Latin American Novel: Evolution and Key Authors
The 20th Century Latin American Novel
The twentieth-century Latin American novel opens with a novel of manners, inherited from the nineteenth century, without any attempt at formal innovation. From the 1940s, the first attempts to renew the aesthetic of the novel began, exploring what is specifically American while being influenced by the avant-garde European movements, especially Surrealism. The World is Wide and Alien by Ciro Alegria, in showing the peculiar psychology of the Indians expelled from their land and civilization, can be considered the first Hispanic renewal novel.
Over this period, existential urban issues first appear, although the old themes of the indigenous novel, mostly social issues, still persisted. But above all, there is a tendency to link reality to imagination through myths, legends, magic, and poetry, giving rise to what has been called magical realism.
Later, in the 1960s, a somewhat journalistic expression called the “boom” of Latin American novels emerged, which involved the dissemination in Spain and elsewhere in the world of an important group of Latin American writers of various ages and from different countries. They continued with the themes of the previous generation and strengthened the integration of fantasy and reality.
Other features of these novels are a disorganized narrative structure, the breakdown of the plot (the narrative is not linear, so it requires great effort from the reader to restore the temporary thread), techniques of counterpoint, combined different people and different narrative points of view, and very frequent use of interior monologue.
With few exceptions, it should be noted that all technical innovations are put into the service of a revolutionary literature, very committed to the reality of countries subject to violent and traumatic historical processes.
Key Authors and Works
The Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias is famous for Legends of Guatemala, based on fantasies about the Maya world, and especially the novel that would earn him the Nobel Prize and inaugurated, in Latin America, the novels of dictators: Mr. President. He used baroque musical language to recount the horrors of dictatorships. Other novels of this type are I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez.
The Cuban Alejo Carpentier was interested in a kind of novel in which he mixed historical events with great care and baroque musical language. Important novels of his are The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral (also known as The Century of Lights).
Jorge Luis Borges, from Argentina, is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. His short stories, collected in books like The Aleph, A Universal History of Iniquity, and Fictions, present the world as a labyrinth between the real and the unreal, always with fuzzy boundaries. His impeccable style is characterized by precision in the choice of vocabulary, constant irony, and unusual word associations.
Juan Rulfo’s stories in The Burning Plain present the appalling misery and violence in the Mexican countryside, with very innovative narrative techniques also used in his great novel Pedro Páramo, a ghostly evocation of Rulfo’s obsessive themes: the rural world, violence, family tensions, the misery of the peasantry, civil war, and especially the absolutely dominating caciquismo (bossism) of rural life.
Most characteristic of the short stories collected in All Fires the Fire, Secret Weapons, etc., by the Argentine Julio Cortázar is how the fantasy element comes quite naturally, mingling with everyday life. He is one of the Hispanic-American writers most influenced by experimentalism, as seen in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds and especially in Hopscotch, his great novel. Hopscotch is a complex work that invites the reader to follow several different modes of reading; it includes non-fictional texts, ranging from rehearsal through the chronicle of events. A number of uprooted characters find their identity in different places, such as Paris and Buenos Aires, and are represented in the novel along with different realities and different ways of understanding life.
Gabriel García Márquez is the best-known Latin American author, especially since he was awarded a Nobel Prize. Since his first novels, Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel, he sought a union of reality and fantasy, creating his particular imaginary world, Macondo, where his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, also takes place. The work is both a summary of the history of Macondo, closely linked with the Buendía family, which metaphorically represents the history of Colombia, Latin America, and humanity in general.
Other Major Authors
- Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz reconstructs the violent Mexican countryside.
- Mario Vargas Llosa: The War of the End of the World is a recreation of Latin American internal wars.
- Ernesto Sabato: On Heroes and Tombs is an apocalyptic vision of our world, given to violence and destruction.