Spanish & Latin American Novels: Key Themes & Authors
The Novel in the Forties
The two most important novels of the forties are The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela. This reflects the inhumanity and violence of rural Spain. Cela’s picaresque novel combines naturalism and the grotesque. The novel Nothing reflects the emptiness and lack of expectations in the miserable and gray life of post-war Spain.
The Social Novel
During the fifties, the social novel dominated Spanish literature. This trend provides critical testimony of Spanish society. The Hive by Cela portrays daily life in Madrid. Narrative strategies include:
- Collective protagonist: The routines of ordinary people, poets, prostitutes, and opponents are reflected, struggling to survive in an environment of solitude and frustration.
- Fragmentary technique and counterpoint: The work consists of 15 fragments separated by spaces, along which a 3-person narrator develops the plot.
Jarama by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio tells of a younger generation’s excursion where a girl drowns after a dull day. The novel features:
- Extensive dialogues: Faithfully reflecting the speech of the time, they are misled about the boredom and lack of concerns.
- Presence of an objective narrator: Interrupted talks by elaborate descriptions.
The Experimental Novel
This novel uses new narrative techniques: the inner monologue to reproduce the chaotic and disorderly thoughts of the characters. Chronological disorder with jumps forward and backward. The multiple viewpoint narrative and alteration of people. The stylistic renewal. All of these techniques arise from foreign writers such as James Joyce and William Faulkner.
The Regionalist Novel
During the first half of the twentieth century, the unifying feature of Latin American fiction is its realistic character.
- Importance of Nature: The Amazon jungle of La Vorágine by Eustasio Rivera is, in all cases, an imposing nature to which the lives of men are subjected.
- Desire to reflect political and social conflicts: The Mexican Revolution or indigenous marginalization.
Jorge Luis Borges
The stories of this Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, have exerted an enormous influence on subsequent Latin American narrative.
- The Anti-Realism: Not just for the fancy pork but does not detail for the environment nor an imitation of reality.
- The Anti-Psychologism: Resignation to deepen the or in the formative character of the characters.
- The Borgesian Universe: The identification of the universe as a great library. The reference of mirrors and mazes and indecipherable subrayasn existence. Reference to other texts or even the presentation of the story as a translation or appointment of another real or apocryphal text.
The Novel of the Boom
Since the late 40s and for two decades after, an explosion occurs in the Latin American narrative called the boom. The most frequent themes in works of the boom are:
- The problematic existential: As Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar is usually composite with narrations and sociopolitical reflection of urban ambience.
- The dictator: As part of the reality in Latin American politics, Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias.
- Inserts of fantastic elements, portentous: In everyday life, characters are assumed by these naturally called it the magic realism.