The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Outside the continental giant, Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Spanish is the most widely spoken language in South America. The area has long had a rich literary tradition, though well into the twentieth century much of the fiction was regional (and often outright provincial). Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was the first transcendent Spanish-writing author from this hemisphere, coming to international attention in the early 1960s, around the time the Latin American “Boom” began. Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927–2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, English 1970) is the landmark text of the Boom, and its magical realism spawned an enormous number of imitators before more or less losing its appeal by the early 1980s. Several writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s, including García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936), and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), have continued to write well into the twenty-first century and for a long time overshadowed younger talents.

Political repression across the continent—such as in Chile after the Pinochet regime assumed power in 1973 and under the Peronist and then the military regimes in Argentina—appears to have stifled creativity. A few authors broke through during this time, notably the bestselling Isabel Allende (b. 1942), but only recently has a post-Boom generation come to the fore. Many writers have now repudiated magical realism and embraced American pop and consumer culture with as much fervor as the older generation denounced American imperialism. The McOndo movement—its name openly mocking García Márquez’s Macondo, the setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude—is one of the most prominent recent literary trends, beginning with the representative anthology McOndo (1996), with contributions from many who have become leading writers today.

The works of the old masters—Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), and a few others—are well represented in English translation, but only a surprisingly small selection of the works by other major as well as younger authors has been translated, giving at best a skewed impression of their talents. This situation is improving, but only gradually.

In the early twentieth century, Argentina was one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Its export-oriented economy reinforced its strong cultural ties to Europe and the United States, and reading, writing, and publishing thrived there. While the works of some authors from the early part of the century continue to be of interest today, notably those of Roberto Arlt (1900–1942), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) has emerged as the towering figure of Argentine literature. His masterful short stories, especially those collected in Ficciones (1944, revised 1956, English 1962, and in the Collected Fictions, 1998), rank alongside the works of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) as among the century’s most distinctive and influential fiction. With their philosophical and literary underpinnings, and Borges’s ability to take his fantastical premises about language, time, infinity, and identity to their absolute extremes in just a few pages while framing them in what always amounts to a story, his fiction has been widely (if only rarely successfully) imitated.

The circle around Borges included other notable writers, such as his frequent collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999), and Bioy Casares’s wife, Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993). Whereas Ocampo’s fiction, like Borges’s, was almost exclusively in the form of short stories, Bioy Casares wrote a number of novels that often also included fantastical premises. With its more elaborate and drawn-out presentation, the eerily hallucinatory virtual reality tale set on a not quite deserted island, The Invention of Morel (1940, English 1964), takes a very different approach to speculative fiction than Borges chose but is a particularly impressive work.

Julio Cortázar’s (1914–1984) innovative Hopscotch (1963, English 1966) is one of the major novels of the Latin American Boom. The first section of the novel is a conventional story, and Cortázar said that the nearly one hundred supplementary chapters of the second section were expendable. The protagonist of this soul-searching novel is Horacio Oliveira, who describes his unfulfilled life in first Paris and then Buenos Aires. As the author explains, the novel’s 155 chapters can be—but do not have to be—read in the order in which they were printed. Cortázar supplies instructions for an alternative sequence, which ultimately leave the reader caught in an infinite loop. While Cortázar’s presentation might appear to be a gimmick, it is carefully and well done and allows for different readings of the text, including the traditional one of front to back. His novel 62: A Model Kit (1968, English 1972) builds on Hopscotch, specifically the sixty-second chapter of the earlier novel, putting into practice the theory outlined there, of a new kind of novel. Melding place—the three locales of the novel: Paris, London, and Vienna—and presenting fragmentary material, this novel also demands more active participation by the reader.

Much of Cortázar’s other fiction is more conventional in form, although his most political novel, A Manual for Manuel (1973, English 1978), about a kidnapping plot by a group of revolutionaries in Paris, also incorporates other material. Interspersing actual newspaper clippings in the text gives the novel a documentary quality, as it becomes a scrapbook of the injustices and violence in the world of that time. Here, however, the extraliterary embellishment distracts from the strong narrative. Cortázar is more successful in Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires (1975, English 2014), in which he develops a story based on an actual comic book in which he and other literary figures like Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia, and Octavio Paz are characters. It is a very amusing, metafictional, political adventure story.

Often consisting of little more than dialogue, Manuel Puig’s (1932–1990) novels also use pop culture extensively. Many of his characters are obsessed with the movies, and Puig uses references to films as markers in their lives and in how they relate to others. Even in what is ostensibly a detective novel like The Buenos Aires Affair (1973, English 1976), Puig inserts parts resembling excerpts from movies and screenplays. The epigraphs at the start of each chapter also contain dialogue from actual films.

The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976, English 1979) is the fullest realization of Puig’s cinematic vision, essentially a two-hander taking place almost entirely in a prison cell. One prisoner, the homosexual Molina, spends much of the time recounting Hollywood movie plots, on which Puig builds to show how the men’s friendship develops. The additional narrative layers—there are scholarly footnotes discussing homosexuality, for example, and the police reports on the two main characters—also are typical of Puig’s use of multiple perspectives.

Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934–2010) was one of many Argentine authors—including Cortázar and Puig—who spent much of his life in exile. As is too often the case with many Latin American authors who have lived and taught in the United States for extended periods, surprisingly little of his large output is available in English translation—though ironically, one of the few works that is, The Perón Novel (1985, English 1988, 1999), has been translated twice. The Perón Novel is a portrait of the dictator Juan Perón, and Santa Evita (1994, English 1995) is a novel that explores the worship of his wife, Eva Perón, the other personality who, even after her death, has dominated modern Argentine politics. Both are fact-saturated fiction addressing the Perón phenomena in Argentina in creative ways, especially in using Eva’s corpse as a totemic and magical object in Santa Evita. The Tango Singer (2004, English 2006) is set in more recent but equally unsettled times, in the midst of Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001 and 2002. The novel’s protagonist, Cadogan, a graduate student at New York University, travels to Buenos Aires to do research on his dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges’s essays on the tango. The novel is filled with episodes of people not finding their way, a paean to what Martínez presents as a constantly shape-shifting city.

Martínez’s most personal work is Purgatory (2008, English 2011). Its narrator strongly resembles the author, but the central figure is Emilia Dupuy, whose husband, Simón, disappeared during Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Now, thirty years later, she believes she has run into him again in New Jersey where she fled. Amazingly, Simón appears to her exactly as he did thirty years earlier, not having aged or changed at all. As earlier circumstances and events are slowly revealed, it becomes clear what Simón’s fate was, yet Martínez generously and persuasively explains that Emilia has convinced herself that she has found Simón after all these decades of uncertainty.

The prolific César Aira (b. 1949) has written a strange and wondrous variety of novellas, with the few available in English giving only a hint of his prodigious interests, abilities, and output. Aira’s works often have a sense of the ineffable, yet he can make even spectral presences seem almost mundane, as in the hauntingly allegorical yet also downto-earth Ghosts (1990, English 2009). Set on a construction site, the ostensibly simple story of the family of the night watchman living there touches on issues like national and class consciousness and reaching adulthood, yet without ever seeming to be about anything specific. The most charming of his works available in English, How I Became a Nun (1993, English 2007), is typically ambiguous (the plot has nothing to do with taking religious vows—the title is a typical Aira feint). In the novel, the narrator recalls episodes from his—or is it her?—childhood when he or she was six. Despite the uncertainty about the character’s gender, confusion about sexual identity is a relatively incidental issue here: in Aira’s world, the narrator can simply claim to have been both a boy named César Aira and an innocent young girl and leave it at that. Aira succeeds in superbly evoking both childhood and childishness in his narrative and offers a surprisingly action-packed plot.

ARGENTINA’S POLITICAL NOVELS

Many novels address Argentine politics and current events of the 1970s and 1980s.

Osvaldo Soriano’s (1943–1997) satire of Peronist enthusiasm and overkill, A Funny Dirty Little War (1980, English 1986), becomes almost slapstick in its excesses, while the narrator in Marcelo Figueras’s (b. 1962) Kamchatka (2003, English 2010) recounts his family’s efforts to maintain the illusion of normality in 1976, when he was ten, and his own childishly limited awareness of the larger world around him.

Works such as Elvira Orphée’s (b. 1930) El Angel’s Last Conquest (1977, English 1985) and Alicia Kozameh’s (b. 1953) Steps Under Water (1987, English 1996) are realist depictions of the brutal treatment of those deemed opponents of the regime during the time of the Dirty War. Kozameh’s fragmented 259 Leaps, the Last Immortal (2001, English 2006) is an autobiographical work that also explores exile.

In Rodolfo Fogwill’s (1941–2010) Malvinas Requiem (1982, English 2007), a group of deserters try to survive during the 1982 Falkland Islands war with Great Britain; it is one of the few war novels about that conflict.

Written during the military dictatorship’s Dirty War—the often violent oppression of citizens that lasted from about 1976 to 1983, during which time some thirty thousand Argentines were made to “disappear,” as the euphemism has it—Ricardo Piglia’s (b. 1940) Artificial Respiration (1980, English 1994) is one of the most interesting reactions to that period. While pointedly beginning the story at the outset of the Dirty War, in April 1976, and also having one of the central characters go missing, most of the novel ostensibly depicts a more distant history. It is a multilayered and very literary thriller of reconstructing the past and of revealing the state’s threat to the creative individual. Piglia also uses Argentine and European intellectual and political figures such as the nineteenth-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, as well as Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Hitler. With other works that show considerable range, such as the slightly futuristic Buenos Aires novel, The Absent City (1992, English 2000), and Money to Burn (1997, English 2003), based on a notorious 1965 bank robbery, Piglia has proved to be one of Argentina’s most significant contemporary authors.

The works of some of the younger Argentine authors are only beginning to appear in translation: Rodrigo Fresán’s (b. 1963) first novel to appear in English was Kensington Gardens (2004, English 2005), perhaps in the hopes that the English setting would ease foreign readers into his work. The narrator is a writer of children’s books who uses the pen name Peter Hook, and the novel itself is a dual biography of Hook and the creator of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie, neatly contrasting Victorian times and the swinging 1960s of Hook’s childhood. The first of Pablo De Santis’s (b. 1963) works to be translated, The Paris Enigma (2007, English 2008), is an homage to the detective novel taking place during the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, where the “Twelve Detectives,” an elite club of the world’s leading sleuths, become involved in a network of conspiracy and crime. The story is narrated by a young wannabe who is thrown into the middle of all this, and even though he is in way over his head, he proves resourceful and observant, finding that some of the great detectives also have their own secrets. Much of De Santis’s other fiction, such as Voltaire’s Calligrapher (2001, English 2010), also uses historical settings and figures and is even more concerned with linguistic and literary references.

• Prolific old master Juan Filloy (1894–2000) is famous for the many thousands of palindromes he devised and for his tale of precision thrown out of kilter, Op Oloop (1934, English 2009).

• Ernesto Sábato (1911–2011) is known for The Outsider (1948, English 1950, and as The Tunnel, 1988) and his masterful On Heroes and Tombs (1961, English 1981).

• Luisa Valenzuela’s (b. 1938) provocative fiction is noteworthy.

• Juan José Saer’s (1937–2005) fiction features many recurring characters and themes.

• Federico Andahazi’s (b. 1963) controversial novel The Anatomist (1997, English 1998) is about sixteenth-century sex research and reactions to it.

• Sergio Chejfec’s (b. 1956) My Two Worlds (2008, English 2011) and The Planets (1999, English 2012) are reflective, meandering novels of memory and observation.

• Andrés Neuman’s (b. 1977) Traveler of the Century (2009, English 2012) is a leisurely paced novel set in nineteenth-century Germany (and reminiscent of German novels from that time).

A trained mathematician, Guillermo Martínez (b. 1962) has written several cerebral mysteries that have been influenced by Borges. With its autobiographical elements, academic backdrop, and the clever but never abstruse integration of mathematics, The Oxford Murders (2003, English 2005) is the most appealing of his novels.

Chile has produced many fine novelists, but until recently its poets easily outshone them. Vicente Huidobro’s (1893–1948) Altazor (1931, English 1988, revised 2003) is an early landmark text and a remarkable epic poem. Chile has two Nobel laureates (1945 and 1971, respectively), Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). The overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 had a profound effect on Chilean writers, with many of the most prominent and promising spending in exile most or all of the years that Augusto Pinochet was head of state (until 1990). Among them were Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942) and Isabel Allende (b. 1942), both of whom have settled in the United States and taken American citizenship, as well as Antonio Skármeta (b. 1940) and Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003).

José Donoso (1924–1996) was Chile’s major “Boom” author, and his novel The Obscene Bird of Night (1970, English 1973) can be considered the ultimate outgrowth of that literary trend. The novel has a nightmarish quality, and the narrative is easily taken for hallucinatory, with much in the jumbled story remaining ambiguous. Even Boy, the creature at the novel’s center, is monstrous, an entirely deformed being who is the last in the line of an aristocratic family.

Donoso also wrote in a more realist vein. The autobiographical The Garden Next Door (1981, English 1994) is about a writer’s experiences in Spanish exile as he tries to write the great Chilean novel, allowing Donoso to write about both the Boom and recent Chilean history. Typically, Donoso upends expectations with his ending, in which he reveals that the narrator and author Julio is not the one behind this work. Touching on both politics and literature, the two novellas published together in Taratuta / Still Life with Pipe (1990, English 1993) sum up many of the issues Donoso addresses in his fiction. Here Donoso has his protagonists become obsessed with other characters—one with a terrorist from Russian revolutionary times and the other with a painter—and in both he offers lessons in trying to come to grips with art and history.

Isabel Allende (b. 1942) is among the globally most widely read Latin American authors. Her multigenerational saga of the Trueba family, The House of the Spirits (1982, English 1985), is her most agreeable read. While Allende employs some magic realism in the novel, her strengths are in the very personal evocation of (slightly disguised) twentieth-century Chilean history. Her novels range from the reimagining of a fictional character in Zorro (2005, English 2005) to young adult fiction. Allende displays a sure hand and keeps her stories rolling along, yet only at its most personal is her work truly memorable.

Diamela Eltit (b. 1949) is among the most prominent authors who remained in Chile during the Pinochet years. Her aggressively confrontational fiction often challenges the prevailing social order and system, especially patriarchy, at the most basic level. The Fourth World (1988, English 1995) begins in the womb, each of the two parts of the novel narrated by one of a set of twins who remain intimately connected later in life. Eltit’s most intriguing work is E. Luminata (1983, English 1997), which is presented in a variety of forms, including sequences of poetry, but most frequently resembles a film script. Eltit consistently undermines any developing sense of story in E. Luminata, which is essentially an experiment in narrative and language, yet the nightmarish vision of an oppressed woman (and victim), brutally exposed in an ominous square, is compelling.

Barely registering outside the Spanish-speaking world before his death, Roberto Bolaño’s (1953–2003) meteoric posthumous rise in reputation and popularity are almost unheard of for a writer of literary fiction. In recent decades, only W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) burst on the scene anywhere near as spectacularly, but given the breadth of Bolaño’s work, the Chilean looks likely to enjoy even greater success. Raised in Chile and Mexico, Bolaño spent essentially all his adult life abroad, first in Mexico and then Spain, but Chile figures prominently in several of his works. Exile, dictatorship, unfathomable evil, and the possibilities of the metafictional are among the dominant and recurring themes in his work, but Bolaño is almost impossible to pin down, and his remarkably varied fiction is full of the unexpected. If there are weaknesses in his sometimes rushed fiction, such as in his limited, underdeveloped female characters, the scale of his invention and the richness of his creations still mark him as the region’s most striking and original writer since García Márquez.

Bolaño’s posthumous magnum opus, 2666 (2004, English 2008), may be his most representative work, as its five separate parts show off many of his different interests and approaches. The book’s longest and most notorious section, “The Part About the Crimes,” is an extended cycle of brief descriptions of the fates of several women, the victims of a massive brutal murder spree inspired by the actual unsolved murders of hundreds of women around Ciudad Juárez in Mexico that began in the early 1990s. Such sequences of short, biographical snapshots are found in a number of Bolaño’s books—particularly in the bizarre fictional encyclopedic tour de force that is Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996, English 2008)—and the individual vignettes and the cumulative effect in 2666 are particularly effective. Other parts of 2666 center on academia and the literary life, and even though the nominal unifying presence is the elusive author Archimboldi, Bolaño unfolds his stories indirectly. The narrative seems to drift off on tangents, and the connections remain subtle and often incidental. Typically, the novel never explains or alludes to the meaning of the title—the date or number 2666. Even so, 2666 adds up to a satisfying and largely cohesive whole, albeit one that leaves much unexplained.

• Although best known for his play Death and the Maiden (1991), Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942) has written several novels, including the multilayered The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1982, English 1987).

• The fiction of Luis Sepúlveda (b. 1949) is worth a look.

• Antonio Skármeta’s (b. 1940) novels include, especially, Burning Patience (now published under the Oscar award–winning movie tie-in title, The Postman; 1985, English 1987).

• Alberto Fuguet’s (b. 1964) novels Bad Vibes (1991, English 1997) and The Movies of My Life (2003, English 2003) describe pop culture as seen from a Chilean perspective.

• Roberto Ampuero’s (b. 1953) The Neruda Case (2008, English 2012) introduces his private investigator Cayetano Brulé to English-speaking audiences when he is hired for his first case by a dying Pablo Neruda in 1973.

The Savage Detectives (1998, English 2007) is Bolaño’s other large-scale work. With its authorial alter ego in the form of Arturo Belano, as well as descriptions of the Mexican literary scene and the “visceral realist” poetry movement (the fictional counterpart to Bolaño’s own infrarealism), it is a more revealing road-trip novel. Like 2666, The Savage Detectives can seem like a jumbled assemblage, but Bolaño throws in so much and keeps the narrative going so well that it easily sustains the reader’s interest. Other works, including Bolaño’s story collections, offer more compact if not necessarily more satisfaction. Even the shorter novels colored by the repression of the Pinochet regime, such as the monologue by a dying Jesuit priest in By Night in Chile (2000, English 2003) and Distant Star (1996, English 2004), with its murderous skywriting air force poet, move along unusual arcs. Underlying—and bubbling forth in—these novels, as in so much of his work, are failed poets and their poetry, and terrible violence.

The first examples of Alejandro Zambra’s (b. 1975) work suggest a promising talent who is cautiously expanding his horizons. Zambra’s Bonsai (2006, English 2008) is a novella about a relationship that is doomed from the start, with much of its charm and effectiveness coming from Zambra’s forthrightness, as he makes clear from the opening of the story that there can be no happy end here. The Private Lives of Trees (2007, English 2010) is another short book with a similarly wistful edge. For much of the brief narrative, the main character, Julián, is waiting for his wife to come home and is trying to entertain his stepdaughter, Daniela. This novella also reflects on the past and the future, as Julián imagines future stages of Daniela’s life (including, eventually, reading this very book).

Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927–2014) novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, English 1970), about the rise and fall of the Buendía family and the town of Macondo, is one of the great works of the twentieth century. A novel filled with ghostly presences and preordained and inescapable fates, García Márquez’s skillful conflation of time provides the novel’s essential foundation. With the fantastic presences of the lingering dead and the brilliantly conceived passions of the living, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the highpoint of magical realism.

One Hundred Years of Solitude cast a long shadow over Latin American fiction. Despite the many imitators, few approached it in quality. Even much of García Márquez’s other fiction, including his dictatorship novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975, English 1976), and his creative variation on the detective novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981, English 1982), pales by comparison. Of his later novels, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, English 1988) is perhaps his greatest accomplishment. Essentially realist, it is a decades-spanning love story in which Florentino Ariza remains determined to win the girl, Fermina Daza, he fell in love with in his youth. Theirs was an almost childish passion, with only a few brief encounters and little opportunity for any sort of relationship to develop beyond that in their imaginations. The magic of the novel is found in Florentino’s ability to sustain—and be driven—by that same youthful romantic desire throughout his life and into old age when he finally meets Fermina again.

Álvaro Mutis (1923–2013) has been overshadowed by García Márquez. The longtime resident of Mexico is best known for his poetry, little of which has been translated into English. His stories featuring Maqroll the Gaviero (Lookout) (1986–1991, collected in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, 2002) also form a remarkable chapter in recent Latin American fiction. Maqroll was a recurring character in Mutis’s poetry long before Mutis chronicled his stories in prose. A fatalistic wanderer and adventurer, Maqroll travels around the world, yet it is not the adventures but the characters—foremost, the philosophical Maqroll himself—that fascinate. With poetic precision, Mutis brings to life an elusive dark hero who rambles and drifts across the globe and through life, rarely finding much success and, yet in his own often dispirited way, is still curious what the future holds.

Manuel Zapata Olivella’s (1920–2004) Changó, the Biggest Badass (1983, English 2010) is an epic of the African diaspora in the Americas. Beginning with a section in verse, the entire narrative is creative in its use of different literary forms and voices, as well as its blending of different actual historical events, basing episodes on real occurrences but also shaping them to fit the story. Zapata Olivella leads the readers through the centuries of the African slave trade and then contemporary history, using both familiar and invented historical figures, including the larger-than-life spirit of the title, in a grand panoramic consideration of the entire African American experience throughout the Americas.

The works of some significant younger Colombian authors have not yet been widely translated, most notably those of Fernando Vallejo (b. 1942). His novel Our Lady of the Assassins (1997, English 2001), the only one available in English, is one of several in which he confronts the drug war–fueled violence of his native Medellín. In this compact, nihilistic work full of operatic violence whose title echoes Jean Genet’s (1910–1986) Our Lady of the Flowers (1943, revised 1951, English 1949), a writer named Fernando returns after thirty years abroad to a city now entirely in the grips of the drug trade and has a doomed affair with a teenage boy.

• Jorge Franco’s (b. 1962) violent novel about Medellín is entitled Rosario Tijeras (1999, English 2004), and his tale of loss and longing (and living illegally in the United States) is Paradise Travel (2001, English 2006).

• Juan Gabriel Vásquez (b. 1973) contrasts the long shadow of Nazism and modern Colombia in The Informers (2004, English 2008). His The Secret History of Costaguana (2007, English 2010), featuring a narrator obsessed with Joseph Conrad and his novel Nostromo, is both a historical commentary and a multilayered literary game.

Laura Restrepo’s (b. 1950) novels have a great deal of violence, as they also describe some of the darker sides of Colombian life, but they are not as brutal as Vallejo’s and offer at least some hope at their conclusions. Delirium (2004, English 2007) is set in 1980s Bogotá, where the former literature professor Aguilar finds that his wife, Agustina, has been reduced to madness, a symptom of both the times and her upbringing. The Dark Bride (1999, English 2002) takes place deep in the Colombian countryside among the oil workers and the prostitutes who serve them. The narrator is a journalist who, in conversations with the locals, learns the story of a legendary prostitute, an Indian girl who adopted the working name of Sayonara. Restrepo tries too hard with her premises of madness or a prostitute’s passions, but her novels offer interesting glimpses of otherwise unseen Colombian life.

The prolific and widely translated Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) has been the dominant figure in Peruvian writing for more than four decades. As his failed but very serious candidacy for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 suggests, Vargas Llosa has always been politically engaged, more so than any of the other prominent authors of the Latin American “Boom.” Remarkably, despite Vargas Llosa’s ideological shift from socialism to neoliberal conservatism, and from being under the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre to embracing the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, his own politics have not tainted his fiction. His very naturalistic realism has little magic, and while condemning Peruvian and Latin American politics in many novels that have a historical basis, he lets the facts and situations speak for themselves rather than use his characters as mouthpieces for his politics.

Vargas Llosa’s books are among the most approachable by all the Boom authors. Several feature autobiographical elements, including his most entertaining novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977, English 1982). Its teenage protagonist who is an aspiring writer named Mario and falls in love with his aunt makes a wonderful comic novel. The story is told in chapters alternating between the narrator’s account of this time of his life and the soap opera inventions of the scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, who works for the same radio station young Mario does. This kind of twin narrative is typical of much of Vargas Llosa’s fiction. Here reality (Mario’s life) and fantasy (the soap opera plots) initially seem divergent, but the distinctions between the two finally blur, allowing Vargas Llosa to address some of his favorite themes, such as the pull and distraction of erotic passion and the barriers to a productive, creative life as an artist.

Many of Vargas Llosa’s novels are historical, and The Way to Paradise (2003, English 2003) is the most successful in marrying all his interests and showcasing his favorite literary tricks. The alternating chapters in this novel move back and forth between the lives of the nineteenth-century Peruvian social activist Flora Tristán and the French painter Paul Gauguin (a grandson she never knew), each in her and his way abandoning comfortable bourgeois lifestyles for what seems like a greater cause.

Peru is central to many of Vargas Llosa’s works of political fiction and the massive Conversation in the Cathedral (1969, English 1975), which is the culmination of Vargas Llosa’s early novels dealing with his homeland. The novel is framed as a conversation between two men, Santiago and Ambrosio, over drinks in a dive called La Catedral. Centered on events under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría in the 1950s, it explores the pervasive human corruption of those times and the toll it takes on individuals and society. Vargas Llosa’s layering of dialogue in the novel in recalling the past is one of his more ambitious stylistic experiments. Other, more straightforward novels, are based on foreign events. In The Feast of the Goat (2000, English 2002), he examines the phenomenon of the Latin American dictator, the case study here being of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. The War of the End of the World (1981, English 1984) describes the historical rebellion in Canudos chronicled in Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha’s (1866–1909) classic account Rebellion in the Backlands (1902, English 1944 and as Backlands, 2010). Set in the backlands of late-nineteenth-century Brazil, Vargas Llosa sees what happened here as representative of the South American experience, the anarchic Canudos a place undone by both fanatic zeal and the violent reaction to it. With its colorful characters and dramatic action, The War of the End of the World is a grand epic of the times and the continent and one of Vargas Llosa’s greatest achievements.

• Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s (b. 1939) charming and insightful novel A World for Julius (1970, English 1992) is about a young boy from an aristocratic family in 1950s Peru.

• Quechua-speaking José Maria Arguedas’s (1911–1969) fiction offers awareness of and insight into Peru’s indigenous population.

• Peruvian-born but English-writing Daniel Alarcón’s (b. 1977) novel Lost City Radio (2007) is set in an unnamed, civil war–wracked South American country. At Night We Walk in Circles (2013) is noteworthy as well.

The first of Santiago Roncagliolo’s (b. 1975) novels to be translated, Red April (2006, English 2009), is a political thriller and mystery. Its protagonist, the lowly but dutiful district prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, is assigned to investigate a horrific murder and soon finds himself in way over his head. The legacy of the long-lasting and violent Shining Path Maoist insurgency and the corrupt authorities who obstruct much of the increasingly deadly investigation result in a twisty, compelling thriller, even if Roncagliolo ultimately heaps too much onto the story.

Much of the domestic fiction by authors from many of the smaller South American nations has not circulated widely beyond their borders, much less in translation. The works by Bolivia’s Juan de Recacoechea (b. 1935) and Edmundo Paz Soldán (b. 1967) are among the first to reach larger foreign audiences.

In Juan de Recacoechea’s American Visa (1994, English 2007), both the author and his protagonist, Mario Alvarez, borrow from American noir fiction. Alvarez is desperate to get to the United States, but when he fails to obtain a visa directly from the U.S. authorities, he tries to get one by paying off the right people. Short of funds, he tries to use what he has learned from the detective novels he has read to pull off a robbery, but like the heroes of his favored fiction, he ends up making his situation more complicated. Recacoechea’s account of a 1952 train trip and its attendant mysteries and murder in Andean Express (2000, English 2009) adds a dose of Agatha Christie to his repertoire. Despite the stock characters and situations, the distinctly Bolivian spin and jovial approach to both these novels make it enjoyable fiction. Too mild and humorous to be considered Latin American noir, Recacoechea has nevertheless found a winning formula.

Longtime U.S. resident Edmundo Paz Soldán continues to write in Spanish, and Bolivia—and the fictional town of Rio Fugitivo—figures in much of his work. The narrator of The Matter of Desire (2001, English 2003), Pedro Zabalaga, bears many biographical similarities to the author, but in addition to a predictable account of a campus romance and an academic torn between two worlds, Paz Soldán leaves considerably more for his protagonist to uncover back in Bolivia. Moving in with his crossword puzzle–writing uncle, David, Zabalaga begins looking into his dead father’s activist past and finds a much more complicated picture of the man. One apparent key to the many mysteries surrounding the man is the cult novel he wrote, Berkeley, and Paz Soldán’s multilayered puzzler offers decent rewards, even if it cannot live up completely to its great ambition. Turing’s Delirium (2003, English 2006) also comes with several puzzles. A kind of cyber thriller, it pits the experts running the government’s intelligence-gathering “Black Chamber,” which employs both the newest technologies and older, more basic approaches, against the hackers trying to undermine the repressive government. With its political, social, and technological criticism tackling everything from globalization to virtual reality, Paz Soldán throws more into his story than the novel can ultimately sustain, but it is an intriguing read.

• José Wolfango Montes’s (b. 1951) Jonah and the Pink Whale (1987, English 1991) is an amusing look at the absurdities of life in Bolivia.

• Jesús Urzagasti’s (1941–2013) creative introspective novel In the Land of Silence (1987, English 1994) has three narrative voices—Jursafú, the Other, and the Dead Man, all of whom are variations of the same protagonist.

In the English-speaking world, Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994) has long had the reputation of being the least-known and read of the major modern Latin American writers. Onetti’s distinctive works stand apart from both the dominant magical realist and the naturalistic schools. Both in staking out his own territory—most of Onetti’s novels about the River Plate region take place around the fictional port city of Santa María—and in constantly shifting the points of view in his nonlinear narratives, Onetti’s writing is frequently compared with William Faulkner’s. A sense of fatalism prevails in much of Onetti’s fiction, leading to a sense of resignation and passivity among his characters, but these existential works are not as overtly introspective as those of contemporary European authors. Onetti’s prose is rich and evocative yet can be frustratingly elusive, with the narratives often appearing to run in place. The Shipyard (1961, English 1968, 1992) is typical in its premise, that when the protagonist, Larsen, takes a job running a rundown and bankrupt shipyard, any and all prospects he might have are illusionary.

Presenting “a life in stories,” Voices of Time (2004, English 2006) is illustrative of Eduardo Galeano’s (1940–2015) approachable creative writing. The collection of more than three hundred vignettes—stories, reflections, musings—is more a kaleidoscope than a mosaic, but Galeano’s often lyrical style and variety make it a thoughtful collection. His Memory of Fire trilogy of Genesis (1982, English 1985), Faces and Masks (1984, English 1987), and Century of the Wind (1986, English 1988) takes a similar, if more controlled, approach and on a much larger scale. With each of the many short pieces with which he builds these fictions based on extraneous sources, Galeano rewrites the history of the Americas, from creation to modern times. It is, as Galeano acknowledges, a very subjective rendering, but it is also a powerful collage.

Jorge Icaza’s (1906–1978) social realist novel Huasipungo (1935, English 1962, and as The Villagers, 1973), about the exploitation of the indigenous Quechua Indians, may be the most famous Ecuadorean novel, but other Ecuadorean authors have produced much more innovative fiction. Demetrio Aguilera-Malta’s (1909–1981) Don Goyo (1933, English 1980), with its 150-year-old protagonist who communes with nature, is among the earliest examples of a kind of magical realism, and Aguilera-Malta continued to experiment with new styles late in his career. Although Aguilera-Malta’s fiction does not have the sustained coherence of García Márquez’s, he lags only a little behind the Colombian master in his lyrical evocation of the slightly unreal. Babelandia (1973, English 1985) is one of the most colorful novels of dictatorship in Latin America. This is a satire with absurdist flair, in which the Babelandian ruler is a robotic skeleton named Holofernes Verbofile, but it is grounded in the prevailing unsettled autocratic Ecuadorean political situation and centers on the real-life case of the kidnapping of a general (as the far more prosaic original Spanish title El secuestro del general, The Abduction of the General, also emphasizes). Aguilera-Malta takes even greater liberties in Santorontón, the fictional setting of Seven Serpents and Seven Moons (1970, English 1979). This allegorical novel overflows with mythical creation and invention, including a speaking Christ figure on a crucifix, and even time and place are largely an indistinct blur. The great Spanish translator Gregory Rabassa translated the novel and cited it as the definitive example of magical realism.

• Mario Benedetti’s (1920–2009) representative story collections are Blood Pact (English 1997) and The Rest Is Jungle (English 2010).

• Carlos Martínez Moreno’s (1917–1986) novel of political terror is entitled El Infierno (1981, English 1988).

• Cristina Peri Rossi (b. 1941) wrote intense and poetic fiction.

Alicia Yánez Cossío’s (b. 1929) novels of life in the Andean highlands, such as Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City (1973, English 1999) and The Potbellied Virgin (1985, English 2006), as well as her novel about the Galápagos Islands, Beyond the Islands (1980, English 2011), are a restrained amalgam of Latin American styles. She resorts to devices like the familial insanity in Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City and the inertia (and all it symbolizes) of the town against which her protagonist wants to rebel, but the more fantastical elements in Yánez Cossío’s fiction are rarely flashy. Her novels have a gentle humor and also a cumulative, poignant power.

AN ECUADORAN NOVEL

Poet Jorge Enrique Adoum’s (1926–2009) playful but complex post-modern novel of Latin America, Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda (1978), is one of the region’s major works of fiction not yet translated into English.

Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969)—who was elected president of Venezuela in 1948 but was overthrown in a military coup after only a few months in office—is the only Venezuelan author to have found much of an audience in the English-speaking world. His frontier novel of the Venezuelan plains, Doña Bárbara (1929, English 1931), is typical of his regional and realist fiction. Its depiction of taming the prairie is more compelling than that found in most such novels, in no small part because of the powerful and cruel female lead, Bárbara. Gallegos’s fiction could not compete abroad with the then more fashionable Boom authors and those who came afterward, but ironically, the Spanish-language literary prize with the most impressive record of recognizing the highest achievement in modern fiction is named after him.

Ana Teresa Torres’s (b. 1945) century-spanning Doña Inés vs. Oblivion (1992, English 1999) is apparently based on an actual court case that took nearly three hundred years to resolve. The novel’s narrator, Doña Inés, begins her account early in the eighteenth century and continues her single-minded pursuit of her family land long after her death, haunting the rapidly changing Venezuela. This short novel is packed with incident and characters, and the monomaniacal Doña Inés is not the most agreeable guide, but in its depiction of the dramatic transformation of Venezuela and Caracas, as well as the history that shaped the country, it has considerable appeal.

The leading Paraguayan author is Augusto Roa Bastos (1917–2005), best known for his classic novel I the Supreme (1974, English 1986). A standout among the many novels about the region’s dictators, the story is closely based on the life of one of the continent’s first authoritarian leaders, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840), who ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840. The novel is presented as a compilation composed mainly of this El Supremo’s dictated accounts. The voice of the amanuensis, Policarpo Patiño, is integrated into his dictation, but The Supreme’s voice is the controlling one. The compiler, who provides editorial notes, is a subtle yet significant presence throughout, and among the connections between the original writing and the compiler’s addenda is the use of the same memory pen in both the original nineteenth-century manuscript and then the edited modern one. I the Supreme is about the written interpretation of facts and history, and from the very beginning, Roa Bastos constantly questions both the authenticity and the objectivity of any account. The symbolic memory pen is partially broken, for example, and words are erased at the same time as they are written. Similarly, the account itself ends in an illegible, fragmented mess.

Paraguay is the only Latin American country in which an indigenous language, Guaraní, has maintained its dominant position. Despite a strong tradition of Guaraní poetry, it has not become widely established as a medium for fiction. In this comprehensive social-historical novel about Paraguay, the bilingual Roa Bastos invokes Guaraní oral traditions, adding another literary dimension to a novel that is as much about writing as it is about a dictator.