Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel (review)

The Latin American literary Boom holds such sway over critics and readers alike that, in its wake, many of both have been left scrambling to invent categories “in which we try to trap the amazing diversity of human textual endeavors” (González 144). Aníbal González sets out to provide a canonizing poetics for what he calls “the new sentimental novel,” a literary mode that has no history, in his admirable study Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel. His success turns on one’s definition of literature.

A poetics is the stamp of legitimacy and history that spells success for a literary tradition. A case in point is Latin American literature as a whole. The commercial and critical successes of the Boom put Latin American literature, whose legitimacy and authenticity had been in question in the main, on the world map. González realizes that, although these “total novels” did not have an Aristotle or a de Rougemont behind them, they did have a Borges with the New Yorker and a Balcells in Barcelona. He realizes that for a literary mode to be accepted within the canon, it must have the imprimatur of the establishment of critics, and this is precisely what he intends to do for some contemporary works and writers who, by his own suggestion, are usually on the “outskirts” (2) and “hold an ambiguous place in the canon” (40).

This is why the main intertext in González’s work is Denis de Rougemont’s L’amour et l’Occident, originally published in 1939 (Love in the Western World is the 1956 English translation). This classic study centers on the medieval Romance of Tristan and Isolde, languishes on medieval Provençal courtly love, and ultimately provides a “typology of amorous experience which has led to the formulation of two opposing concepts of love in the Western tradition”: eros and agape (13). Today’s readers of Latin American literature might balk at first at seeing a preoccupation with such chronologically distant and seemingly far-afield literary criticism, especially in light of the prosaic short shrift (relegated to footnotes) González usually gives here to more contemporary and apposite studies (feminist criticism, for example), and of the contemporary body of theory and criticism that has shifted, if not broken altogether, the polarized paradigm of eros–agape (queer theory, to name one approach). After all, one of González’s goals is to enfranchise, if not ensconce, this new modality he identifies within a modern literary history. However, what de Rougemont’s study does for the sentimental novel is what Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia did for the European vernacular literatures: it provides credible antecedents and ancestors, even if the model seems forced at times and does not always align well with more contemporary paradigms.

González introduces Miguel Barnet’s Canción de Rachel and Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego as origins of the new Spanish American sentimental narrative. Chapter one is devoted to Isabel Allende’s rupture with testimonio in De amor y de sombra. In chapter two, González focuses on Alfredo Bryce Echenique as the founding figure of the new sentimental narrative. Chapter three looks at the effects of both testimonial and sentimental narratives on celebrated Boom writers, such as García Márquez. While chapter four studies how Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate, Luis Sepúlveda’s Un viejo que leía novelas de amor, and Marcela Serrano’s Nosotras que nos queremos tanto keep the mass media and the discourse of passion at arm’s length, chapter five’s focus on Antonio Skármeta’s Love–Fifteen and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos is more accepting of these discourses.

Sentimentalism itself has often been derided by modern literary critics, but González argues that it has a deeper motivation: “the turn to love . . . in the Spanish American narrative from the 1980’s on [has...