The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel. Bolaño and After ed. by Corral, Will H., Juan E. de Castro, Nicholas Birns (review)

With a few notable exceptions, current-day Spanish American novelists have not received anywhere near the attention that has been given to their illustrious, canonized predecessors. This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by offering a comprehensive introduction to the writing of sixty contemporary novelists from all regions of the Spanish-speaking Americas.

The book divides Spanish America into six compartments: Mexico, Central America, Hispanophone Caribbean, Greater Andean Region, Southern Cone, United States Latino Novelists. The space given to each region is generally proportional, if not to the number of novelists from that area, to their prominence. Thus, the section on Mexico contains about three times as many entries as that for Central America. Nearly all of the novelists in the volume were born in the thirty-year span between 1950 and 1980. The principal trends and movements are well-represented, among them the McOndo group, the Mexican “crack” generation, metafictionalists of various stripes, and realists dirty rather than magical.

A short review of a book like this one, which contains substantial essays on sixty writers by four dozen scholars, can address its contents only fragmentarily. Reading through the essays, I was struck by the welcome uniformity in language and format. Much more detailed than an encyclopedia entry, each combines biographical information with an overview of the novelist’s career and a critical assessment. The insightful General Introduction by Corral and the introductions to the six sections (by Corral or one of the other editors) supply the historical and literary contexts. As with all collective volumes, some of the essays are stronger than others, and of course one can always argue about the omissions. It is odd, for example, that the section on Latino novelists leaves out Óscar Hijuelos and Julia Álvarez. It would also have been useful if the discussion of the individual authors had been accompanied by a concise primary and secondary bibliography instead of a “Works Cited” à la MLA. And a list of novels available in English would have been appropriate in a book that intends to reach a non-specialist audience.

But these are quibbles. This versatile volume, obviously the result of years of preparation, has two great merits: not only does it serve as a thoughtful and thorough summary of the achievement of two generations of Spanish American novelists; it also introduces the reader to writers that she or he may have never read, and in more than a few instances, never heard of (I am speaking for myself, of course). In this respect, the book is an excellent guide for further reading in recent Spanish American fiction.

The distinguished Peruvian critic Luis Alberto Sánchez once published a study of the continent’s fiction provocatively entitled, América, novela sin novelistas. As this volume convincingly attests, contemporary Spanish America does not lack novelists to render its extraordinarily rich and complicated reality. The question today is how much longer will these novelists – and the books about them – have readers.