New Latin American Boom

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Latin America is back with a boom

By Boyd Tonkin

During our hard-fought but well-mannered judging sessions for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, we spend too much time inspecting individual trees ever to spot the shape of the emerging wood. So I left the meeting at which we hammered out the long-list for this year's £10,000 prize happy merely that the judges – Harriett Gilbert, MJ Hyland, Catriona Kelly, Neel Mukherjee and myself – had picked 15 titles that between them represent the best, and broadest, sample of new fiction in translation that one could could hope to set before a British readership.

As indeed they do. It was only later that I spotted one big story behind the selection. Whatever comes to pass in the final stages of this prize, our sifting from the whole field of translated fiction by living writers published in the UK during 2010 does ratify one global trend. The Latin Americans have roared back. A new generation of novelists – the grandchildren, if you like, of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and the patriarchs of the 1960s "boom" – is restoring the continent to its vanguard role in international fiction. Four of our 15 titles come from Latin American Spanish. But these books don't belong to any school or conform to any type.

From Colombia, Juan Gabriel Vásquez recruits the ghost of Jopeph Conrad into a sly and gripping counter-narrative of revolution and conspiracy (The Secret History of Costaguana). From Venezuela, Alberto Berrera Tysza distils an eerie fable of identity from a hypochondriac's psycho-drama and a looming family crisis (The Sickness). From Peru, Santiago Roncagliolo revisits the trauma of recent history in a sophisticated, page-turning political thriller (Red April). And from Argentina, Marcelo Figueras tells – with insight and inwardness – the story of another grisly era through the wide eyes of a child (Kamchatka).....

Thank you for sharing this. I searched the prize name and found the whole list at:
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Prizes-and-awards/Independent-Foreign-Fiction-Prize
I'll be looking for those Latin American writers, in fact I immediately grabbed the Granta #113 to see if any of these writers had a piece in it. Yes, Santiago Roncagliolo has a short story. No others but I'll be looking for them elsewhere.

2: The University of Rochester's Three Percent blog recently had a series of interviews (including exerpts of their works) with the twenty-two young Spanish-language writers chosen by Granta. The list of writers can be found here:

Best Young Spanish Novelists

Unfortunately, the list doesn't link to the specific interviews, but you can search a specific writer's name on the blog and find the corresponding interview.

I don't read a lot of contemporary literature, so I'm glad to have a resource like this. I generally frequent books that have marinated for a generation or two. But I feel bad about this and am trying to get more up with the times. I'm reading Pedro Lemebel's Tengo miedo torero right now and it's really good. It was translated to English as My Tender Matador.

I also notice that this Three Percent blog is reppin' a new translation of Wytold Gombrowicz's Pornografia. I'm tempted to buy it, considering that, except for the fact that he's Polish, Gombrowicz is one of the more important Argentine writers of the 20th century. The translator, Danuta Borchardt, also translated Ferdydurke, and I enjoyed recently comparing her translation to the O.G. Spanish version translated by Gombrowicz himself (with the help of Virgilio Piñera and a group of other friends) in Buenos Aires back in the 40s. I ended up concluding that the English translation was excellent, considering that I enjoyed it every bit as much as the Spanish version.