50
PARTISAN REVIEW
Elegant where it should have been simply corny, sentimental where it
should have been uncompromising, Hernandez's novel only helps to re–
veal the virtues of its model.
La
perinola
(The Spinning Top, 1971), by
Mario Sexer, also uses the same narrative devices as Puig ro picture the
confined, oppressive atmosphere of an Argentine provincial city. But
although Sexer has a pretty robust adolescent sense of humor, he lacks the
power
to
bring about the other dimensions of that corny and frustrated
reality. His parodies are cold; they don't have that anguish that is always
present in the linguistic tissue of Puig's works.
With Puig's imitators we reach a truly epigonal stage of the new
novel. The case of these rwo writers is not unique. Cortazar had already
"liberated" more than one writer and had brought
to
life the very interest–
ing variations of Nestor Sanchez in
Nosotros dos
(Us Two, 1966),
Siberia
Blues
(1967),
EI amor, los orsinis
y
la muerte
(Love, the Orsinis, and Death,
1969). In these works not only Cortazar's linguistic teachings but also the
serial system of the new French novel and
nouvelle vague
movies were used
to achieve effects which almost tear apart the narrative itself. But Sanchez
seems
to
have entered, especially in his last book, a territory whose access
is even more difficult than that of Sarduy's books. In and out of Colombia,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
has unleashed a series of novels which harken
back to America's novelesque past-like German Espinosa's
Los cortejos del
diablo
(The Pageants of the Devil, 1970) - or which apply something of
the epic-mythical vision of Garcia Marquez's book to Latin America's raw
reality. Also tributaries of the great Colombian narrator are books like
Tomas Eloy Martinez's
Sargrado
(Holy, 1969), or like
Redoble por Rancas
(Drumroll for Rancas, 1970), by Manuel Scorza. If the first uses the
enormous repository of fables and superstitions of his native Tucuman
to
give, on several levels of reality, an epic vision of a famous Argentine
medicine man, the second takes advantage of the narrative freedom which
Garcia Marquez had made possible to tell another episode (also real) of the
fight for freedom in Perti. Of the many epigones of
One Hundred Years ,
perhaps one of the most interesting is
Pais port:'til
(Portable Country,
1968), by Adriano Gonzalez Leon who uses a similar point of view
to
reconstruct in part the origins of a recent Venezuelan reality, deeply
divided by guerrilla warfare. The urban world of the protagonist (narrated
mainly through an interior monologue) contrasts with the hallucinated
evocation of his rural origins . The extent to which Garcia Marquez has
introduced a new note in Hispano-American letters can
be
measured by
his influence on a mature and already established raconteur such as Miguel
Otero Silva, who in
Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro
(When I Want
to
Cry, I
Don't, 1971), finds his true vein as an oral narrator and frees himself from
