In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel by Aníbal González (review)

The study of the intersections between religion and literature is a field that has captivated the attention of many scholars. Whether it is represented under the veil of the supernatural or framed in a novel under the mantle of madness, there is an undeniable and fascinating connection between the sacred and the human experience. To study such a link, scholars have taken up the task of theorizing about the possibilities literature brings to this cultural element and vice-versa. Aníbal González's In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel fits into this discussion by tracing some of the major developments in the portrayal of religion in the Latin-American novel since the XIX Century. González examines how religion gives the novel a greater aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual transcendence while suggesting that novelists have been involved in a process of sacralization of their creation since that time. In other words, they attempted to turn their narratives into transcendental historical accounts or works of art by creating a text that synthesized the two models.

González's book is divided into six chapters, including an introduction titled "A Literary Trinity: The Novel, the Sacred, and the Nation" which provides a theoretical framework to analyze religion in literature after reviewing the historical link between novels and Scripture. He determines that "the sacred" effects in novels are linked to the characteristics of power, authority, unicity, inspiration, and eternity or antiquity contained in each work. He also shows that each condition is present in the tradition of the Latin American novel beginning with Naturalist novels studied in chapter 1, "Prophetic Discourse in the Naturalist Novel: Federico Gamboa and Manuel Zeno Gandía." This section focuses on conceptualizing prophetic discourse and argues that Gamboa and Gandía explore the possibility of transforming the novel into an object of veneration by using the rhetoric of prophecy in their creations. Gamboa's Santa (1903) and Gandía's Redentores (1925) provide examples of personal quests that bring into light extraordinary insights of the society that each work represents. Santa shows the journey of a girl who falls into prostitution in Mexico City and is saved through the love of a blind musician. Redentores portrays a broader picture of Puerto Rico as it features a sequence of interwoven plots of the social political reality of the island following the 1898 invasion.

Chapter 2, "The Other Theologian: Jorge Luis Borges and 'The Death of the Novel,'" examines Borges's contributions as a critic to the ideas of high modernism about literature and transcendences. He considers that the Argentinian writer began to use concepts linked to the study of religions from the perspective of anthropological and historical studies to create short stories that contained the ideological foundation of the Boom's total novels. "El Aleph" is specifically reviewed as an example due to the ironic appropriation of the concept of eternity which ties to González's third chapter, "Tales from Eternity: María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo." This middle section analyses the Borgesian ideas contained in Bombal's La amortajada (1938), Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949), and Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955). González argues that each writer applied Borges' concepts in their novels to endow them with traits associated with the holy. Building from the ideas of Émile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto, González also argues that the concepts of eternity, faith, darkness, emptiness, and silence are all observed in the novels and provide the literary seed that evolved into the Boom novels studied in the fourth chapter.

Chapter 4 is titled "In Search of the Sacred Book: Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima" and explores the prophetic nature of their novels as each writer sought to create a new national discourse in Latin...