated as central figures. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. In general—and considering there are many countries and hundreds of important authors—at the start of the period, Realism
prevails, with novels tinged by an existentialist pessimism, with well-rounded characters lamenting their destinies, and a straightforward narrative line. In the 1960s, language loosens up, gets hip, pop, streetwise, characters are much more complex, and the chronology becomes intricate, making of the reader an active participant in the deciphering of the text. Late in the period the political adventure goes sour, while the linguistic sophistication reaches a new height, and novelists turn more to a reflection on their own writing, a fiction on fiction or metafiction, while characters and story lines show the corrosive power of a postmodern
society, where all is equally available and insignificant.
With the success of the Boom, the work of a previous generation of writers gained access to a new and expanded public. These precursors include Jorge Luis Borges
, Miguel Ángel Asturias
, and Alejo Carpentier
, Juan Carlos Onetti
, and Juan Rulfo
.
's Rayuela
(Hopscotch
) (1963) while others prefer Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero
which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962. Fernando Alegria
considers Augusto Roa Bastos
' Hijo de hombre
the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, "it was published in 1959." One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias
's 1949 novel Men of Maize
.
Another variation is articulated by Randolph D. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Ángel Asturias's El Señor Presidente
(published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Sabato
's "El túnel
" (1948) or Onetti's "El pozo
" (1939). Or go even farther back, to the vanguardist movements of the 1920s. However, the writers of the Boom declared themselves orphaned and without any autochthonous model, caught between their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers Indigenistas, Criollistas, and Mundonovistas."
The major representatives of the Boom claimed that they were an "orphan" literary generation, without a "Latin American "father" of influence;" however, they owe much of their stylistic innovation to the Vanguardists. Jean Franco writes that the Boom marks "a refusal to be identified with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the novela de la tierra."
in 1966.
) marvelous realism or lo real maravilloso. According to this aesthetic, unreal things are treated as if realistic and mundane, and mundane things as if unreal. Plots, while often based on real experiences, incorporate strange, fantastic, and legendary elements, mythical peoples, speculative settings, and characters who, while plausible, could also be unreal, and combine the true, the imaginary, and the nonexistent in such a way that they are difficult to separate."
where historical figures and events were portrayed in a way that connections between them and contemporary events in Latin America could not be doubted. An example is Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme
, which depicts the 19th century Paraguayan dictatorship of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia
but was published at the height of Alfredo Stroessner
's regime. Nunn writes that "novelists of the Boom themselves evinced a sophisticated grasp of their genre's ability to depict parallel and alternative history. And they actively participated in the cultural and political debates of the region that questioned the very meaning and worth of history."
Julio Cortázar
was born in Argentina in 1914 and lived with his parents in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires
at the age of four. Like other Boom writers, Cortázar grew to question the politics in his country: his public opposition to Juan Domingo Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza
and ultimately, to his exile. He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen. Like García Márquez, Cortázar publicly supported the Cuba
n government of Fidel Castro
, as well as leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende
and other left-wing movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
. In his fiction, however, political elements were generally muted or absent until the publication of the explicitly political novel Libro de Manuel
in 1973.
Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe
. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch (1963). This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable", which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predilection.
His other works include the short story collections Bestiario
(1951), Final del juego
(1956), Las armas secretas
(1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego
(1966). He also wrote novels such as Los premios (1960) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
(1967), and the unclassifiable Historias de cronopios y de famas
(1962). Cortázar died in Paris, France in 1985.
Carlos Fuentes began to publish in the 1950s. He is the son of a Mexican diplomat and has lived in cities such as Buenos Aires
, Quito
, Montevideo
and Rio de Janeiro
, as well as Washington, D. C.. His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely. His novel The Death of Artemio Cruz
(1962) describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed, employing innovative changes in narrative point-of-view. Other important works include Where the Air Is Clear (1959), Aura
(1962), Terra Nostra
(1975), and the post-Boom novella The Old Gringo
(1985).
Fuentes not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also a critic and publicist of Spanish America. In 1955 Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo founded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura which introduced Latin Americans to the works of European Modernists and the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre
and Albert Camus
. In 1969 he published the important critical work, La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Fuentes held the position of professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University
(1978) and at Harvard (1987) and more recently has been associated with Brown University
. He once said that "the so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past."
Gabriel García Márquez
is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned of the Boom writers. He started out as a journalist and has written many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories; his earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogotá
's El Espectador
newspaper in the 1940s.
He is best known for novel
s such as One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch
(1975), No One Writes to the Colonel
(1962), and post-Boom work such as Love in the Time of Cholera
(1985). He has achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for introducing what has been labeled magical realism to the literary world. He experimented with more or less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression". A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude
. García Márquez is now considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, as is attested by his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature
.
Mario Vargas Llosa
is a Peruvian-Spanish novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic. He attended Lima
's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain. In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel García Márquez. He shot to fame with his novel The Time of the Hero
(1963), a scathing indictment of cruelty and corruption in a Peruvian military academy (and, by implication, in Peruvian society).
Vargas Llosa also wrote The Green House
(1966), the epic Conversation in the Cathedral
(1969), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
(1973), and post-Boom novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
(1977). Vargas Llosa returned to Lima
in 2000, following the resignation of President Fujimori
who won the 1990 Peruvian election, beating Vargas Llosa. He won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
, the author of two books, only one of them a novel, was the acknowledged master incorporated a posteriori; a writer who balances social concern, verbal experimentation and unique style. Augusto Roa Bastos
of Paraguay, wrote Hijo de hombre
, considered by some to be the first novel of the Boom. His highly experimental I, the Supreme
has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses
and is "one of the most highly regarded works of fictional history to ever come out of South America." Manuel Puig
, an Argentine, is a central figure, along with Vargas Llosa, of the Seix-Barral publishing world. The Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima
, though not widely known in the English-language publishing world, can also be regarded as a major figure on the basis of his major novel, Paradiso
(1966). José Donoso
is a Chilean writer of both the Boom and the post-Boom. In his book, Historia Personal del "Boom", Donoso also mentions other writers associated with the movement. Examples are Jorge Amado
(although he began writing novels back in the 1930s) of Brazil, Salvador Garmendia
and Adriano González León
of Venezuela and David Viñas
of Argentina, among many others.
, Mexico City
, Buenos Aires
, Montevideo
, Asunción
or Santiago
were responsible for publishing most of the Boom novels, and these cities became strong centers of cultural innovation.
It should be noted, however, that this period saw the publishing of Boom novels in Barcelona
, reflecting the new interest of Spanish publishing houses in the Spanish American market. However, as Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola notes, the revenue generated by the publishing of these novels gave a boost to the Spanish economy, even as the works were subjected to Franco
's censors. Some of the Seix Barral-published novels include Mario Vargas Llosa
's The Time of the Hero
(1963) and his Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
(1973), and Manuel Puig
's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971). A crucial figure "in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain", (and elsewhere) was the "super-agent" Carmen Balcells, whom Vargas Llosa referred to as "The Big Mama of the Latin American novel."
was very critical of Boom writers like García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America." In his article on Donoso's break from the Boom Philip Swanson articulates another critique of the "new novel" (i.e. Boom novel): "Though [it] was essentially a reaction against a perceived staleness in conventional realism, many of the formal experiments and innovations of modern fiction have themselves become standardized features of modern writing, leading to another form of traditionalism where one set of stereotypes has been replaced with another." Also often criticized is the Boom's emphasis on masculinity, both in the fact that all of the movement's representatives were male and the treatment of female characters within the novels. The Boom fiction's emphasis on history and the fantastic has also been the subject of criticism as it was claimed that it is too removed from the realities of Latin American political situations that it criticized.
could be said to belong to both movements. His novel The Obscene Bird of the Night (1970) is considered, as Philip Swanson notes, "one of the classics of the Boom." His later work, however, fits more comfortably into the post-Boom. Manuel Puig
and Severo Sarduy
are considered writers whose works embody the transition from the Boom to the Post-Boom. It is important to note that this uneasiness in categorization is perpetuated by the fact that major writers of the Boom (Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) continued writing well after the end of the Boom. The post-Boom is distinct from the Boom in various respects, most notably in the presence of female authors such as Isabel Allende
, Luisa Valenzuela
, Giannina Braschi
, Cristina Peri Rossi
, and Elena Poniatowska
. While Valenzuela and Poniatowska were both active writers during the Boom period, Allende is considered "a product of the Boom." Shaw also identifies Antonio Skarmeta
, Rosario Ferre
and Gustavo Sainz
as Post-Boom writers. The Post-Boom writers challenge the perceived elitism of the Boom by using a simpler, more readable style and going back to realism.
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
of Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...
of Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
of Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
, and Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
of Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
; but it also brought fame to older writers like Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
and Ernesto Sábato
Ernesto Sabato
Ernesto Sabato , was an Argentine writer, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America"...
. Influenced by European and North American
North American
North American generally refers to an entity, people, group, or attribute of North America, especially of the United States and Canada together.-Culture:*North American English, a collective term used to describe American English and Canadian English...
Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, often very political. "It is no exaggeration", critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
between 1959 and 1971."
The sudden success of the Boom authors was in large part because their works were among the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe, by publishing houses such as Barcelona's avant-garde Seix Barral in Spain. Indeed, Frederick M. Nunn writes that "Latin American novelists became world famous through their writing and their advocacy of political and social action, and because many of them had the good fortune to reach markets and audiences beyond Latin America through translation and travel—and sometimes through exile."
Historical background
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of political turmoil all over Latin America, in a political and diplomatic climate strongly influenced by the dynamics of the Cold WarCold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
. This climate formed the background for the work of the writers of the Latin American Boom, and defined the context in which their sometimes radical ideas had to operate. The Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
in 1959 and the subsequent USA attempt to thwart it through the Bay of Pigs Invasion
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, less than three months...
can be seen as the start of this period. Cuba's vulnerability led it to closer ties with the USSR, resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...
in 1962 when the US and USSR came dangerously close to nuclear war
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare, or atomic warfare, is a military conflict or political strategy in which nuclear weaponry is detonated on an opponent. Compared to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can be vastly more destructive in range and extent of damage...
. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s military authoritarian regimes ruled in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and many others. For example, on September 11, 1973 the democratically elected President Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....
was overthrown in Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
and replaced by General Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
who would go on to rule until the end of the 1980s. Chile under Pinochet became "infamous for [...] human rights abuses and torture techniques", and in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
the 1970s brought the Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
, notorious for its human rights violations and the disappearances of Argentine citizens. Many of these governments (which were supported by the US) cooperated with each other in terms of torturing or eliminating political opponents and "disposing of their bodies" in "the so-called Operation Condor
Operation Condor
Operation Condor , was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America...
."
The period between 1950 and 1975 saw major changes in the way in which history and literature were approached in terms of interpretation and writing. It also produced a change in the self perception of Spanish American novelists . The development of the cities, the coming of age of a large middle class, the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
, the Alliance for Progress
Alliance for Progress
The Alliance for Progress initiated by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 aimed to establish economic cooperation between the U.S. and South America.-Origin and goals:...
, an increase in communication between the countries of Latin America, the greater importance of the mass media, and a greater attention to Latin America from Europe and the United States all contributed to this change. The most important political events of the period were the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
in 1973. The fall of General Perón
Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine military officer, and politician. Perón was three times elected as President of Argentina though he only managed to serve one full term, after serving in several government positions, including the Secretary of Labor and the Vice Presidency...
in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
, and the unending violence in Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
also affected writers, as they generated explanations, or testimonies, or provided a troubling background for their work.
The greater attention paid to Spanish American
Spanish American
A Spanish American is a citizen or resident of the United States whose ancestors originate from the southwestern European nation of Spain. Spanish Americans are the earliest European American group, with a continuous presence since 1565.-Immigration waves:...
novelists and their international success in the 1960s, a phenomenon that was called the Boom, affected all writers and readers in that period. What mainly brought writers together and focused the attention of the world on Spanish America was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
in 1959, which promised a new age. The period of euphoria can be considered closed when in 1971 the Cuban government hardened its party line and the poet Heberto Padilla
Heberto Padilla
Heberto Padilla was a Cuban poet. The Padilla Affair was named after him. He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces , was published in 1948...
was forced to reject in a public document his so-called decadent and deviant views. The furor over Padilla's case brought to an end the affinity between Spanish American intellectuals and the Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
n inspirational myth. The Padilla affair is thought by some to have signalled the beginning of the end of the Boom. However, in a significant sense, the Boom has not ended; the writers associated with the Boom have continued to publish books that have been read by audiences far larger than those enjoyed by Latin American writers prior to the Boom. The books of such writers as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (both of whom are still active as of 2011) are widely distributed and translated into other major European and Asian languages to a much greater extent than those of such significant pre-Boom writers as José María Arguedas
José María Arguedas
José María Arguedas Altamirano was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist who wrote mainly in Spanish, although some of his poetry is in Quechua...
, Eduardo Mallea
Eduardo Mallea
Eduardo Mallea was an Argentine essayist, cultural critic, writer and diplomat. In 1931 he became editor of the literary magazine of La Nación.-Work:...
or Manuel Rojas.
Literary influences
The rise of Latin American literatureLatin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
began with the writings of Jose Martí
José Martí
José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. He was also a part of the Cuban...
, Ruben Darío
Rubén Darío
Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...
and José Asunción Silva
José Asunción Silva
José Asunción Silva was a Colombian poet. He is considered one of the founders of Spanish-American Modernism.-Life:...
's modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
departures from the European literary canon. European modernist writers like James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
have also influenced the writers of the Boom, as have the Latin American writers of the Vanguardia movement. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez argues that the writers of the Vanguardia were the "true precursors" to the Boom, writing innovative and challenging novels before Borges and others conventionally thought to be the main Latin American inspirations for the mid-20th century movement.
In 1950, Spanish American novelists were tolerated but marginal in the literary landscape, with Paris and New York representing the center of the literary world; by 1975 they were celebrated as central figures. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the Boom introduced a series of novel aesthetic and stylistic features to world literature. In general—and considering there are many countries and hundreds of important authors—at the start of the period, Realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
prevails, with novels tinged by an existentialist pessimism, with well-rounded characters lamenting their destinies, and a straightforward narrative line. In the 1960s, language loosens up, gets hip, pop, streetwise, characters are much more complex, and the chronology becomes intricate, making of the reader an active participant in the deciphering of the text. Late in the period the political adventure goes sour, while the linguistic sophistication reaches a new height, and novelists turn more to a reflection on their own writing, a fiction on fiction or metafiction, while characters and story lines show the corrosive power of a postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
society, where all is equally available and insignificant.
With the success of the Boom, the work of a previous generation of writers gained access to a new and expanded public. These precursors include Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and diplomat...
, and Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
, Juan Carlos Onetti
Juan Carlos Onetti
Juan Carlos Onetti was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories.A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time...
, and Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo was a Mexican author and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel Pedro Páramo , and El Llano en llamas...
.
Origins
While most critics agree that the Boom started some time in the 1960s, there is some disagreement as to which work should be considered the first Boom novel. Some (such as Alfred McAdam) would start with Julio CortázarJulio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
's Rayuela
Rayuela
Hopscotch is a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Written in Paris and published in Spanish in 1963 and in English in 1966, the English translation by Gregory Rabassa won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award. Hopscotch is an introspective stream-of-consciousness novel where characters...
(Hopscotch
Hopscotch
Hopscotch is a children's game that can be played with several players or alone. Hopscotch is a popular playground game.- Court and rules :- The court :...
) (1963) while others prefer Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero was the first novel published by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school , it is notable for its experimental and complex employment of multiple perspectives...
which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962. Fernando Alegria
Fernando Alegría
Fernando Alegría was a Chilean poet, writer, literary critic and scholar.-Biography:Alegría was born in Santiago, Chile and grew up in the Independencia barrio of the city. Poets from this barrio include Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra and Volodia Teitelboim.He received an M.A. from Bowling Green...
considers Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos, was a noted Paraguayan novelist and short story writer, and one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor...
' Hijo de hombre
Hijo de hombre
Hijo de hombre is a novel by the Paraguayan author, Augusto Roa BastosRoa Bastos' first published novel, Hijo de hombre represents his definitive break with poetry. It portrays the struggle between the governing élite and the oppressed in Paraguay from 1912 until 1936, just after the end of the...
the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, "it was published in 1959." One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and diplomat...
's 1949 novel Men of Maize
Men of Maize
Men of Maize is a 1949 novel by Guatemalan Nobel Prize in Literature winner Miguel Ángel Asturias...
.
Another variation is articulated by Randolph D. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Ángel Asturias's El Señor Presidente
El Señor Presidente
' is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias . A landmark text in Latin American literature, explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias makes early use of a literary technique now known...
(published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Sabato
Ernesto Sabato
Ernesto Sabato , was an Argentine writer, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America"...
's "El túnel
El Túnel
The Tunnel is a dark, psychological novel written by Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato about a deranged porteño painter, Juan Pablo Castel, and his obsession with a woman...
" (1948) or Onetti's "El pozo
El Pozo
El Pozo is a small town located about 20 minutes northeast of Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. The name of the town means "The Well" in the Spanish language....
" (1939). Or go even farther back, to the vanguardist movements of the 1920s. However, the writers of the Boom declared themselves orphaned and without any autochthonous model, caught between their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers Indigenistas, Criollistas, and Mundonovistas."
The major representatives of the Boom claimed that they were an "orphan" literary generation, without a "Latin American "father" of influence;" however, they owe much of their stylistic innovation to the Vanguardists. Jean Franco writes that the Boom marks "a refusal to be identified with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the novela de la tierra."
Hallmarks
The Boom novels are essentially modernist novels. They treat time as nonlinear, often use more than one perspective or narrative voice and feature a great number of neologisms (the coining of new words or phrases), puns and even profanities. As Pope writes, in reference to the style of the Boom: "It relied on a Cubist superposition of different points of view, it made time and lineal progress questionable, and it was technically complex. Linguistically self assured, it used the vernacular without apologies." Other notable characteristics of the Boom include the treatment of both "rural and urban settings", internationalism, an emphasis on both the historical and the political, as well as "questioning of regional as well as, or more than, national identity; awareness of hemisphereic as well as worldwide economic and ideological issues; polemicism; and timeliness." Boom literature breaks down the barriers between the fantastical and the mundane, transforming this mixture into a new reality. Of the Boom writers, Gabriel García Márquez is most closely associated with the use of magical realism; indeed, he is credited with bringing it "into vogue" after the publishing of One Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
in 1966.
Magical realism
In The Ends of Literature, Brett Levinson writes that magical realism, "a key aesthetic mode within recent Latin American fiction ... materializes when Latin American history reveals itself as incapable of accounting for its own origin, an incapacity which traditionally ... represents a demand for a myth: mythos as a means to explain the beginnings which escape history's narrative." The writings of the Chroniclers of the Indies depicted the exotic "new world" and their accounts of conquering strange new lands became accepted as history. These often fantastical stories helped to bring about a new aesthetic, which morphed into magical realism and "(as conceived by Alejo CarpentierAlejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
) marvelous realism or lo real maravilloso. According to this aesthetic, unreal things are treated as if realistic and mundane, and mundane things as if unreal. Plots, while often based on real experiences, incorporate strange, fantastic, and legendary elements, mythical peoples, speculative settings, and characters who, while plausible, could also be unreal, and combine the true, the imaginary, and the nonexistent in such a way that they are difficult to separate."
Historical fiction
An interest in history is another characteristic of the novels of the Boom period. The epitome of this is the dictator novelDictator novel
The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship,...
where historical figures and events were portrayed in a way that connections between them and contemporary events in Latin America could not be doubted. An example is Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme is a historical novel written by exiled Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr...
, which depicts the 19th century Paraguayan dictatorship of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia
José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia
200px|right|thumb|José Gaspar Rodríguez de FranciaDr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco was the first leader of Paraguay following its independence from Spain...
but was published at the height of Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda, whose name is also spelled Strössner or Strößner , was a Paraguayan military officer and dictator from 1954 to 1989...
's regime. Nunn writes that "novelists of the Boom themselves evinced a sophisticated grasp of their genre's ability to depict parallel and alternative history. And they actively participated in the cultural and political debates of the region that questioned the very meaning and worth of history."
Major representatives
Who is and who is not to be included in the Boom has been widely debated and never settled. On the other hand, a few writers exerted wide and undisputed influence. While the names of many other writers may be added to the list, the following may not be omitted:Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
was born in Argentina in 1914 and lived with his parents in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
at the age of four. Like other Boom writers, Cortázar grew to question the politics in his country: his public opposition to Juan Domingo Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza
Mendoza, Argentina
Mendoza is the capital city of Mendoza Province, in Argentina. It is located in the northern-central part of the province, in a region of foothills and high plains, on the eastern side of the Andes. As of the , Mendoza's population was 110,993...
and ultimately, to his exile. He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen. Like García Márquez, Cortázar publicly supported the Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
n government of Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
, as well as leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....
and other left-wing movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the largest country in the Central American American isthmus, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The country is situated between 11 and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere, which places it entirely within the tropics. The Pacific Ocean...
. In his fiction, however, political elements were generally muted or absent until the publication of the explicitly political novel Libro de Manuel
Libro de Manuel
Libro de Manuel is a novel by Julio Cortázar published in 1973.-Summary:The novel is a blueprint that synthetizes the controversy of politics and social movements during the 1970s...
in 1973.
Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch (1963). This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable", which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predilection.
His other works include the short story collections Bestiario
Bestiario
Bestiario is a book of 8 short stories written by Julio Cortázar.-Stories:* “Casa tomada”* “Carta a una señorita en París”* “Lejana”* “Ómnibus”* “Cefalea”* “Circe”* “Las puertas del cielo”* “Bestiario”...
(1951), Final del juego
Final del juego
Final del juego is a book of 18 short stories written by Julio Cortázar. It is divided in three levels of difficulty, measured by the effort it should take to understand each story.-I:* Continuidad de los Parques* No se culpe nadie* El Río* Los Venenos...
(1956), Las armas secretas
Las armas secretas
Las armas secretas is a book of 5 short stories written by Julio Cortázar. Four of the stories appear in translation in the volume Blow-up and Other Stories ; one story, "Cartas de Mamá," has never been translated into English.-Stories:*Letters from Mom: a...
(1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego
Todos los fuegos el fuego
Todos los fuegos el fuego is a book of 8 short stories written by Julio Cortázar.-Stories:* "La autopista del sur" * "La salud de los enfermos" * "Reunión"...
(1966). He also wrote novels such as Los premios (1960) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
La Vuelta al Día en Ochenta Mundos is a book by Julio Cortázar released and published in two separate volumes in 1967 ...
(1967), and the unclassifiable Historias de cronopios y de famas
Historias de cronopios y de famas
Historias de cronopios y de famas is a short story anthology by Argentine author Julio Cortázar. It was published in 1962.-Plot summary:This handbook recounts the birth of the Cronopios and the Famas. Cronopios and Famas are two kinds of living creatures conceived by Julio Cortázar's imagination....
(1962). Cortázar died in Paris, France in 1985.
Carlos Fuentes
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, Quito
Quito
San Francisco de Quito, most often called Quito , is the capital city of Ecuador in northwestern South America. It is located in north-central Ecuador in the Guayllabamba river basin, on the eastern slopes of Pichincha, an active stratovolcano in the Andes mountains...
, Montevideo
Montevideo
Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...
and Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
, as well as Washington, D. C.. His experiences with anti-Mexican discrimination in the United States led him to examine Mexican culture more closely. His novel The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Death of Artemio Cruz is a novel written in 1962 by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and is considered to be a contributor to the Latin American literary movement known as the Latin American "Boom".-Plot summary:...
(1962) describes the life of a former Mexican revolutionary on his deathbed, employing innovative changes in narrative point-of-view. Other important works include Where the Air Is Clear (1959), Aura
Aura (Fuentes)
Aura is a novel by Carlos Fuentes, first published in 1962 in Mexico. The first English translation by Lysander Kemp, was published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.-Plot:...
(1962), Terra Nostra
Terra Nostra (novel)
Terra Nostra is a 1975 novel by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. The narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth"...
(1975), and the post-Boom novella The Old Gringo
The Old Gringo
The Old Gringo is a novel written by Carlos Fuentes over a period extending between 1964 and 1984 and finally published in 1985. In 1989 it was made into a film called Old Gringo starring Gregory Peck....
(1985).
Fuentes not only wrote some of the most important novels of the period, but was also a critic and publicist of Spanish America. In 1955 Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo founded the journal Revista Mexicana de Literatura which introduced Latin Americans to the works of European Modernists and the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
and Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
. In 1969 he published the important critical work, La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Fuentes held the position of professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
(1978) and at Harvard (1987) and more recently has been associated with Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
. He once said that "the so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past."
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
is undoubtedly the most internationally renowned of the Boom writers. He started out as a journalist and has written many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories; his earliest published writings were short stories which appeared in Bogotá
Bogotá
Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...
's El Espectador
El Espectador
El Espectador is a newspaper with national circulation within Colombia, founded by Fidel Cano Gutiérrez on 22 March 1887 in Medellín and published since 1915 in Bogotá...
newspaper in the 1940s.
He is best known for novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s such as One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
(1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch
The Autumn of the Patriarch
The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator...
(1975), No One Writes to the Colonel
No One Writes to the Colonel
No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella written by the Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. It also gives its name to a short story collection.-Plot summary:...
(1962), and post-Boom work such as Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez first published in the Spanish language during 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published the English translation during 1988...
(1985). He has achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for introducing what has been labeled magical realism to the literary world. He experimented with more or less traditional approaches to reality, so that "the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with the deadpan expression". A commonly cited example is the physical and spiritual ascending into heaven of a character while she is hanging the laundry out to dry in One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude
One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
. García Márquez is now considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, as is attested by his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
is a Peruvian-Spanish novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary and political critic. He attended Lima
Lima
Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...
's University of San Marcos and subsequently attained a doctorate in Latin American literature in Spain. In fact, his thesis was on Gabriel García Márquez. He shot to fame with his novel The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero was the first novel published by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school , it is notable for its experimental and complex employment of multiple perspectives...
(1963), a scathing indictment of cruelty and corruption in a Peruvian military academy (and, by implication, in Peruvian society).
Vargas Llosa also wrote The Green House
The Green House
The Green House is the second novel by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, published in 1966. The novel covers more than forty years...
(1966), the epic Conversation in the Cathedral
Conversation in the Cathedral
Conversation in the Cathedral is a 1969 novel by Peruvian writer and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa, recognized as one of his major works. It is a portrayal of Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría in the 1950s, and deals with the lives of characters from different social strata...
(1969), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is a relatively short comedic novel by acclaimed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa....
(1973), and post-Boom novels such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the fifth novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. It was published by Editorial Seix Barral, S.A., Spain, in 1977. Set in Peru during the 1950s, it is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee...
(1977). Vargas Llosa returned to Lima
Lima
Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...
in 2000, following the resignation of President Fujimori
Alberto Fujimori
Alberto Fujimori Fujimori served as President of Peru from 28 July 1990 to 17 November 2000. A controversial figure, Fujimori has been credited with the creation of Fujimorism, uprooting terrorism in Peru and restoring its macroeconomic stability, though his methods have drawn charges of...
who won the 1990 Peruvian election, beating Vargas Llosa. He won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Other figures
Several other writers have been associated with the Boom. Juan RulfoJuan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo was a Mexican author and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel Pedro Páramo , and El Llano en llamas...
, the author of two books, only one of them a novel, was the acknowledged master incorporated a posteriori; a writer who balances social concern, verbal experimentation and unique style. Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos, was a noted Paraguayan novelist and short story writer, and one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor...
of Paraguay, wrote Hijo de hombre
Hijo de hombre
Hijo de hombre is a novel by the Paraguayan author, Augusto Roa BastosRoa Bastos' first published novel, Hijo de hombre represents his definitive break with poetry. It portrays the struggle between the governing élite and the oppressed in Paraguay from 1912 until 1936, just after the end of the...
, considered by some to be the first novel of the Boom. His highly experimental I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme is a historical novel written by exiled Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr...
has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
and is "one of the most highly regarded works of fictional history to ever come out of South America." Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig was an Argentine author...
, an Argentine, is a central figure, along with Vargas Llosa, of the Seix-Barral publishing world. The Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima
José Lezama Lima
José Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature....
, though not widely known in the English-language publishing world, can also be regarded as a major figure on the basis of his major novel, Paradiso
Paradiso (1966 novel)
Paradiso was the only novel by Cuban poet José Lezama Lima to be completed and published during his lifetime. The narrative consists of the childhood and youth of José Cemí, told in a highly baroque experimental style, and depicts many scenes which have remarkable resonances with Lezama's own life...
(1966). José Donoso
José Donoso
José Donoso Yáñez was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he claimed his exile was also a form of...
is a Chilean writer of both the Boom and the post-Boom. In his book, Historia Personal del "Boom", Donoso also mentions other writers associated with the movement. Examples are Jorge Amado
Jorge Amado
Jorge Leal Amado de Faria was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands in 1978...
(although he began writing novels back in the 1930s) of Brazil, Salvador Garmendia
Salvador Garmendia
Salvador Garmendia Graterón was a notable Venezuelan author, was born in Barquisimeto, Lara state, 11 June 1928. His parents were Ezequiel Garmendia and Dolores Graterón. He graduated High school in Barquisimeto, and from then on he was largely self-educated as he was unable to continue formal...
and Adriano González León
Adriano González León
Adriano González León was a Venezuelan writer who is known in his country for the novel País Portátil , widely regarded as the premier Venezuelan novel of the latter half of the 20th century, and for his many years of hosting a television program dedicated to promoting literary appreciation among...
of Venezuela and David Viñas
David Viñas
David Viñas was an Argentine dramatist, critic, and novelist.-Life and career:Viñas grew up in Buenos Aires, and enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires, becoming head of the student organization Federación Universitaria de Buenos Aires...
of Argentina, among many others.
Publishing Latin American Boom novelists
Publishing played a crucial role in the advent of the Boom. Major publishing houses based in HavanaHavana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, Montevideo
Montevideo
Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...
, Asunción
Asunción
Asunción is the capital and largest city of Paraguay.The "Ciudad de Asunción" is an autonomous capital district not part of any department. The metropolitan area, called Gran Asunción, includes the cities of San Lorenzo, Fernando de la Mora, Lambaré, Luque, Mariano Roque Alonso, Ñemby, San...
or Santiago
Santiago, Chile
Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...
were responsible for publishing most of the Boom novels, and these cities became strong centers of cultural innovation.
- SantiagoSantiago, ChileSantiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...
in ChileChileChile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, is presided over by the criticism of Alone, while the older generation of Benjamín Subercaseaux, Eduardo BarriosEduardo Barrios- Overview :After his father’s death, at the age of 5 his family moved to Lima until the age of 15 where he was the victim of harassment by his classmates. After high school he joined the Chilean Military School but quit before graduating as an officer. He spent much of his young adulthood...
, Marta Brunet, and Manuel Rojas were quietly superseded by José DonosoJosé DonosoJosé Donoso Yáñez was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he claimed his exile was also a form of...
. Other writers, such as Enrique LafourcadeEnrique LafourcadeEnrique Lafourcade Valdenegro is a Chilean writer, critic and journalist who was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 14, 1927.-Brief Biography:...
, have a large national readership. - CubaCubaThe Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
is a lively cultural center, first with the group of OrígenesOrígenesOrígenes is the ninth album recorded by Mexican singer Alejandro Fernández. Produced by Kiko Campos and Pedro Ramírez, with this album he returns to his "origins" recording an album of Mexican music, but this time with his own style...
, and then with Lunes de Revolución. - In ColombiaColombiaColombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
the rural novels of Caballero Calderon were displaced by García Márquez who was followed by Alvarez Gardeazábal. - Mexico continues a tradition of strong regional writers and diverse schools of writing, from YáñezAgustín YáñezAgustín Yáñez Delgadillo was a notable Mexican writer and politician who served as Governor of Jalisco and Secretary of Public Education during Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's presidency...
to Sainz, with novelists such as Luis Spota or Sergio Fernández, the first a popular, the other a refined, writer, both better known in Mexico than abroad.
It should be noted, however, that this period saw the publishing of Boom novels in Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, reflecting the new interest of Spanish publishing houses in the Spanish American market. However, as Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola notes, the revenue generated by the publishing of these novels gave a boost to the Spanish economy, even as the works were subjected to Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's censors. Some of the Seix Barral-published novels include Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
's The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero
The Time of the Hero was the first novel published by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Set among a community of cadets in a Lima military school , it is notable for its experimental and complex employment of multiple perspectives...
(1963) and his Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is a relatively short comedic novel by acclaimed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa....
(1973), and Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig was an Argentine author...
's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971). A crucial figure "in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain", (and elsewhere) was the "super-agent" Carmen Balcells, whom Vargas Llosa referred to as "The Big Mama of the Latin American novel."
Critique
A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism." In his study of the Post-Boom Donald L. Shaw writes that Mario BenedettiMario Benedetti
Mario Benedetti was an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet....
was very critical of Boom writers like García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America." In his article on Donoso's break from the Boom Philip Swanson articulates another critique of the "new novel" (i.e. Boom novel): "Though [it] was essentially a reaction against a perceived staleness in conventional realism, many of the formal experiments and innovations of modern fiction have themselves become standardized features of modern writing, leading to another form of traditionalism where one set of stereotypes has been replaced with another." Also often criticized is the Boom's emphasis on masculinity, both in the fact that all of the movement's representatives were male and the treatment of female characters within the novels. The Boom fiction's emphasis on history and the fantastic has also been the subject of criticism as it was claimed that it is too removed from the realities of Latin American political situations that it criticized.
Impact
The Boom had an immediate impact as it changed the way Latin American culture was viewed around the world. The commercial success of the Boom writers had the effect of elevating them almost to rock star status in Latin America. Of course, translation played a major role in the success of the Boom writers because it gave them a much larger audience. These authors continued to produce best-sellers for four decades. In addition, the Boom opened the door for new Latin American writers in terms of the international scene. A testimony to the Boom's global impact is the fact that "up-and-coming international writers" look upon the likes of Fuentes, García Márquez or Vargas Llosa as their mentors.Post-Boom
Since the 1980s it has become common to speak of Post-Boom writers, most of whom were born during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It is difficult to clearly situate the Post-Boom as many of its writers were active before the end of the Boom. Indeed, some writers, like Jose DonosoJosé Donoso
José Donoso Yáñez was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he claimed his exile was also a form of...
could be said to belong to both movements. His novel The Obscene Bird of the Night (1970) is considered, as Philip Swanson notes, "one of the classics of the Boom." His later work, however, fits more comfortably into the post-Boom. Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig
Manuel Puig was an Argentine author...
and Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy
Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.-Biography:...
are considered writers whose works embody the transition from the Boom to the Post-Boom. It is important to note that this uneasiness in categorization is perpetuated by the fact that major writers of the Boom (Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) continued writing well after the end of the Boom. The post-Boom is distinct from the Boom in various respects, most notably in the presence of female authors such as Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean writer with American citizenship. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts , which have been commercially successful...
, Luisa Valenzuela
Luisa Valenzuela
Luisa Valenzuela is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in...
, Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
, Cristina Peri Rossi
Cristina Peri Rossi
Cristina Peri Rossi is an Uruguayan novelist, poet, translator, and author of short stories.Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiled in 1972, and moved to...
, and Elena Poniatowska
Elena Poniatowska
Elena Poniatowska is a Mexican journalist and author. Her generation of writers include Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis.-Life:Poniatowska was born in Paris to Prince Jean Joseph Evremont Sperry Poniatowski and Paula Amor Yturbe...
. While Valenzuela and Poniatowska were both active writers during the Boom period, Allende is considered "a product of the Boom." Shaw also identifies Antonio Skarmeta
Antonio Skármeta
Antonio Skármeta is a Chilean writer, born November 7, 1940 in Antofagasta, Chile. He was born to Croatian immigrants from the Adriatic island of Brač, region of Dalmatia....
, Rosario Ferre
Rosario Ferré
Dr. Rosario Ferré is a Puerto Rican writer, poet and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferré, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico, and the founding father of the New Progressive Party. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970...
and Gustavo Sainz
Gustavo Sainz
Gustavo Sainz is a Spanish language author from Mexico.Born in Mexico City, the son of journalist José Luis Sainz, Gustavo Sainz learned how to read at the age of three from his paternal grandmother, and started publishing his work in the city newspapers at the age of ten...
as Post-Boom writers. The Post-Boom writers challenge the perceived elitism of the Boom by using a simpler, more readable style and going back to realism.