Light at the End of a Tunnel: The New Writers of Latin America

Abstract

Luis Sepulveda, a Chilean novelist born in 1949, solemnly announced that there is a new literary generation in Latin America. He was quite humorless about the claim, which made me sit up and listen respectfully. With a face wrapped in a very dark beard, he said the members of the new generation (though he shied from using that word and simply referred to these people), have come out of the intellectual vacuum left by the years of terror, in the 1970s and early 1980s. The new writers are the successors-though not quite the heirs, because the grand old men and women have not bowed out yet-of the literary lions. The big names, who produced large, impenetrable tomes plagued with obstacles and hence were a must on every course reading list, are being overtaken. Sepuilveda nodded as he spoke, turning a packet of cigarettes between his fingers. For the listener, it is no simple matter to absorb the importance of such a statement. write adventure stories with the basic purpose of hooking readers and bringing them back to reading. That is the function of the new writing. Latin American literature was becoming very boring before we came along. I am part of a network of friends, not a group, not a 'generation' as such, though it is that-a circle, perhaps, in which all were born between 1947 and 1952. We all started writing early, we all suffered a great pause between 1970 and 1980 because of the wave of political activity, and we all recovered writing as from 1980. A severe hangover robbed me of the pleasure and importance of the occasion. We sat at a glass table; the fizzing of a cola drink was the