En breve: la novela corta en México ed. by Anadeli Bencomo, Cecilia Eudave (review)

Abstract

Bencomo, Anadeli and Cecilia Eudave, eds. En breve: la novela corta en Mexico. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2014. 342 pp. A friend of mine recently polled the social media collective brain for suggestions about what Spanish-language novellas she could include in an undergraduate literature course. As the responses rolled in--there were many--I was struck by two thoughts. The first was that there is an undiscovered goldmine of short novels out there that could be used in college courses to expose students to a smorgasbord of historical periods, narrative styles, themes, and literary history. Short novels are, in fact, ideal for the classroom: their brevity allows students to read them in relatively little time while simultaneously giving them maximum exposure to the intensity of short fiction and the character development of the traditional novel. Looking back over my own syllabi, I have discovered an appalling lack of these texts which I hope to amend in the near future. The second thought was that, because the genre is formally different from the short story or the novel, I might need to rethink and possibly retool my approaches to teaching. But where to start? And how to best do that? You will imagine my joy and my surprise, then, when a few months later I was asked to review Anadeli Bencomo and Cecilia Eudave's En breve, an edited volume that offers both a wide sampling of short novels from Mexico and an even wider variety of critical approaches to reading them. En breve brings together twenty-one critical reflections on twentieth-century Mexican novelas cortas by a cadre of outstanding scholars. Bencomo herself leads off with a brilliant theoretical introduction that highlights some of the major tensions of the genre, primarily its anti-epic character--which she underscores by briefly contrasting the expansive scope of novels like Palinuro de Mexico with the narrative intensity of shorter texts like Querido Diego--and the importance of what she calls the anomalous subjectivities of marginalized characters--thinking specifically of outlier protagonists from books by a veritable who's-who of contemporary literature including Alvaro Enrigue, Roberto Bolano, Luis Arturo Ramos, Antonio Ortuno, Juan Villoro, and Daniel Espartaco Sanchez. Following this introduction the chapters proceed more or less chronologically from the early decades of the century through the present, from Federico Gamboa's El evangelista to Espartaco Sanchez's Autos usados. The book then closes with a short conclusion by Eudave, who sidesteps a traditional scholarly conclusion, preferring instead to provide insights from her own experience as an author of novellas. This organization allows readers to take in the development of the genre as it moves from early post-revolutionary literature, with its contrasting penchant for belated colonialist desires and avant-garde experimentation, to later postmodern works. Read front to back En breve becomes a subtle alternate history of Mexican narrative in that it eschews any meditation on the novel of the Revolution--no Campobello, Azuela, Munoz, Guzman here which is, in itself, rather refreshing--and instead focuses from the outset on frequently overlooked literary groups like the colonialistas, the estridentistas, and the contemporaneos who played a central role in the formation of national literature but who, nevertheless, get short shrift outside of local literary circles. …