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

In this book, Victoria Saramago reconsiders canonical novels and authors of twentieth-century Latin American literature through the paradigm of environmental studies. In fact, she asks not only how five representative and iconic authors (João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa) have represented specific natural environments, but also delves deeply into the parallel or subsequent environmental, social, and economic histories of the respective geographic regions. While the works she discusses mostly predate contemporary conservationist and ecological agendas, Saramago argues that such agendas do indeed feed on the conservationist function that literary fiction exercises with regard to the broader cultural imagination and that it has "interacted with environmentalist transformations over the decades" (5). The time period marked by the works considered, roughly from the 1940s to the 1960s, is generally distinguished by deforestation processes and a specifically Latin American idea of developmentalism. As Saramago shows, her writers partake to varying degrees in these developmentalist discourses, even as they contribute to the sometimes nostalgically inflected conservation of natural landscapes. Despite the affinity of their novels with (late) modernism aesthetics, Saramago, by including questions of reception history, argues for the novels' realist or mimetic potential, insofar as "they reveal details about remote areas that the general public cannot visit in person" (10) and because "referential reality may remain a spectral presence throughout a work's reception history" (11). In other words, the consideration of novelistic and real environments (and their loss) reveals an intertwined, mutually affecting relationship.

The first section deals with the relation between conservation fiction and policies. Thus, the first chapter studies how Guimarães Rosa's Brazilian masterwork Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956) and its representation of the sertão backlands in the region of Minas Gerais intersects with real-world initiatives during the past decades, such as, most significantly, the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park. Saramago, elaborating on the "malleability" (37) of the very term sertão, first lays out how Guimarães Rosa's metaphysical concerns and his "careful study of the area's history and geography" (36) mark his novel. Subsequently, she explores how the process of deforestation in this savanna landscape (cerrado), in conjunction with the at once regional and universal images transmitted by Guimarães Rosa's novel, has fostered a certain "pastoralist nostalgia for an uncorrupted world" (43), which in turn has "effectively foster[ed] social and environmental change" (46). Thereby, Saramago intriguingly moves between an analysis of the novel's own adumbrations of environmental change (an awareness of the impending "end of the sertão as a microcosm resistant to modernization" [51]) and a discussion of the implications of the establishment of the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park in 1989. With many insights into the complexities and ironies of this process, Saramago argues that the "deaestheticization of Guimarães Rosa's work . . . result[s] in the reaestheticization of today's sertão" (58).

The next chapter explores similar issues regarding the relation between the economic and environmental significance of the Great Savannah in Venezuelan Guiana and Carpentier's novel Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953). Here, Saramago shows that the different temporalities staged by the novel's narrative, in line with the Cuban author's famous concept of the real maravilloso, nevertheless posit and conserve the world of the Amazonian jungle as "an immutable reality akin to that of Genesis" (63). Saramago also shows that Carpentier's journalistic pieces and essays on the Venezuelan Amazon are roughly contemporary with Swiss naturalist Henri Pittier's early conservation initiatives and respond to the oil-driven idea of economic progress in Venezuela. Saramago carefully develops how Carpentier's nonfiction, marked by an awareness of global threats, complements and questions his novels' depiction of the forest as an autonomous realm. The chapter moves between an analysis of how the novel's "static" (71) and poetic representation of the jungle is a corollary of...