Decadence and modernity in the unfinished society: The Latin American novel

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Chilean novelist Jose Donoso published his A Personal History of the "'Boom," an analysis of the development of the "new" Latin American novel and the extraordinary spread of its reception and influence outside the borders of Latin America itself, especially in the United States and Western Europe. Donoso himself was one of the main contributors to the "boom," most notably through his hallucinogenic confessional, The Obscene Bird of Night. In the 1980s, many Latin American writers speak of the ending of the "boom" and the transition to a new stage of creative experimentation and output by the writers of the region. If the "boom" is indeed over, it reached a culmination in the award of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature to Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a number of other novels and short stories, most of them centered on the town of "Macondo," a name Garcia Marquez has chosen to render into fictional narrative and myth his hometown of Aracataca, located in the Caribbean coastal area of Colombia. The work of Donoso, Garcia Marquez and of other Latin American writers such as the Argentinian Julio Cort~zar, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and the Cubans, Alejo Carpentier and Guillermo Cabrera Infante has been characterized as the expression of "magical realism," an allusion to the 20th century school of painters of the same name. Other writers such as the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Argentinian Manuel Puig, and the Cuban Severo Sarduy, whose work may adapt less easily to this label, nevertheless share the imaginative sensibility that Michael Wood has identified as dominant in the contemporary Latin American novel, namely, "a strong sense of reality as fiction. ''1 In Garcia Marquez's novels and stories, for instance, the sense of life, biography, social relations, gossip, tedium and isolation