New CONTEXT

As noted by many blogs last week, there’s a new CONTEXT online. Of interest (among other things) is an interview with Eloy Urroz and an excerpt from Urroz’s newly translated novel (forthcoming from Dalkey in July).

Here Urroz is talking about the future of Latin American literature.

I grew up reading—when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—those big, sprawling, nineteenth-century novels, novels by people like Thackeray, Dickens, Galdós, Balzac, Stendhal, Sue, Hugo, Verga, Clarín, and Pardo Bazán. But, from that point on—once I turned nineteen or twenty—I started reading Latin American literature. First the Boom writers like Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Fuentes, Donoso, and Cabrera Infante, then the pre-Boom writers like Borges, Carpentier, Arguedas, and Onetti. Finally, after that, Elizondo, Pitol, and Arredondo of the so-called Generación de Medio Siglo.

After the 1960s, though—after the Boom—it seemed like there were no books coming out that had the same level of quality and ambition, no novels that were difficult and complex and challenging and profound. Having read everything by Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and Donoso, I wanted more. The stuff being published was very light, very easy. For the most part, writers no longer challenged the reader—though there were, of course, some exceptions: Bryce Echenique, Muñoz Molina, and Bolaños.

We, the Crack writers, were into the literature of the 50s and the 60s, a literature that was itself very influenced by Mann, Kafka, Nabokov, Faulkner, Yourcenar, Moravia, and, above all, the British Modernism of Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Forster. And we revered the Boom. To us, many of those books are milestones of literature. We wanted to pursue that line, that tradition. We saw that if there were ever going to be more books in that tradition of Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Borges, we would have to write them ourselves.