Killer Books. Writing Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 293 Con Agatha en Estambul (1994) open the narrative space through an intertexual assimilation of detectivesque fiction. By combining the investigative act with the interpretative act, FernándezCubas collapses the epistemological with the ontological to reveal the blurred boundaries between representation and reality where the author's characters may obtain, states Folkart, "free reign to discover agency in changing subjectivity" (184). In her last chapter, "Plotting Desire: The Visual Construction of the Subject in El ángulo del horror" Folkart extrapolates Bahktin's idea of "chronotope" to analyze how it contributes to "delineate a subject's space and structure a subject's time" (214). In the subject's pursuit of a singular identity stabilized by the supposed static nature of a binary opposition, Fernández-Cubas's stories ultimately upend difference. Any assumed stability is undermined by revealing alternate perspectives that expose other angles of perception that provoke contradictions in die subject's understanding of self and other. In her book Jessica Folkart engages Fernández -Cubas's fiction in a provocative way that rescues an often overlooked author and genre from the margins of post-Franco Spain's literary landscape . Both the text's organization as well as its clear prose communicate complex theoretical issues coherently and effectively while introducing the reader to the essential works of Cristina Fernández-Cubas. William J. Nichols Texas A&M International University Killer Books. Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative University of Texas Press, 2001 By AnÃ-bal González Written against the grain of current sociocritical trends in Latin American letters, AnÃ-bal Gonzalez's Killer Books is a plea for a return to the "complexity and reflexivity" of texts written within a canonical literary tradition under attack in the last two decades. Positioning itself between deconstruction and ethical theory, this book provides much-needed reflection about the ambiguities of narratological knowledge and the subtlety of point of view in works that many postcolonial and cultural critics have dismissed as "co-opted by the powers that control society"(l4l). Through painstaking analysis and an impressive display of erudition, Gonzalez demonstrates the conflicted and ambivalent nature of the narrators and authors in the texts he studies, thereby revealing the implausibility of readings diat condemn these same texts, or their authors, for their solipsism or unconscious complicity with hegemonic discourses. At the deconstructive heart (or black hole) of all the narratives he examines, this critic finds pronounced evidence of what he calls graphophobia, a term he uses to signify "not so much [to] a fear of writing [...] but [to] an attitude towards the written word diat mixes respect, caution and dread with revulsion and contempt" (3). Since the narratives chosen are in many ways representative of major modern literary movements in Latin America (modernismo, naturalismo, postmodernismo, the vanguardia and the Boom), it stands to reason that the erhical dilemmas González examines, both on deconstructive and moral grounds, are not idiosyncratic to these particular authors, but instead are widely representative of traditions implicated in the particular analyses. As the author explains in his introduction, his approach ro the representation of violence in the works he examines is not thematic. Neither is it a study of the ethical dimension of particular narrative fictions (as purveyors of virtues to be practiced, for example). Although thematic violence does indeed make frequent appearances in Gonzalez's analyses of individual texts, and important considerations regarding the morality of writing fictions partially dependent on their representation of violent acts are raised throughout this book, the critic's project is both more reticent and more strictly analytical. What this book does, and does very successfully, is to examine the ethical implications behind the epistemological and rhetorical procedures that bind authors to their characters, to their readers, and to the fictive world that traps all these subjectivities into tangled and often-violent webs. 294 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The fruitfulness of Gonzalez's method is most persuasively exemplified in his final three chapters—on Borges, Carpentier and Cortázar. All three chapters are a tour de force of careful analyses and brilliant deconstructive maneuvers. In his analysis of Borges's "The Garden of...