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Epilogue ____________________________ Legends of the Boom Latin American Publishing Revisited Carmen Balcells, who had been an almost mythic figure of the Boom and its most visible literary agent, took center stage again in Hispanic publishing when she announced her retirement in March 2000. Critics and journalists revisited her role in the promotion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and the “Balcells legend” (la leyenda Balcells) became the stock phrase that summed up her distinguished career and the crucial role she played in the promotion of Latin American literature in Spain, the Americas, and beyond. The plethora of newspaper articles and personal testimonies that appeared in the print media in 2000 presented an inviting occasion to reexamine the publishing history of the 1960s and 1970s, when Latin America’s literary production made its appearance on the international scene.1 The appellatives invented to describe Balcells are reminiscent of some of the Boom’s own literary creations, and reinforce her status as a mythic and legendary figure. Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, called her “Barcelona’s Big Mama” (“El jubileo” 1) or “The Big Mama of the Latin American novel” (Saldívar, viaje a la semilla 458); the journal Quimera labeled her “the alchemist of the book” (Riera 23); and the French daily Le Monde describes a woman with the character of the Buendía matriarchs: “astuta como una campesina, generosa como una madre de familia, dispuesta a defender a sus autores a base sobre todo de intuición” [“as wily as a peasant woman, as generous as the mother of a brood of children, and above all given to defending her authors 173 mainly according to the dictates of her intuition”] (Mora, “Generosa” 1). These descriptions caught my eye not only because they bring back to life the same literary creations (such as García Márquez’s Big Mama) that Balcells helped bring to light in the Boom years, but also because they now seem to supplant the real personality of the distinguished Catalan agent. Over time, the “literary mother of the Boom,” whom some also call an “editorial terrorist,” has acquired larger-than-life features that surpass the literary characters she herself helped to market in the 1960s and 1970s (Mora, “Generosa” 1). In this spirit, Juan Cruz, the director of Alfaguara (the leading publisher of Latin American literature today), describes Balcells as a “literary superagent with a license to kill like James Bond,” and able to pull out from “her office desk’s top drawer the pistol Vargas Llosa had as a cadet at Leoncio Prado, which he gave her” (“La Balcells” 2). These recent descriptions of Balcells, however, are not the new phenomenon one might think. As early as 1972, in his Historia personal, José Donoso had already described the materno-cannibalistic approach Carmen Balcells had toward Latin American writers entering the Spanish book market in the 1960s: “reclinada sobre los pulposos cojines de un diván, se relamía revolviendo los ingredientes de este sabroso guiso literario . . . quizá con admiración, quizá con hambre, quizá con una mezcla de ambas cosas” (124) [“reclining against the well-stuffed cushions of a divan, she would lick her lips repeatedly as she stirred the ingredients of this tasty literary stew . . . perhaps out of admiration, perhaps out of hunger, perhaps out of a mixture of both”]. Ten years after the first edition of Historia personal, Donoso would remember Balcells as “todavía refugiada en su modesta guarida de la calle Urgel sin el lujoso velito que ahora caracterizaba su cabeza” (216) [“nevertheless still curled up in her modest lair on Urgel Street minus the luxurious veil that now graced her head”], contrasting this picture with the new Balcells “en sus versallescas instalaciones de la Diagonal” [“in her Versaillesque quarters on Diagonal Avenue”] (219). This is the powerful and manipulative figure of the publishing industry, part literary mother and part devouring editorial creature, who inspired Donoso’s character Núria Monclús, Balcells’ alter ego in El jardín de al lado (44). The monstrous Monclús, incidentally, was responsible for Isabel Allende’s submission of La casa de los espíritus [House of the Spirits] to Balcells in the early 1980s, as the author herself confessed in a 1996 interview. It may seem like an incident typical of the publication history of a Boom novel, but Allende claims that, after reading the characterization of the Catalan agent in Donoso’s novel, she sent her manuscript to Balcells...

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