Expresiones liminales en la narrativa latinoamericana del siglo XX. Estrategias postmodernas y postcoloniales (review)

This volume unites European and Latin American scholars from various fields. While the title emphasizes the terms 'postmodern' and 'postcolonial', the book remains faithful to the wider project of interdisciplinarity and probes issues as diverse as globalization, modernity and transculturation. However, according to the editors the common denominator is the varying treatment of postmodernity and postcoloniality, as applied to selected literary texts from Latin America (9). De Toro and Ceballos subdivide the book into three sections: the first favours historiographical and new historicist approaches, while the remaining essays, save one, concentrate more exclusively on postcolonialism and postmodernity. The final section consists of Flávio R. Kothe's focus on the literary canon.

Hans-Joachim König begins with a robust discussion of the tension between the novel and historical discourse in Venezuela and Colombia. He highlights the traditional role of historiography in the region, which has, he believes, created an official discourse that prioritizes concepts such as the nation state and patriotism. Novels in this context have value in challenging historical discourse. This argument is continued in the work of Brigitte König, who stresses that the novel has gone beyond the limitations of history with its obsessive focus on national myths and heroes. Her choice of novels, particularly Gabriel García Márquez's fictional rendering of the last days of Simón Bolívar, El General en su laberinto (1989), is incisive. The novel is seen to deviate from the official heroic line in its portrayal of a decrepit and disillusioned former leader.

Alfonso de Toro examines the often conflicting roles of historiography and the novel through the work of Augusto Roa Bastos, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. He contends that the novel explores the space between fiction and reality, which leads him to question how much the form actually contributes to historical knowledge. He concludes by stating that the postmodern 'nueva novela histórica' (73) actually complements official history and sometimes corrects it. He cites, as examples of the new historicist genre, Roa Bastos's recreation of the dictatorial regime of nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator Dr. Francia, in Yo el Supremo (1974), and Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo (1981), which re-imagines the 1896 Canudos rebellion. By contrast, René Ceballos believes that the postcolonial perspective, as well as the new historical approach, is required in the novel to adequately 'pensar, percibir y construir el mundo' (136). The dizzying hybridity of novelistic form, style and subject matter lead Ceballos to replace the term 'new historical' with 'la novela transversalhistórica' (135).

Valter Sinder transports us to the realm of the Brazilian historical romance. Taking the theories of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha as a starting point, he finds that the Brazilian nation was traditionally narrated or constructed through the figures of the 'Indian' and tropical nature. Contemporary Brazilian novelists challenge this and are prepared to explore the plurality of Brazilian identity. Flávio R. Kothe supports this argument, claiming that the Brazilian literary canon has been restricted to the interests of the ruling oligarchy. He calls for a re-evaluation of the canon to reflect the hybridity of Brazilian society and reject any notion of a unifying national identity.

Rita Gnutzmann's essay is particularly engaging for its thorough discussion of the contemporary historical novel, La fragata de las máscaras (1996) by Tomás de Mattos. La fragata revisits Herman Mellville's Benito Cereno (1856), which was based on a true story of a slave ship rebellion off the Americas in 1799. In de Mattos's version, a female narrator and a polyphony of slave voices tell the tale, replacing the lone male North American, Captain Delano, from the original. Gnutzmann perceives this literary rewriting of history as evidence of the text's postmodern credentials.

Claudia Gatzemeier examines postmodern Latin...