Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago (review)

Can literature literally shape the landscape? In Fictional Environments, Victoria Saramago explores this question and others in a thoroughly researched and elegantly written examination of canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American novels. The impressive breadth of this book, which analyzes João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Clarice Lispector's A cidade sitiada, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Amazonian fiction, is matched by the depth of its engagement with ecocritical theory and the extensive critical bibliographies on each of these well-studied authors. Saramago argues that the fictional texts in her corpus do not merely reflect each author's vision of the physical biome, but rather that they serve as "sites for the production of knowledge about, imaginations of, and interventions in Latin American environments" (5). In doing so, she stakes a significant claim for the ongoing importance of studying canonical novels through innovative theoretical and methodological lenses. Most importantly, by showing how literature informs ecological perceptions, Fictional Environments points out the agency, and therefore the urgency, of literary works on our rapidly changing planet. A major contribution to Latin American literary studies, this book is also essential reading for scholars of the broader field of environmental humanities interested in how literature configures physical spaces and collective imaginations.

Fictional Environments proposes that these iconic novels published from the 1940s to the 1960s sparked ecological imaginaries, inspired the creation of conservation areas, and contributed to environmental policies even before the advent of organized environmentalist movements in Latin America. Deforestation, a hallmark of the ecological history of the South American continent that accelerated rapidly in the period she studies, forms the backdrop against which varying forms of extractivism, agricultural industrialization, and urbanization play out. The complex, mimetic relationship between the physical landscape and the fictional realm during times of ecological change lies at the heart of Fictional Environments. Saramago offers sure-footed explanations of the shifting role of mimesis in literary studies, including Auerbach's classic text and Timothy Morton's concept of ecomimesis. The author makes her own original contribution to this field in coining the term "reverse mimesis" to indicate how physical environments have been shaped to more closely resemble literary texts in national parks and conservation areas. At the same time, Saramago shows, referential reality becomes a painfully spectral presence in literary works as deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization make the contemporary landscape diverge sharply from its earlier fictional representations.

Rather than organizing her study according to language, geography, or temporality, Saramago divides the book into three sections: "Conservation," "Development," and "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction." In each section, Saramago offers a bird's-eye view of the literary texts' reception history and socioecological context, and occasionally swoops down to perform close readings of key ecological entanglements in the works themselves. Special credit is due to the editors of the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press for retaining the original Spanish and Portuguese quotations in addition to English-language translations, which deepens the richness of Saramago's analysis.

"Conservation" consists of two chapters examining how Grande sertão: Veredas and Los pasos perdidos distill environments in fiction and simultaneously shape preservation efforts. For example, the famous sertão is now the site of extensive soy, corn, rice, and eucalyptus monoculture plantations, and the larger savannah biome known as the cerrado is predicted to disappear entirely by 2030. Saramago's argument for reverse mimesis is strongest in this first chapter, which shows how the Guimarães Rosa Tourist Circuit, the Manuelzão Project, and the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park each attempt to make their protected area imitate the sertão of the novel. This remarkable intervention "challenges the very notion of literary representation as a one-way process" (33). Los pasos perdidos, Saramago proposes, is one of several works (including Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Richard Schomburgk's Travels in...