{"id":1434,"date":"2011-01-26T12:15:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T11:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=1434"},"modified":"2011-01-26T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T11:31:14","slug":"granta-113-best-young-spanish-language-novelists","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=1434","title":{"rendered":"Granta 113: Best Young Spanish Language Novelists"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"\"Anthologies often depend on bold propositions<\/strong> and the editors of this Granta make much of the idea that this new generation of Spanish language novelists (i.e. born after 1975) have not experienced the repression of Franco or the Latin American dictators, so write more of the personal than the political.\u00a0 This perhaps oversimplifies the work of previous generations \u2013 like Vargas Llosa and M\u00e1rquez \u2013 and also ignores the work of some of the finest young Peruvian writers like Daniel Alarc\u00f3n (Lost City Radio<\/em>) and Santiago Roncagliolo (Red April<\/em>) which is intensely political.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

However, they do have a point as one huge influence hangs over this generation and not necessarily a benign one:\u00a0 the late Robert Bola\u00f1o, who was been canonised by the literary world since his untimely death.\u00a0 In novels like The Savage Detectives<\/em>, Bola\u00f1o made a virtue of an autobiographical approach \u2013 his life as a writer in a\u00a0Latin American bohemian world of casual sex and drugs \u2013 which in the hands of a master is all very well, \u00a0but played out in infinite variations by disciples can become introverted and dull.\u00a0 Writers have affairs and literary rivalries \u2014 fine.\u00a0 Yet it doesn’t quite match Macondo or The<\/em> War At The End Of The World<\/em> for scale and vision.\u00a0 Both Alarc\u00f3n and Roncagliolo provide that in their novels above, as do some of the others here;\u00a0 the best of the short stories on display are, to use one of Borges\u2019s favourite words, n\u00edtido<\/em>, \u2018lucid and intense\u2019, as \u2018viscerally real\u2019 as Bola\u00f1o wanted South American literature to become.\u00a0 Granta are also to be commended for commissioning a set of excellent translations\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013 some by Alarc\u00f3n, who writes in English.\u00a0<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

One striking reminder that the anthology provides is how much Latin American writing is done in often self-imposed exile.\u00a0 Few of the writers featured still live in their home countries, a habit they have inherited from their forbears: Vallejo, Neruda, Vargas Llosa and M\u00e1rquez were all restless travellers, and a similar anthology of short stories published by Penguin thirty years ago at the height of the \u2018Magic Realism\u2019 boom was also noticeable for a sense of dislocation.\u00a0\u00a0 Vargas Llosa\u2019s long voluntary exile in Europe\u00a0 after losing the Presidency drew attention to the phenomenon and one recent Peruvian literary periodical consisted of nothing but replies by leading Peruvian artists and writers to one simple question:\u00a0 \u201cWhy have you left Peru?\u201d\u00a0 The answer was rarely a political one \u2013 repression of intellectuals had never occurred in Peru in the same way as it had earlier in Argentina and Chile \u2013 but seemed born more of a febrile dissatisfaction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are plenty of fractured travelling lives portrayed here \u2013 lonely sexual encounters in hotel bedrooms, lost friendships on American highways \u2013 behind which lies a residual toughness and a sense that the writing vocation is a hard one.\u00a0 The story by Antonio Ortu\u00f1o (oddly the only Mexican contribution from a country busting out with films and literature at the moment ) takes this to a haunting extreme:\u00a0 his writer is imprisoned for reasons that remain unclear \u2013 but his duty is still to try to write, despite daily beatings and subtle humiliations that include being forced to wear little boy shorts and having a toilet “in a state of indefinite repair\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patricio Pron of Argentina compares the gestation of writers to \u2018The Life Cycle Of Frogs\u2019: \u00a0in his story of the same name,\u00a0 the young provincial writer comes to the capital, takes menial jobs while trying to climb the literary slagheap and sleep with the right influential people, then returns defeated to his provincial town where he forms a writing group and sends more young spawn to the capital to repeat the cycle.\u00a0 In the process he contributes to “one of those anthologies whose table of contents one rereads 10 years after its publication and feels fear and sadness\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The editors of this anthology would presumably like \u2018prescience and pleasure\u2019 to be added to the list of emotions.\u00a0 What is notable in their own table of contents is the lack of women writers.\u00a0 All six of those reading at the issue\u2019s recent launch in London were men.\u00a0 And only a quarter of the total published list are women.\u00a0 This is not the fault of Granta<\/em>, who have rightly selected on the grounds of merit and availability, not political correctness.\u00a0 But surely the next wave of Latin American writing will see far more published from the likes of the remarkably accomplished Luc\u00eda Puenzo, who is both a filmmaker and writer: her story revolves around an encounter with a dream-like Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, who wears a different coloured tracksuit each day and tells her writing class that to succeed they must provide \u2018a big idea\u2019 \u2013 perhaps the anxiety dream that all her contemporaries suffer from.<\/p>\n

A shortened version of this review <\/em>was published by the Independent<\/em> \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthologies often depend on bold propositions and the editors of this Granta make much of the idea that this new generation of Spanish language novelists (i.e. born after 1975) have not experienced the repression of Franco or the Latin American dictators, so write more of the personal than the political.\u00a0 This perhaps oversimplifies the work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":616,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"page-without-sidebar.php","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1434","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1436,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1434\/revisions\/1436"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}