Mexico is the northern giant of Latin American literature. Its sheer size, cultural and educational infrastructure, and comparatively stable and moderate political climate contribute to its dominant position in the region. Many authors from other Latin American countries, including the Colombians Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) and Álvaro Mutis (1923–2013), Honduras-born Guatemalan Augusto Monterroso (1921–2003), and Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), settled there or had strong ties to the country, enhancing its position as a literary center.
Although the much smaller Central American countries have long literary traditions, they have been much more isolated, with little available in English translation. Most of the few authors that have achieved greater recognition abroad have also spent much of their lives abroad, including Guatemala’s Nobel laureate, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974).
Juan Rulfo’s (1918–1986) Pedro Páramo (1955, English 1959, 1994) is one of the books that set off the wave of popularity of Latin American fiction abroad. The short work follows Juan Preciado’s quest for traces of his father, Pedro Páramo, in desolate Comala. Exploited and ruined by Páramo, Comala is a place permeated by death. The novel is a mix of the realistic and the hallucinatory, with the dead presented as real presences. Much of the fragmentary and elusive narrative seems uncertain and uneasy, but this precursor to magical realism is distinctive in its presentation and treatment of the supernatural.
Almost all of Carlos Fuentes’s (1928–2012) fiction concerns Mexico, and a number of his novels synthesize large swaths of Mexican history. The most sweeping of these efforts is the massive Terra Nostra (1975, English 1976), which tries to encompass all the recent centuries of Spanish and Latin American history. In large part an exposition of the forces that shaped the Spanish domination of Mexico, this is a complex novel of clashing ideologies and traditions. As in other works, such as Christopher Unborn (1987, English 1989), a novel more closely focused on Mexico itself, Fuentes does not end in the present but looks slightly ahead: Terra Nostra leads up to the millennium, a quarter of a century in the future, while Christopher Unborn culminates in the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. His more political novel The Eagle’s Throne (2002, English 2006) takes place in 2020, and even The Years with Laura Díaz (1998, English 2000) is extended to the turn of the century. Typically, Fuentes’s fatalistic historical accounts imagine the future as an inevitability similar to what has happened so far, with little improvement possible. His dark visions are also warnings, of course, and can be taken as suggestions that the course of history should be changed.
Fuentes repeatedly examines the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century and its legacy, most notably in one of his best books,
The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962, English 1964, 1991). The title figure personifies many of the changes that Mexico underwent in the twentieth century, with Cruz graduating from being a poor young idealist to being a powerful industrial magnate, having brutally and cynically climbed to the top. A dying man now, the novel describes his painful physical and mental decline while also looking back on the different stages in his—and Mexico’s—past. Cruz’s present is narrated in the first person, and the past is considered more dispassionately in the third. In addition, there are sections in which a voice in the second person admonishes and accuses him. Artemio Cruz is among Fuentes’s more convincing human creations in a body of work in which characters almost inevitably represent something and therefore often can seem less than entirely lifelike.
Two of Fernando del Paso’s (b. 1935) major works are available in English, covering very different periods. Like Fuentes’s largest works, Paso’s novels try to encompass a great amount of history and material. News from the Empire (1987, English 2009) centers on the brief, ill-fated reign of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, who was installed as emperor of Mexico in 1864 and executed when the republic was restored under Benito Juárez in 1867. Maximilian’s wife, Empress Carlota, lost her mind but lived, in Europe, until 1927, still believing herself to be the empress of Mexico. News from the Empire is presented in chapters that alternate between the madwoman’s personal ravings from 1927 and more neutral accounts of Maximilian’s brief reign and its aftermath. This almost farcical interregnum did not mark the end of European imperialism per se, but Paso’s examination of this colorful episode in history from both the European and Mexican vantage points clearly shows the dawning of a new political age. A lively text that shifts between the documentary and the freely imagined, it succeeds as a historical novel, personal saga, and political commentary.
The rapid shifts and larger ambitions of Paso’s
Palinuro of Mexico (1977, English 1989) make it a similarly busy novel. The main characters are the medical student Palinuro and his cousin Estefania. In a section presented as a drama (or, rather, a dark comedy), Palinuro is shot during the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco Square, but the novel is not primarily political, focusing instead on Palinuro’s personal and visceral quests for knowledge and understanding. The novel has been compared with James Joyce’s
Ulysses, and given its humor, linguistic contortions, and anatomical detail, the comparison is not unreasonable.
Several women are among the Mexican authors who have had success both in Mexico and abroad. In Like Water for Chocolate (1989, English 1991), Laura Esquivel (b. 1950) cleverly integrates into her story the pleasures of cooking and eating, literally imbuing the food cooked by the protagonist, Tita, with her emotions. A charming example of thoughtful popular fiction, it is a story of a grand, unfulfilled passion, as Tita is expected to remain single and care for her aging mother while the love of her life marries her older sister. Esquivel has not managed the same happy balance of gimmicks like the recipes in Like Water for Chocolate, imaginative premises, and a good story in her later fiction, though not for want of trying. Much of The Law of Love (1995, English 1996), for example, is set in the twenty-third century, and the book comes with a CD of accompanying music.
Carmen Boullosa’s (b. 1954) cross-cultural fiction, which includes creative historical works like her novel Cleopatra Dismounts (2002, English 2003); and works by Ángeles Mastretta (b. 1949) such as those about the Mexican Revolution, Mexican Bolero (1986, English 1989, and as Tear This Heart Out, 1997) and Lovesick (1996, English 1997), all feature strong female characters. Though best known for her documentary work on the 1968 clashes between students and the authorities, Massacre in Mexico (1971, English 1975), French-born Elena Poniatowska’s (b. 1932) larger body of work contains several novels based on such famous artists as Diego Rivera (Dear Diego [1978, English 1986]) and Tina Modotti (Tinisima [1992, English 1996]).
Daniel Sada (1953–2011) used and manipulated language and style expertly in his fiction, creating considerable problems in attempts to translate it. The mischievous and circuitous courtship novel
Almost Never (2008, English 2012), set in a slowly changing Mexico after the end of World War II, offers some sense of his abilities. Despite relatively little plot, Sada’s off-beat style easily carries the reader through this amusing and sex-filled tale.
The younger authors Jorge Volpi (b. 1968) and Ignacio Padilla (b. 1968) are part of a Latin American trend of writing less fixated on the national. In Volpi’s dialogue-heavy novel of ideas, In Search of Klingsor (1999, English 2002), a scientifically minded American named Francis Bacon becomes obsessed after World War II with learning the identity of a Nazi known as Klingsor. A mix of spy and scientific fiction, the novel revisits German efforts to make an atomic bomb. Ignacio Padilla’s stylish if thin stories collected in Antipodes (2001, English 2004) are exotic in locale and invention, but his novel Shadow Without a Name (2000, English 2003) is considerably better. This novel of identity and role-playing begins with a high-stakes game of chess during World War I: two men play for their identities and the future that each of these seems to hold, one assured of a life of safety and security and the other surely doomed. Both men, in fact, survive, and identities prove surprisingly elusive as the story progresses in what turns out to be a chesslike game that stretches over decades (and also involves Nazism). Four different narrators recount parts of the story, each shining a different light on events in this clever puzzler.
KEEP IN MIND
• Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s (b. 1951) novels using his fictional Moroccan setting include Mogador (1987, English 1993) and The Secret Gardens of Mogador (2001, English 2009).
• Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928–1983) are worth reading.
• Homero Aridjis’s (b. 1940) historical novels are 1492 (1985, English 1991) and his “visions of the year 1000,” The Lord of the Last Days (1994, English 1995).
• Paco Ignacio Taibo II (b. 1949) writes politically engaged crime fiction.
Despite being awarded the Nobel Prize, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) remains an underrated precursor of the Latin American Boom. His grotesque satire based on the Guatemalan dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera, The President (published in the United States as El Señor Presidente; 1946, English 1963), is at least acknowledged as one of the first and finest of the region’s dictator novels. A more remarkable achievement is the complex Men of Maize (1949, English 1975), a novel pitting indigenous culture against outside influences and might that is deeply rooted in local myth and oral storytelling. A dedicated follower of the surrealist movement when he lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Asturias is notable for his linguistic creativity and his integration of many literary traditions, ranging from the European avantgarde to Mayan storytelling.
Despite being born in Honduras and having spent the last five decades of his life in exile in Mexico, Augusto Monterroso’s (1921–2003) life was also closely tied to Guatemala, and he is considered one of its greatest writers. A master of the succinct, he is famous for his micro-tales, with some of his stories only a sentence or paragraph long. The title of his 1959 collection, Complete Works and Other Stories (English 1995, in a translation that also includes Perpetual Motion, 1972) reflects some of his playful attitudes, from suggesting comprehensiveness and finality when in fact he is just getting started, to immediately undermining the claim to absoluteness. Monterroso’s elegantly crafted fables are remarkable pieces of concision that nevertheless seem full-bodied; they also are both profound and humorous.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958) is unavoidably linked to American author Paul Bowles (1910–1999), who influenced and translated several volumes of Rey Rosa’s fiction. Rey Rosa’s spare, restrained stories and novellas often depict great violence, the dispassionate prose of the surface ultimately revealing great turmoil beneath.
Severina (2011, English 2014), a short but action-filled tale of human and literary passions in which the narrator becomes obsessed with a woman named Severina, is a fine example of Rey Rosa’s work.
NICARAGUA
Nicaragua boasts several of Latin America’s finest poets, beginning with the father of modernism, Rubén Darío (1867–1916). Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) is a Catholic priest who also became the minister of culture under the Sandinista government, which came to power in 1979. His epic The Doubtful Strait (1966, English 1995) is a verse narrative about the Spanish conquest of Central America that prefigures more recent Nicaraguan history and the Somoza dictatorships. Cardenal weaves quotations from historical documents, including accounts by Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas, into a critical rewriting of the early experiences of the Spanish in the New World. Gioconda Belli (b. 1948) also is a noted poet who has written several conventional novels, including a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand (2008, English 2009). Her most compelling work of fiction is The Scroll of Seduction (2005, English 2006), with its dual narratives of obsessions. A professor, Manuel, recounts the story of the crazed love between the mad queen Juana of Castile and her husband, Philippe the Handsome, to the teenage Lucía. The retelling gets out of hand, with Manuel and Lucía completely embracing the old tale in an intriguing take on passion.
Closely involved with the Sandinista cause,
Sergio Ramírez (b. 1942) served as vice president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, but he has also long been one of Central America’s leading writers. Ramírez already displays considerable storytelling talent in his early representative collection,
Stories (English 1986), even if some of the satirical pieces critical of the United States and its influence in Latin America in it are rather obvious. In one story, a Nicaraguan emulates bodybuilder Charles Atlas (a stand-in for the United States), only to be disillusioned when he meets the dying man himself. In another story, Ramírez describes the ridiculous preparations made by Nicaraguan high society anticipating a visit by Jackie Onassis, who never shows up.
Ramírez’s later novels are more complex and nuanced. Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea (1998, English 2008) moves back and forth between the lives (and legacies) of the legendary Rubén Darío and the dictator Anastasio Somoza. The two poles of the story are Darío’s triumphal return to Nicaragua in 1907 and the 1956 assassination of Somoza, but Ramírez’s crisscrossing story is full of connections between the two in a small country where everyone seems to know everyone else. With its assassination plot, Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea has elements of a thriller, but the broader picture of the novel is of Nicaraguan life in the first half of the twentieth century. With its melding of personal fact and fiction, A Thousand Deaths Plus One (2004, English 2009) is a novel in the style of Spaniards Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marías. The novel alternates between first-person accounts by a narrator much resembling Ramírez and the man whose life he is trying to piece together, an obscure photographer named Juan Castellón. Ramírez comes across traces of Castellón while traveling in his official political capacity, and over the years of his obsession, a fascinating picture emerges. The two tracks of the narrative cover more than a century of Nicaraguan history but also address issues such as how to capture history and convey individual lives. Ramírez’s novel suggests that neither photography, even from the very midst of history (where Castellón often found himself), nor a written record or re-creation seems able to ever grasp all the essentials.
ELSEWHERE IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Several of the most prominent authors from the other Central American countries, including
Claribel Alegría (b. 1924) and
Horacio Castellanos Moya (b. 1957), have led very peripatetic live. Although she is best known for her poetry, the Nicaraguan-born Claribel Alegría has also written several works of fiction.
Luisa in Realityland (1987, English 1987), inspired by Lewis Carroll’s
Alice books and based on her own childhood in El Salvador, alternates between short prose sections and poems in a tapestry of myth, history, and remembrance that is a good introduction to the author. Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras but grew up in El Salvador. Strongly influenced by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, Castellanos Moya’s novels, such as
The She-Devil in the Mirror (2000, English 2009) and
Senselessness (2004, English 2008), feature obsessive narrators confronting violent Central American society in Bernhardian monologues.
Senselessness is set in an unnamed country that is nevertheless readily identifiable as Guatemala. The narrator, who hastily fled his own homeland after publishing a piece of writing that generated a very critical reaction—much as Castellanos Moya went into permanent exile after the publication of his controversial novel
El asco (1997, not yet translated)—has agreed to edit an eleven-hundred-page report detailing atrocities committed by the army against the indigenous population. The Bernhardian style of run-on sentences and relentless self-reflection, even in light of all these horrors, is very effective.
KEEP IN MIND
• Manlio Argueta’s (b. 1935) novels about El Salvador are noteworthy.
• Zee Edgell’s (b. 1940) English-language fiction is from Belize (formerly known as British Honduras and achieving full independence only in 1981).
• Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1994), edited by Barbara Ras, contains more than two dozen stories from all parts of Costa Rica.