McCrack: McOndo, El Crack Y Los Destinos De La Literatura Latinoamericana ed. by Brescia Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada (review)

The sixteen essays of this anthology, plus one interview, are divided into four parts to analyze the short stories compiled by Chileans Sergio Gómez and Alberto Fuguet in 1994, and the Mexican "Crack" group. McOndo became one of the major anthologies that emerged after the Latin American Boom. The editors, Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada, use "McCrack" to include the members of the Crack in Mexico formed by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the late Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel Palou, Jorge Volpi, and Eloy Urroz who stormed the literary scene with a manifesto. Mcondistas wanted to escape the long shadow of the Boom writers and, as they wrote in their introduction, address their dilemmas that were between Windows 95 or Macintosh rather than the pen or the rifle. Crack writers reacted to the fatigue brought on by the so much attention paid to "magical realism" that had turned into "magiquismo trágico" as Ignacio Padilla described it.

The first section offers the views of writers in regards to these movements. Edmundo Paz Soldán reflects twenty years after the McOndo anthology launched conveniently in a McDonald's restaurant in Santiago. For him the anthology was trying to combat a stereotype of Latin American fiction while imposing another based on urban settings and the omnipresence of media and MTV in those years. He says "La utopía estaba en el prólogo, no en los cuentos" (24). Paz-Soldán also mentions how the anthology Se habla español came about, with 36 writers included and involving Latino authors such as Junot Díaz, Ernesto Quiñonez and Silvana Paternostro.

In his essay, Pedro Angel Palou, a member himself of the Crack, mentions the initial disregard by critics. One of them said, for example, that because the novels were published as a package, he would not review them. Salvador Elizondo, when asked about the movement, responded: "No creo que esos muchachos fumen Crack, se ven muy fresas." Guillermo Fadanelli remarks: "más bien será el grupo del frac." He attests that the movement was an opening to a "renovado cosmopolitismo" (30), and that they were not looking to destroy the Boom but to continue it.

In Naief Yehya's article he references the magazine Moho, that appeared in a moment when all literary expressions that seemed new were considered part of "La Onda," a literary movement that in the eighties had passed its prime. With Guillermo Fadanelli's collaboration they wanted to move away from the "literature that they were condemned to read" (47). Yehya moved to New York in the 90s and kept in touch with Mexico collaborating on the newspaper La Jornada, via internet. Technology and culture had been one of his areas of expertise, and his many articles relating to this topic are illuminating. He shares an anecdote: that the news articles he would send to the newspaper by email were followed by a request to send them again by fax, not because they did not receive the email, but because they did not know how to open the attachments in the early internet era. In Cristina Rivera Garza's article, she talks about the concept of chi-ixi or in between entities, and the rise of Creative Writing programs in Spanish in the US; she says "el español cruza una de las fronteras más dramáticas y poderosas de nuestro mundo globalizado sobre los hombros y en las bocas de los migrantes indocumentados" (53).

The second part of the book deals with a cartography of movements. Eduardo Becerra's essay draws a map of novels based on themes and not on group designations or by decades; he mentions that for Jorge Volpi, "Bolaño construyó el último discurso épico del continente y de su historia" (63). Jorge Fornet refers to new writers and the emphasis placed on their young age...