Narrativas del crimen en América Latina. Transformaciones y transculturaciones del policial ed. by Brigitte Adriaensen and Valeria Grinberg Pla (review)

This volume covers a wide range of the crime narratives that have emerged over the last few decades in Latin America. It is a timely volume: as many of the contributors point out, the various genres that center on crime have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Our culture is obsessed with violent crime, writes Albrecht Buschmann in his chapter, in which he ultimately concludes that this obsession reflects a sort of disavowal. We accept the taboo on violence, he says, only in as much as we can ignore it. Rationality, exemplified by the figure of the detective, does not lie at the origin of culture. Rather, the transgression of detached reason is the rule itself (77, 87). Variations on this theme recur throughout the sixteen articles that make up this volume. Brigitte Adriaensen, for example, reads certain representations of violence that destabilize the geopolitics underlying this dichotomy. If violence lies at the heart of western civilization, then it is not to be understood at all as a particularity of contemporary Latin America (163).

This geopolitical reading goes hand in hand with another theme common throughout the volume: the transformations of crime fiction by Latin American writers, a function of the unstable origins of the genre itself. In returning to one of crime fiction’s foundational texts, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Ana Luengo finds there a principle of generic mobility and translation. This principle is manifested in two ways: first, in the transition from the genre of the short story to that of the crime novel, passing through comics and cinema along the way; and second, in the incipient transnationalism represented by Poe’s story—written in English by an American but set in Paris (141). Just as violence traverses the putatively rational basis of society, the foundational moment of crime fiction betrays its own instability. And whether or not we accept Luengo’s principle that hybridity is inherent in crime fiction, we can certainly appreciate the multiplicity of possibilities opened up by the genre’s mutability (142).

A number of contributors center on this mutability. They emphasize the ways that contemporary crime writers have cannibalized earlier forms from both within Latin America and beyond. Many of the chapters illuminate the relationship between contemporary crime fiction and its hardboiled and noir antecedents. Others center more on the cross-cultural dynamic of appropriation. In this respect, Valeria Grinberg Pla’s reading of Jô Soares’s O Xangô de Baker Street (1995), which parodies the classic detective Sherlock Holmes, is exemplary. She concludes that the ironic undermining of his authority gives us reason to “fear” the critical energies of contemporary crime fiction in Latin America (56).

The common focus on parody, appropriation, and transculturation places this volume within a well-established critical tradition in Latin American cultural studies. Close readings of contemporary novels form the foundation for understanding these strategies throughout this collection. However, one might wonder what lies beyond these forms of critique. Are there modes of understanding and representing crime and violence that exceed the impulse to couch them within a critique of reason and the idea of the origin?

One text in the volume hints at an answer to this question, though perhaps inadvertently. Toward the end of his chapter on the eroticization of the female corpse in the noir tradition, Glen Close mentions a writer and an artist who present alternatives to this common trope. The first is Roberto Bolaño, whose 2666 would have the merit of recalling “la mecánica del police procedural sin conceder nunca el consuelo justiciero que promete ese subgénero” (104). This is to say that Bolaño’s litany of coldly described femicide cases does not allow us the satisfaction of symbolic, literary justice. The other alternative is the work of artist Teresa Margolles, whose numerous morgue-centered interventions reveal “una compasión...