27. The Secret Agent of the Boom

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ. Mario Vargas Llosa. Miguel Ángel Asturias. Julio Cortázar. Carlos Fuentes. The “Big Five” of the Latin American Boom took the global publishing world by storm in the 1960s. The first three went on to earn Nobel Prizes in 1982, 2010, and 1967, respectively. The two still living—Vargas Llosa and García Márquez—are literary rock stars whose influence stretches far beyond the Spanish-speaking world. With his mustachioed face, Gabriel García Márquez is a globally recognized brand, and his unusual nickname, El Gabo, is familiar across Latin America.

The Latin American Boom was such a huge phenomenon that it is hard to define who its members are, not to mention what united them, or why the Boom happened when it did. Actually, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened, since many authors now considered part of the Boom, including Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, Chile’s Pablo Neruda, and Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, wrote decades before the 1960s and became associated with the Boom only because they influenced its main writers.

Born in 1899, the same year as Borges, Miguel Angel Asturías is ample proof that the actual boom did not begin in the 1960s. He owes his 1967 Nobel Prize to a series of work begun in the 1930s, including Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), El señor president (1946), Men of Maize (1949), the Banana trilogy, and Mulata de tal (1963).

Yet despite their differences, there is one thing that unquestionably united Fuentes, Cortázar, Asturias, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and many others: they all had the same Catalan literary agent.

Before retiring at sixty-nine, in 2000, Carmen Balcells (b. 1930) represented every author who mattered in the Spanish language. El Gabo called her la Mama Grande (Big Mama) of Latin American literature. Others spoke of her as the Super Agent 007, Santa Carmen de las Letras (Saint Carmen of the letters) or, just familiarly, la Balcells. She can boast having represented six Nobel Prize winners: in addition to the first three, there were Pablo Neruda, Camilo José Cela, and Vicente Aleixandre. Among the Latin Americans, Balcells now represents Isabel Allende, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique. The writers on her Spanish client list—including Miguel Delibes, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Terenci Moix, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral, Josep Maria Castellet, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marsé, Eduardo Mendoza, Rosa Regàs, Gustavo Martín Garzo—have won most of the prestigious Spanish-language literary awards.

Balcells opened her agency at age thirty, in 1960, in Barcelona, after working for six years as a secretary at the agency of Romanian exile Vintilă Horia. In those years, Europe’s few literary agents didn’t represent authors vis-à-vis publishers; they brokered deals between publishing houses. Carmen Balcells was the first to represent authors instead of publishing houses.

Carmen Balcells, whom some publishers called la Terrorista, pioneered true professional relationships between authors and publishers. A sharp negotiator, she demanded that contracts include time limits, that publishers pay advances and royalties to authors in full, and she put an end to the customary thinking that authors “belonged” to their publisher. As the writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán put it in a tribute to Balcells on her retirement: “Up until Carmen Balcells, publishers signed authors up for life contracts and paid them a pittance. From time to time authors were paid in kind with gifts of sweaters or Stilton cheese.”

Carmen Balcells no doubt had a sixth sense for detecting which Latin American writers would be important, but she also had help from the great poet and Barcelona-based publisher Carlos Barral, of Seix Barral Publishing. Balcells met Barral in Barcelona in the early 1960s, when he was already working hard to raise the profile of Spanish-language literature. She soon took an interest in the Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez. In 1964, Balcells did the rounds of New York publishing houses peddling his book ideas, including one called Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). She managed to get a four-book contract with Harper & Row with a one-thousand-dollar advance. “Your contract is shit,” said Gabriel García Márquez, when he met her for the first time in Mexico.

Such a small amount seems incredible to us in retrospect, but in the mid-1960s, Márquez was known only to a couple hundred aficionados of Latin American literature. French publisher Julliard had acquired the French rights to A Hundred Years of Solitude for an undisclosed amount but actually relinquished the contract, so Fayard snatched them up for five thousand francs (about one thousand dollars). Even the original Argentine publisher, Sudamericana, had paid only five hundred dollars for the Spanish rights. As the story goes, Márquez was so poor when he finished writing the manuscript in Mexico in 1966 that he had to sell his last wedding present, a blender, to be able to mail to Buenos Aires.

Carmen Balcells would do better for him next time. Cien años de soledad sold thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. In 1985, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) earned a $1 million advance. Then four years later, Carmen Balcells garnered advances totaling $10 million for El general en su laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth). By then, la Balcells and El Gabo were fast friends—she even asked his permission before she moved her agency’s office.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda famously described Carmen Balcells as having the pellejo de rinoceronte (skin of a rhino). But for her authors, she was more of a mother hen than a rhino. In 1968, Balcells paid $500 a month as a stipend to a certain “young Peruvian author” stuck in London in the hopes that he would be able to finish his book. Six years earlier, the young author in question, Mario Vargas Llosa, had had tremendous success with his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), which was translated into two dozen languages. But his contract was so bad he ended up not earning much from it. The book for which Balcells supported Vargas Llosa—and which he nearly lost in an airplane—would be his chef d’oeuvre, Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), which went on to be a milestone in world literature.

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In spite of its notoriety, it’s hard to nail down exactly what the 1960s Latin American Boom was all about. The five emblematic Boom authors were all Latin Americans, all were popular in Europe, and all had the same agent. Otherwise, they didn’t have much in common. Neither did their precursors, or their successors, for that matter. Asturias had a strong folklorist bias. Cortázar was experimental. Carlos Fuentes has spent much of his career as a script and essay writer, and Vargas Llosa’s writing is realistic compared to that of García Márquez, which is almost dreamlike.

One thing they undoubtedly share is a debt to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). The Latin America scholar Leslie Bethell went as far as saying that without Borges, none of the new novelists, including García Márquez, would have emerged. Borges wrote mostly short stories, but he also translated James Joyce’s Ulysses into Spanish. Although his star never shone as brightly as that of his successors, Borges’s brilliant short stories influenced them all. His 1936 Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) was completely original, at once European and truly Latin American. Borges was a courageous and opinionated writer who fought blindness but never let an opportunity to criticize Juan Perón’s regime slip by. He refused to flee into exile and went as far as calling Eva Perón a prostitute.

The other influential trend that preceded the Boom was the rise of a new generation of poets, most notably Chilean, including Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize, 1945) and Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize, 1971). Neruda (1904–1973) was so famous he was invited to read his poems in soccer stadiums. During a rally in honor of a Brazilian Communist leader in 1945, some one hundred thousand people listened to one reading. In his twenties, Neruda traveled extensively in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, and occupied a number of diplomatic posts, before being forced into exile in the 1940s for being a Communist. He was a dogged writer who held many topics. His Veinte poemas de amor (Twenty Love Poems), though they appeared in 1924, have never lost their popularity. Even today, the poems have a fresh and youthful quality. Neruda’s 1935 Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth) remains a key work in the history of Latin American lyrical poetry.

The renown of Borges, Neruda, and many others spawned tertulias and veladas (informal gatherings and social evenings) of writers who read and commented on each other’s work in every major city in Latin America. These brought Latin American writers into intense contact, allowing them to create cultural networks between different American capitals and Paris, capital of them all. One of these, Grupo de Barranquilla, in Colombia, was an informal gathering of writers and journalists to which El Gabo belonged.

The other thing the Latin American Boom authors inherited from their predecessors, particularly from Borges, was common goals for the Spanish language. They consciously set out to abolish the gulf between “high” and “popular” culture. They wanted to write in a Spanish language that was urban, modern, and nonacademic. The second sentence of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most famous work, Conversación en la catedral, reads: “¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú” (At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?).

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The Boom authors also undeniably brought one new literary invention to an international audience: el realismo mágico.

Magic realism merges the fantastic with the ordinary. In a typical scene in Cien años de soledad, a young woman, Remedios the Beauty, rises to heaven while she’s hanging out her laundry. In magic realism, neither the narrator nor the characters find this extraordinary. Such events are portrayed as the normal course of events. In García Márquez’s short story “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings), characters treat the discovery of an unconscious angel casually. One character simply says, “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.” García Márquez mastered the technique of magic realism so thoroughly that he used it to write the first half of his own autobiography.

According to Valentín Pérez Venzalá, editor of the cultural review Cuadernos del Minotoro, the Surrealist scene in Paris in the 1920s was the source of realismo mágico. Americans initially paid little attention to the Surrealists, but the Latin Americans followed them closely. The German art critic Franz Roh coined the term magischer Realismus in 1925. At the time, it was strictly associated with visual arts. The term entered Spanish in 1927 when it was translated by José Ortega y Gasset. In 1947, the Venezuelan art critic Arturo Uslar Pietri introduced it in his analysis of a Venezuelan short story. In the 1940s, two authors were already using magic realism: Miguel Ángel Asturias in El Señor Presidente (The President) and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in El Reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World). Carpentier called it lo real maravilloso (marvelous realism).

Even though magic realism is now almost automatically associated with Spanish-language literature, writers in other languages have been influenced by it, including Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and even John Updike. There are also two very early cases of magic realism being used in French literature, in Marcel Aymé’s 1943 collection of short stories, Le Passe-Muraille (The Man Who Passed through Walls), as well as in most novels of Boris Vian.

Yet if magic realism now embodies the Latin American style—exotic and tropical, overblown and unrestrained, phantasmagorical and hallucinatory—this is precisely what magic realism is not about.

What does magic realism try to achieve? In an essay on what he calls magical realism, the American short fiction author Bruce Holland Rogers claims that it is neither escapism nor a synonym for fantasy stories. “It is trying to convey the reality of one or several worldviews that actually exist, or have existed.” In other words, a ghost is not a fantasy element but the manifestation of the reality of people who believe in, or have “real” experiences of, ghosts. He writes, “Magical realist fiction depicts the real world of people whose reality is different from ours. It’s not a thought experiment. It’s not speculation. Magical realism endeavors to show us the world through other eyes.”

One reason magic realism became so influential in Latin American literature was that it coincided with the quest for a new identity, which united the many dichotomies of society: urban and rural, American and Spanish, modern and old, native and European, colonial and neocolonial. Magic realism is an effective tool for expressing all these conflicting elements. As Carlos Fuentes said to Frederick Nunn in Collisions With History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from El Boom to the New World Order, “The so-called Boom, in reality, is the result of four centuries that, literarily, reached a moment of urgency in which fiction became the way to organize lessons from the past.”

Although many authors, including Asturias, Cortázar, and Fuentes, use elements of magic realism in their work, the master of the practice is, of course, Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1927). One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most important works of the twentieth century. It makes full use of all the devices of magic realism, from first page to last. Even its structure is built on a succession of hallucinatory flashbacks. The book recounts the history of the village of Macondo, inspired by García Márquez’s Colombian birthplace, Aracateca. It explores the impenetrable mysteries of life yet reads like a fantasy.

Although Latin American authors widely adopted realismo mágico, there are exceptions, most notably Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936). Vargas Llosa never used the techniques beyond a few elements here and there. Though very experimental, his writing is hyperrealistic. Yet it was Vargas Llosa who really kick-started the Latin American Boom in 1963 with The Time of the Hero. This scathing depiction of a fictional crime at Lima’s military academy had a first printing of one thousand copies. Peru’s generals accused Vargas Llosa of being unpatriotic and a Communist, and allegedly burned one hundred copies of the book in a formal ceremony. But this modern-day auto-da-fé backfired. The publicity it generated turned Vargas Llosa’s first book into a smash hit, although his contract was so bad that he did not earn a living as a writer until the end of the decade.

The momentum of the Latin American Boom carried on after the 1960s with the arrival of a new generation of Spanish and Latin America authors. Isabel Allende (b. 1942), a cousin of Chilean president Salvador Allende, is by far the most successful Latin American female writer with an international audience. Elena Poniatowska (b. 1935) is probably the most important writer in Mexico today, after Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. Another Mexican, Laura Esquivel (b. 1950), inspired the most significant box office success for a Spanish-language film in the United States with her Como agua para chocolate, which earned $21 million. The Argentine writer Manuel Puig (1932–1990) made history with books that appeared frivolous but were deadly serious, like El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman).

One other notable Latin American editorial success story, though not exactly literary, is the work of Joaquín Salvador Lavado, aka Quino. The Argentine illustrator created the comic strip Mafalda, about a six-year-old perpetual rebel, sort of a Latin American version of Charlie Brown. Mafalda appeared in various Buenos Aires dailies between 1964 and 1973 and was translated into many languages. A huge success in Europe and in Quebec, Mafalda inspired two animated series and a film.

Given the mountain of successful literature in the Boom, it is no surprise that the Spanish-speaking world started organizing world-class international book expos in its wake. Yet the most successful among them have been held not in Madrid or Barcelona but at the extremities of Latin America. The Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires was inaugurated in 1972 and today attracts 1.2 million visitors. Though smaller, Mexico’s Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara is more influential. Founded in 1987, roughly half a million people attend it each year, including 100,000 students, but it draws thousands of agents and publishers from all over the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, and awards half a dozen prizes. The book fair, which honors a different country each year, gathered 1,935 publishers from forty-three countries in 2011. New Mexico was honored in 1994, Canada in 1996, Brazil in 2001, Quebec in 2003, Italy in 2008, Los Angeles in 2009, and Germany in 2011.

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In many ways, the Latin American Boom was the product of one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most fascinating yet least known features: high entropy.

Entropy is a concept from thermodynamics that refers to disorder. Applied to languages, it refers to the degree to which they are spread out geographically. The French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet, a specialist in Latin languages, runs a Web site called Le Poids des langues (The Weight of Languages), where he ranks 137 tongues with more than five million speakers according to ten criteria to determine their influence. Entropy is one of these categories. The world’s most spoken language, Mandarin—with more than 850 million native speakers—ranks near the bottom of the entropy scale, at ninety-seventh, because most Mandarin speakers live in the same country. English has much higher entropy—it ranks as number eleven. But on this scale, Spanish ranks first.

What does a high degree of entropy do to a language? Its speakers move around more. In other words, high entropy means high mobility for Spanish writers, entrepreneurs, artists, exiles, and expats. A Spanish-speaking creator can seek audiences in twenty-two countries that have an average of twenty million inhabitants each and share the same language and general culture. High entropy generates a great variety of political-economic systems, choice and opportunity within the same cultural environment.

Although the political instability that shook Latin America throughout the twentieth century forced many writers and creators into exile, thanks to high entropy, there was always a haven somewhere where Spanish-language cultural production could continue. In the nineteenth century, Chile and Argentina were these havens. But Argentina progressively spiraled into dictatorship in the mid-1920s. After 1920, Mexico was at peace when most of the rest of the continent was wracked by political chaos. Four countries—Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Argentina—account for 60 percent of the population of the Hispanic world. And fortunately, since the revolutionary era, they have never been in upheaval at the same time.

The high degree of entropy in the Spanish-speaking world has resulted in the oddest acquaintances being struck. In his autobiography, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), Gabriel García Márquez tells a fascinating anecdote about befriending a Cuban student activist named Fidel Castro during a particularly brutal riot. Even after he became president of Cuba, Castro regularly invited his friend Gabo to literary discussions there. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a doctoral thesis on Gabriel García Márquez, and the two remained friends until 1976, when Vargas Llosa gave García Márquez a black eye for the way he had “consoled” Vargas Llosa’s estranged wife.

The high entropy of Spanish also intensifies the writers’ political involvement. The political chaos of the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean coup d’état gave Latin America high international visibility at the same time as a generation of young writers was emerging. In 1990, twenty years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Vargas Llosa ran for the Peruvian presidency. Sarmiento, Bello, Darío, Neruda, and Octavio Paz were all either diplomats or statesmen.

The fact that Latin America produced five Nobel Peace Prize winners, compared to six Nobel Prizes for literature, points to the fact that, magic realism notwithstanding, literary genius and political chaos went hand in hand in Latin America. The earliest work by a Latin Boom author was the avant-garde El Señor Presidente published in 1946. With this novel, Miguel Ángel Asturias initiated the prolific Latin American subgenre of “dictator novels.” Another work, published in 1974 by the exiled Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo (I, the Supreme), shows how language and power linked the reign of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Latin America’s first nineteenth-century despot in Paraguay. García Márquez wrote not just one, but two such “dictator novels”: El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and El general en su laberinto about Simón Bolívar’s last journey toward his premature death. Because of high entropy in Spanish-language writing, the same political themes cut across national literatures in remarkably similar ways.

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The extent to which foreign powers—including Spain, Britain, France, the USSR, and the United States—have meddled in Latin America also increased the entropy of Spanish. Until a decade ago in Latin America, el 11 del septiembre referred to the 1973 coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende, which was supported by the CIA. The renowned Latin America specialist Pat M. Holt, chief of staff of the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate in the late 1970s, was famous in Washington circles for a joke he made about American interventionism: “Why is Washington the only capital in the Americas where there hasn’t been a coup?” he would ask rhetorically, before answering: “Because Washington doesn’t have a U.S. embassy.”

There’s no doubt that the international interest in Boom authors also came from the way they expressed feelings about a cold war in which they refused to be pawns. Many critics argue that it was the Cuban revolution of 1959 that triggered the Latin American Boom. It’s probably fair to say that no other single event since the Mexican Revolution had as great an impact on Latin American politics and culture. When Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, at the height of the cold war, he sent shockwaves throughout Latin America and beyond. The Cuban revolution was a rare case where a Latin American dictator was deposed by a true rebellion and not a political coup like the overthrow of Juan Perón in 1955 or of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez in 1958. Latin Americans saw that change did not have to come from the top; it could build from the bottom up. Since 1930, the entire continent had been progressively falling into the hands of dictators and becoming dominated by foreign powers—mostly the United States. Castro’s victory created an immense wave of hope in Latin America, showing that it was possible to overthrow a dictator. Revolutionary movements flared up everywhere.

But the Latin American Boom authors would get much more material for reflection when the Cuban revolution slipped into a totalitarian dictatorship. In 1971, the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, previously a supporter of Castro and his regime, was arrested on vague charges of anti-Castro activities. After a mock trial, he was released from prison—after publicly reading his Autocrítica (Self-criticism), admitting to errors in judgment and confessing to “counterrevolutionary” ideas and activities. After Cuba and Chile, Latin America got a savage dictatorship in Argentina, Argentina’s Dirty War, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, civil war and drug lords in Colombia, Peruvian militarism and democracy, the Salvadoran revolution, the Falklands War, the urban guerrillas of the Tupamaros in Montevideo, the Peruvian guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), Subcomandante Marcos’s Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the rise of drug lords in Mexico.… It did not seem to stop.

Such phenomenal chaos produced massive movements of refugees, fueling the age-old tradition of exiled literary figures in the Spanish-speaking world, whether Spaniards in Mexico, Colombians in Argentina, or Cubans in Florida. Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic all have 10 percent or more of their population living abroad. The proportion for Mexico is 25 percent, a world record. In Chile, the military coup of September 11, 1973, forced two hundred thousand Chileans (2 percent of the population) into exile. Thanks to Chile’s high-quality education system, most of its immigrants were skilled. Most went to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Canada.

Chilean refugees, for political reasons, were never welcome in the United States. Instead, Mexican and Cuban immigrants would play the greatest role in the burgeoning Latin American community.