1 - Contexts

Summary

We wish to learn from our critics, but it is hard for us even to recover from them.

Randall Jarrell

The Boom

Latin American literature existed before the conquest of the continent, although it wasn't Latin and didn't call itself American. But it has a way of repeatedly seeming very recent, just discovered, and not only to outsiders. There are all kinds of gaps in its history, patches of darkness or stasis, and the Chilean José Donoso has suggested that the so-called Boom in contemporary Latin American fiction, the surge of vivid and challenging new writing which appeared some twenty years ago, was the product of authors who had grandfathers but no fathers. The literary tradition failed to offer an immediate example, a preferred path; but this failure, once absorbed, became a spectacular opportunity.

The Boom is identified by the English word in Spanish, which lends a slightly exotic flavour to the enterprise, and the hint of a drumroll: El ‘Boom’. The phenomenon has been much quarrelled about: seen as an invention of the media, the phantom child of French and American publishers; as the outlet of a literary mafia, a conspiracy of pals promoting each others' work; as the mark of a dazzling renaissance, or even just a naissance, the first arrival of this literature at independent life. The term itself has been found vulgar and inappropriate, an insult to art; yet it seems to me perfect if we don't take it too seriously.