Not Their Masters’ Voice: Latin American Nonfiction

Abstract

recent Latin American writers are reviving and occasionally surpassing their canonical earlier counterparts, especially those associated with the “Boom.” That movement will be half a century old by 2013, and, since its apogee, digital media have contributed substantially to a swift, constant awareness of the new writers. Many of them have their own blogs and a larger presence in journalism, thereby contributing in diverse ways to new views of world literature. One still reads biweekly columns by the recent Nobel Prize–winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes; their canonicity is unquestioned, aided and abetted by their presence in world media. Yet numerous Spanish-language dailies are devoting exceptional attention to several new writers’ every move, even providing some (not always the most accomplished) with columns or blogs to express their epiphanies and predispositions for assailing orthodoxies. The recent publication of Roberto Bolano’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003 (2011), in a prodigious translation by Natasha Wimmer of the 2004 original, may launch a repositioning in the larger republic of letters of the importance of the essay and its avatars as a foundation for understanding Latin America and its cultures. The Chilean’s generic hybrids are bluntly honest, frequently trenchant and hilarious, feisty, insightful, aesthetic-centered, sometimes decadent in taste, naive in the estimation of literary value, yet always inspired. Bolano’s nonfiction reminds one of American cultural critics who publish visceral critiques, while arbitrarily exaggerating the merits of some of their friends; above from left