Latin American Novel
The twentieth century Latin American novel opens in the Latin American novel of manners with a novel inherited from the nineteenth century, without any attempt at formal innovation.
From the 40’s begin the first attempts to renew the aesthetic of the novel exploring what is specifically American and while leaving influenced by the avant-garde European movements, especially Surrealism. The world is wide and outside of Ciro Alegria, in showing the peculiar psychology of the Indians expelled from their land and civilization, can be considered the first novel Hispanic renewal.
Over this period they first appear and existential urban issues, although they still persisted the old themes of the novel indigenous, mostly social issues. But above all there is a tendency to link reality to the imagination through myths, legends, magic, poetry, giving rise to what has been called magic realism.
Later, in the 60s which featured a somewhat journalistic expression is called the “boom? Latin American novels, which involved the dissemination in Spain and elsewhere in the world of an important group of Latin American writers of various ages and from different countries. continue with the themes of the previous generation, and strengthen the integration of fantasy and reality.
Other features of these novels are disorganized narrative structure, the breakdown of the plot, the narrative is not linear so it requires great effort from the reader to restore temporary thread, techniques of counterpoint, combined different people and different narrative points of view and is very frequent use of interior monologue.
With few exceptions should be noted that all technical innovations are put into service of a revolutionary literature, very committed to the reality of the countries subject to violent and traumatic historical processes.
The Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias is famous Legends of Guatemala, based on fantasies about the Maya world and especially the novel would take the Nobel Prize and inaugurated, in Latin America, the novels of dictators, Mr. President. Baroque musical language he used to recount the horrors of dictatorships. Other novels of this type are I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos and The Autumn of the Patriarch in Gabriel García Márquez.
The Cuban Alejo Carpentier interested in a kind of novel in which he mixes historical events with great care and Baroque musical language. Important steps of his novels are lost or the Enlightenment.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. His short stories collected in books like The Aleph, Universal History of Infamy, or Fictions presents the world as a labyrinth between the real and the unreal, always with fuzzy boundaries. His impeccable style is characterized by precision in the choice of vocabulary, irony constant and unusual word associations.
Juan Rulfo’s stories El llano en llamas presents the appalling misery and violence on the Mexican countryside, with very innovative narrative techniques also used in his great novel Pedro Paramo, ghostly evocation of Rulfo’s obsessive themes: the rural world violence, family and tensions, the misery of the peasantry, civil war, and especially the absolutely dominating caciquismo rural life.
Most characteristic of short stories, collected in libraries and all fires, fire, Secret Weapons etc., The Argentine Julio Cortázar is like the fantasy element comes quite naturally mingling with everyday life. It is a Hispanic-American writers most influenced by the experimentalism as seen on Around the day in eighty worlds and especially in Rayuela, his great novel, a complex work that invites the reader to follow several different modes of reading, she include non-fictional texts, ranging from rehearsal through the chronicle of events. A number of uprooted characters finding their identity in different places as Paris and Buenos Aires and are representing the novel along different realities and different ways of understanding life.
Gabriel García Márquez is best known Latin American authors, especially since it was awarded a Nobel Prize. Since the first novel, Leaf Storm, The Colonel no one writes etc., Seeks union of reality and fantasy, creating their particular imaginary world, Macondo, where he also runs his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The work is both a summary of the history of Macondo, closely linked with the Buendía family, which metaphorically represents the history of Colombia, Latin America, and humanity in general.
Other major Latin American writers of this period are: Carlos Fuentes queen The death of Artemio Cruz reconstructs the violent Mexican countryside, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa in The End of the World War made a recreation of Latin American internal wars. Argentina’s Ernesto Sabato has cultivated a kind of novel that are interpolated lengthy consideration to the way of real trials. On Heroes and Tombs is an apocalyptic vision of our world, given to violence and destruction.