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

In Search of the Sacred Book is a significant contribution to the fields of Latin American literature, religious studies, and the dialogue between the two by one of the most important Latin American literary critics. This work takes the question of religion seriously; it is an essential part of life in Latin America that has largely been ignored by critics in the fields of literary and cultural studies. The historical connection between religion and education, which gave way to religion and nationalism, is the background for the work. Indeed, In Search of the Sacred Book’s central claim is that “religion and nationalism come together in a series of key works of the Latin American novel in which the nation becomes the transcendent ‘secular sacred’ of which the novel becomes the holy vessel, its sacred scripture” (27). In some ways, González’s work reads the ciudad letrada as a spiritual space.

The introduction establishes that this monograph will discuss notions of the sacred and the novel. He surveys Western literature, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, to establish a history of literary works that deal with religious topics. He also engages with theological approaches to sacred books (such as the Torah and Quran), and illustrates the similarities between the two genres. González then moves to Latin America, contextualizing the argument for novels as nationalist documents—and highlighting the ways that several of these works engage with religious or spiritual topics, in spite of the fact that the liberal independence movements of the nineteenth century were highly critical of the Catholic Church. In Search of the Sacred Book focuses on narratives that appropriate “ideas and motifs associated with religion and theology in an attempt to link them organically in theory and practice to the discourse of the novel, and, in turn, to the discourse about the nation” (27). It examines several important genres of the novel and reinterprets canonical texts by writers such as Federico Gamboa, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel García Márquez. In this process, González demonstrates that the novel is a way to interpret the sacred and serve the nation.

Each chapter connects a genre and time period to the overall argument. The first examines naturalist novels from the turn of the twentieth century by Federico Gamboa and Manuel Zeno Gandía. He argues that these novels—usually thought of as being influenced by scientific discourse—present religious elements, such as prophetic rhetoric or other religious elements, as a spiritual survival guide to navigate massive social changes of the time period. The subsequent chapter focuses entirely on the work of Borges as a theologian and compares his fictional work to his other writing with religious or philosophical commentary. This chapter, as well as chapter three, give tantalizing glimpses into the relationship between twentieth-century Latin American fiction and the European and Latin American literary traditions since the sixteenth century. A greater emphasis on this in the introduction argument would have strengthened González’s claims.

The subsequent chapter, in addition to contextualizing the work of writers Rulfo, María Luisa Bombal and Alejo Carpentier, demonstrates the way that González examines works from each region of Latin America, effectively supporting his claim that his analysis is about the connection between novels and nationalism throughout the region. This chapter contends that the novels were an attempt to imagine a second creation, where “a new novel and a new nation . . . will rise from the ruins and relics of a prior and vanished order” (118).

The Boom novels, which González examines in chapter four, deal with some of this effort to imagine a new nation. It builds on the established understanding that these novels’ form reflects changes of the 1960s and 1970s. González builds on this existing idea to return to his argument, showing how their form—such as their fragmentation—in fact, mimics sacred works. In...