Letters between four giants of Latin American literature
LAS CARTAS DEL BOOM JULIO CORTÁZAR, CARLOS FUENTES, GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, MARIO VARGAS LLOSA Edited by Carlos Aguirre, Gerald Martin, Javier Munguía and Augusto Wong Campos 562pp. Alfaguara. €23.90.
THE FOUR AUTHORS of these selected letters, written mostly between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, became giants of Latin American literature. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa received Nobel prizes. (Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar deserved one, too, say the editors.) All four were good friends. All four lived mainly in Paris, Barcelona and London. Along with a few others, including the Chilean José Donoso and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, they belonged to a group of Latin American novelists that came to be known as the “boom generation.”
From the mid-1960s there was growing international interest in Latin American fiction. Critics had become pessimistic about the future of the novel in general, but these four novelists believed they were on a rescue mission. Fuentes writes to Vargas Llosa in 1964 that “the future of the novel is in Latin America, where everything is yet to be said and to be named”. Vargas Llosa had long regarded the European novel as having reached a dead end. He was especially scathing about the French nouveau roman. Answering Fuentes, he derides the writer and film-maker Alain Robbe-Grillet for claiming that “literature has nothing to say”, that its only purpose is the “creation of innovative form”. Fortunately, he goes on, Latin America has “the energy, the myths, the stories capable of saving the genre”. And, interestingly, the novelists believed that it was easier to capture these fresh Latin American stories while living in Europe. Only at this distance did they recognize their commonality. Only there could they feel free to unleash their imaginations, uninhibited by the provincialism of local milieux.
The “boom” novels were quickly translated into many European languages. In 1967 the TLS ran an influential special number on Latin American Literature. It contained an essay on poetry by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, one on the novel by Vargas Llosa and a general introduction by the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal.
Rodríguez Monegal was editor of Mundo Nuevo, a Latin American monthly founded in Paris in 1966, to which all four novelists contributed. Mundo Nuevo fed the “boom” as a concept, both defining it and turning its authors into something of a clique. Their correspondence shows that they were well aware of this. The four writers refer constantly to each other, and hardly at all to predecessors or contemporaries of equal merit. There is barely a reference to Jorge Luis Borges, although one cannot imagine the work of Cortázar or García Márquez without him, or to Adolfo Bioy Casares, also from Arge
