Latin American Literature: Sixties Boom and Beyond
The Story of the Sixties: Years of Boom and Magical Realism
The final renewal of Latin American fiction came in the 1960s with a phenomenon that critics have referred to as the “boom” of the Latin American novel. It was linked to an extra-literary phenomenon that facilitated the novel’s international recognition: the support of Spanish publishers, especially after the success of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The City and the Dogs (1962). However, added to this was the convergence in a short space of time of a series of stunning novels (and novelists): On Heroes and Tombs by the Argentine Ernesto Sabato, Three Trapped Tigers by the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and, above all, the unprecedented success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. These works fixed the attention of international critics and audiences on this group of writers and some of their predecessors.
In terms of themes, although not easy to synthesize, these are prominent:
- The existential crisis of the individual: Recurrent themes include sexuality, death, loneliness, and isolation.
- The dictator: The first narrative outbreak of this figure in Latin American history came with Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas. Subsequently, it has been portrayed in Asturias’s The President and Carpentier’s Reasons of State.
- The history of Latin America: The continent’s history has been rich in events with suggestive narrative possibilities. Thus, numerous historical novels of exceptional quality have arisen: Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World and even One Hundred Years of Solitude could be integrated into this group.
The Most Recent Novel
From the 1970s onward, already established authors continued to publish, joined by others who had not reached the diffusion of the authors related to the boom. The result is a huge list of creators and creations that we cannot address here. The narrative of these years reduces the technical complexity initiated in previous works to create a novel that the reader can more easily access, although this does not involve a total abandonment of experimentation. Realistic narrative prevails and includes colloquial language, but also resorts to magical realism. Key names and titles from this period include: Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez.
The Spanish-American Story
Along with the novel, the short story has been a widely cultivated narrative genre in Latin America from the 1940s to the present. The narrators of the forties and fifties were great cultivators of the literary tale. The extraordinary contribution of Jorge Luis Borges (Universal History of Infamy, Ficciones, The Aleph, and The Book of Sand) stands out. Also important are the stories by Juan Rulfo (The Burning Plain), in which he portrays the harshness of life in Mexican rural poverty, primitivism, both physical and moral. With respect to the 1960s to the present, the short stories of the narrators of the Hispanic boom have gone unnoticed because of the importance of their novels, as is the case with Garcia Marquez. However, one of the main innovators of the genre is Julio Cortazar, who shows a complex reality in his stories.