BOOKS
459
THE NEW LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL
CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL.
By Mario Vargas Llosa.
Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Harper
&
Row . $12 .50 .
COBRA . By Severo Sarduy . Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. E.P.
Dutton . $8 .95.
The boom in Latin American fiction, at least as it reaches us, is
thunder resounding after lightning that struck several countries at once . Our
distance from the source distorts our relation to the cause and just as we start
listening to what we have been hearing, someone like Victoria Ocampo asks,
" The boom? Well, it's over, isn ' t it?" while Suzanne Jill Levine, in the
preface to her latest translation says,
"Cobra
represents, in many ways , the
culmination of the New Latin American Novel. Perhaps, to suggest an even
more apocalyptical vision, it represents a turning point in the course of the
novel form ." Instant apocalypses-not to speak of those that are "turning
points" -aggravate our literature-lag ; they stun and confuse us , especially
when what we 're after is some sense of genesis.
Whatever else may be said about the origins of the New Latin American
Novel, one thing is certain : the phenomenon took decisive impetus from
Borges's
Universal History olIn/amy,
which he published as a book in 1935.
It
is found not so much in the actual pages of that skinny collection as in the
writer 's attitude implicit in them and explicit in his prefaces where he first
calls his work "exercises in prose narrative" and then refers to it as "the
irresponsible game of a timid man who didn't dare to write stories and who
amuses himself in falsifying and distorting (sometimes without esthetic justi–
fication) the stories of other people ." •'Exercises" and" irresponsible game"
are the signal words here : the writer considers himself in relation to his writing
and his writing in relation to other writings, rather than considering his work's
relation to its possible referents in the nonliterary world . In other words,
language, style, and form are the focus , and that notorious " anthropological
interest" of Latin American literature is discarded or subordinated.
I'm not suggesting that subsequent works that are a part of the boom have
all made an identical subordination. Certainly not. But I am saying that they
have consistently proceeded from a similar attitude, measuring achievement
not by the extent to which the work is
engage,
but to the degree that it is
ecriture.
Beyond that , I'm suggesting that those boom works which have'least
claimed our attention are precisely those in which the degree of social, politi–
cal , or cultural commitment is the highest or most obvious.
