The Great Latin American Novel

December 7, 2015
In this in-depth yet personal study, the late Mexican novelist Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz), who died in 2012, describes how the literature of Latin America is inextricably tied to its history, while imparting many other lessons. For Fuentes, understanding Latin American literature must begin with the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote about participating in Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs. After covering the colonial era, Fuentes moves on to the writer he considers “the greatest—if not the only—Ibero-American novelist of the 19th century,” the Brazilian author Machado de Assis. Throughout the book, Fuentes returns to personal touchstones: Mexico City, Don Quixote, and the unrealized ideal of “the potential novel.” At the book’s heart are Fuentes’s contemporaries, fellow members of the 1960s–’70s “boom” in Latin American literature: Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. There are some surprises: the lesser-known José Donoso figures prominently, but the popular Roberto Bolaño doesn’t appear at all. Fuentes’s stellar sense of history bolsters his taste in literature. For Anglophone readers, one of his book’s best qualities is how it points out gaps in knowledge—particularly those left by untranslated books. Fuentes has left behind a sage meditation on the literature of a language and the power of the novel.

Starred review from January 1, 2016

An extraordinary contribution to global understanding of Latin American literature and culture, these essays demonstrate the polymathic intellectual power of an Umberto Eco, Alberto Manguel, or Octavio Paz. Given that Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz) ranks among Mexico's greatest novelists, this intellectual heft is unsurprising. The author died in 2012, but this posthumous translation captures all the richness and precision of his style. Eschewing footnotes or other scholarly conceits, Fuentes adapts the framework of mestizaje (ethnic and cultural intermingling) to trace common themes and distinctive permutations--memory, violence, utopia, identity, etc.--across a smorgasbord of literary genius throughout Latin America. Audiences meet familiar titans such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges yet also discover novelists overlooked by the English-speaking world: writers--most of them men--such as Jose Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, or Joao Guimaraes Rosa. Fuentes appears skeptical of the continent's 1990s multicultural shift; he acknowledges indigenous and Afro-Latin American cultural contributions but declares Spanish the real marker of "us." VERDICT This work of profound intellect is essential for anyone seeking to understand the Latin American literary canon.--Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2015
The late, great Mexican novelist and critic (1928-2012) offers a personal history of the fiction he admired. Fuentes (Destiny and Desire, 2011, etc.) has few harsh words for anyone in this history (though he calls some work by Ken Follett "startlingly bad"), which commences in the 16th century with Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of the Conquest of New Spain, a work that Fuentes identifies as the first novel of Latin America. Early on, the author begins referring to some literary lions who roared elsewhere, writers to whom he returns throughout this richly detailed and idiosyncratic work--among them, Cervantes, Proust, and Faulkner. In many ways a scholarly work as well, the text alludes to Max Weber, Erasmus, Rousseau, and other intellectual notables. Fuentes writes frequently about the novelists' use of time, place, and, most of all, language. The organization is chronological at first and later, geographical, as he looks at the novels of writers from Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Peru, and elsewhere. (He admits a sort of "Mexican bias," but he also spends a lot of time with Argentinian writers.) Fuentes is also aware of a male dominance and makes a serious effort, especially in the final quarter of the book, to highlight novels by women. Effusive praise appears often, and he features such locutions as, "his prose is as bright and clear as day," and "a brilliant, richly textured book." A subtitle for this book could be Novels I Have Loved. Fuentes occasionally offers declarations about the novel ("There can be no literature without the body") and also provides, in instructional fashion, lists of writers and works and commonalities among them. In moments that have enormous contemporary resonance, he argues powerfully for the great advantages of immigration. A valedictory work full of erudition and heart.

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