5 - Spanish American narrative since 1970

Summary

The story of Spanish American narrative since 1970 is, inescapably, the story of Spanish American narrative 'after the Boom'. For the purposes of this brief account, then, it may be recorded that the so-called Boom was the culmination of what we may conveniently call the Spanish American New Novel, which stretched from the 1940s to the 1970s. Its origins lay in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and particularly the works of Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier, all writers who wrote their first significant books in the 1920s or early 1930s yet were still writing fiction in the 1960s. The Boom of Spanish American fiction was a grand finale, an extraordinarily fertile moment which saw the climax and consummation of Latin American modernism (in the Anglo-American sense of the word) and the inauguration of Latin American post-modern narrative. This unique conjunctural phenomenon, the Boom, stretched, arguably, from Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958;Where the Air is Clear) to his Terra nostra (Terra Nostra) in 1975. But when most critics think about the era, they tend to concentrate, naturally enough, on the 1960s alone and the brief but intense period from Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (1962; The Time of the Hero) and Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz) through Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch) to García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude); though, again, otherswouldsee José Donosós El obsceno pájarode la noche (1970;The Obscene Bird of Night) as marking the end of the era.