This is great. The thing with Lerner, whose writing I like, is that it doesn't seem like the gravitas of his work could ever approach someone like Sebald because Lerner is writing about the concerns of highly educated cultural elites whereas Sebald is grappling with the Holocaust and the fact that his father was a Nazi. I don't know how Lerner escapes this, except by recognizing it (the excerpt about his friend in Mexico getting "experience" is a good example). This conversation also makes me think of Richard Ford and especially The Sportswriter. Ford seems to also recognize the "experience" issue, but his solution in The Sportswriter is the opposite: he writes about the most boring, nondescript place possible (the New Jersey suburbs) and a guy with what he considers a meaningless job, writing puff pieces about athletes (after failing to be a novelist). He creates something really moving and one of the best descriptions of the USA I've ever seen.
Yeah, well put Derek. I agree there is something compelling about Lerner’s recognition of that gap. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about the novel, even though I find the Adam character irksome (as I said in my comment on your review).
I think culture of tertulias and just the general level of philological discourse is much much higher in Latin America. The average student of literature in Latin America is much wider and better read than their contemporary counterparts in the anglosphere. Latin Americans respect writers and literature as a vocation more than the anglosphere which is mostly driven by mercantalism.
Well put. I agree about the vocationalism 100%. For all its problems (and they are many), the Latin American literary field remains far more intellectually serious than the US one, in part because Latin Americans take their writers more seriously.
I’m curious how the specific example of Bolaño’s adoption compares to the earlier popularity of boom writers like García Márquez or Allende, or post boom writers like Puig or Lispector. As you note with Borges, the U.S. tends to have waves where publishers, authors, and critics “dicover” the literature of the rest of the Americas and talk about them a lot for a few years. What do you think is different about the Bolaño example from, for example, Lispector who was a few years earlier (I think, I confess my timeline of uptake of authors is not the strongest).
Good question. I think there has been a stronger push in the post-Bolaño period to create sustainable institutions for the distribution of Latin American literature in the United States than there was at the height of the Boom. There are now publishers in the Anglophone world that focus purely on Latin American literature (Charco, Sundial House, Cardboard House, etc), and a far more diverse offering among major and independent presses. The issue of visibility remains, but it’s a shift from the days when a single publisher (Knopf) was publishing the vast majority of Latin American works in translation.
I read one Puig, La traición de Rita Hayworth. It was very difficult, )if my memory is correct) it being peppered with Lunfardo. I've read the complete works (I think a '74 edition) of Borges, and he was very interested in a Gauchesco of course, but then at some point he decided to write in a rather traditional Castellano. I feel like he said as much in an essay. So coming from the POV of someone reading in Spanish, whose knowledge of Spanish is Mexican-American Spanish in Texas, and the stuff they teach in school, Puig is a whole different ball game.
Of course, I haven't read another Puig. So he might not always write in the mix of dialects that he does in Betrayal.
I had a Cuban professor who must have been trying to challenge me because he was always suggesting material with a lot of Italian in it.
I guess a part of me wants to mold this into some sort of argument for why Borges is popular, but really I just wanted to share.
Haha, Puig is certainly a challenging author, in large part because almost all (if not all) of his books are written as scripts where you never get the character name in front of the dialogue. His language also varies between books- I don’t find his “el beso de la mujer araña” as challenging to read as “la traicion” in part because that book is *relatively* standard Argentine Spanish. His uptake in English is also interesting, “el beso” is a major hit and spawns a successful movie and successful (if imo mediocre) stage musical, while “la traicion” (which I believe critics preferred at the time of release) is pretty much unknown in English circles. At a certain point though, Puig also starts writing his novels in English, which opens the door to things like “eternal curse on the readers of these pages” getting a widely available mass market edition.
Borges starts writing in a more standard style after “La historia universal de la infamia.” In the introduction he gives to later versions of that book, he refers to himself as seduced by the baroque as a youthful error. Personally, I don’t think it’s particularly baroque, but when you get to the famous stuff, I.e. ficciones, the style is very simplistic. Personally, I would attribute his u.s. success to that stylistic simplicity making for relatively easy translation, the strong influence of anglophone science fiction on Borges’s writing making him easy for anglophone audiences to pick up on, the seeing novelty of some of his ideas (I know this isn’t anglophone, but the French love the ideas in “Pierre Menard”), and the fact that he can be pretty easily slotted in with the postmodern fiction that was starting to become a major player in anglophone publishing. Who knows it could also have to do with the fact that the first translated book of Borges doesn’t exist in Spanish; “labyrinths” is a mash-up/greatest hits of “ficciones” and “el aleph” with some poetry and essays thrown in for extra spice.
If people from the U.S. are serious about learning the literary canon of the Spanish-speaking world, they'll have to jump over the language barrier. It's not impossible. After all, most famous Latin American writers were/are fluent in English. The reverse can also become true.
The article is very interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Cultural insularity gives rise to professional intellectuals, that is they know too much about their own world. Cross pollination is essential even if translations are not perfect.
Thanks for the excerpt. I'd seen notices for your book, and now I'll go get a copy. This essay raises a question for me about the extent to which the value of an author is independent of their original cultural context.
In my field, art history, if a scholar or critic notes the belated emergence or canonization of an artist who was previously unknown or marginalized, the moral might be that the sudden acceptance of the artist says more about the people who are finally "discovering" them than it does about the artist themselves. At the beginning of your piece I thought you were going to say that the recognition of Bolaño was a North American phenomenon, best understood by studying North Americans who read him, and that he might have different values elsewhere. So when you say "we are still far from recognizing just how 'epoch-making' a writer he was," it's surprising: isn't it possible that he seemed epoch-making from an early 21st-century North American perspective, and that his value and stature might be quite different in Mexico, Argentina, or elsewhere in the world? In other words: are you arguing he is important in general, and North American readers and critics have been discovering that? Or that he has become important for particular reasons in North America, which might be irrelevant or even incompatible with judgments about him in Latin America? Sorry if this is off-base as a question: ordinarily I'd read the book first! but this is, after all, Substack.
Great questions! Happy to answer them on here. In the intro to the book, I discuss the view that Bolaño was an American product, and why I ultimately don’t find it that persuasive. He won the Rómulo Gallegos for Savage Detectives in 1998, and was clearly recognized by Latin American writers and critics as the major author of his generation before he was widely translated into English. As for his continuing relevance in Latin America, I think it’s massive, and if anything underdiscussed. You can see his influence, among other places, in Chile (Alejandro Zambra’s extraordinary Chilean Poet is very Bolañian) and Mexico (in Cristina Rivera Garza’s work, for instance, or in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season). Ironically, some of the writers most influenced by Bolaño—like Horacio Castellanos Moya and Valeria Luiselli—did a lot to fuel the idea that Bolaño’s influence was due to his posthumous celebrity in the US. I suspect this was partly to create space for their own work. But it led imo to a distorted sense that Bolaño’s aesthetic was somehow extraneous to the Latin American tradition, which couldn’t be further from true. Of course, different traditions select different things from authors, but I’m less suspicious than other critics that what American readers see in Bolaño is vi merely a reflection of themselves
Really enjoyed this. I'm curious if, in the years since writing this, you've observed other US writers you feel are absorbing the influence of Latin American literature, and/or Bolaño specifically, in interesting ways. I actually can't think of that many (though I have a hard time keeping up with recent writing), but I do wonder if the rise of autofiction in the US in the last 15 years is partially attributable to Bolaño, not as much for the autobiographical gamesmanship he played but in the permission he gave writers to have main characters who are writers, and to legitimize literary careers and literature itself as worthy thematic material and even plots.
Yes, I do believe that US writers absorbed the Bolaño influence intensely! I think the strongest uptake was among the generation of writers I cite in this excerpt—and I would include Latino writers such as Junot Díaz (post-Drown), Daniel Alarcón, and Ana Menéndez in that group (I discuss them in another part of the epilogue to Anxieties of Experience). In different ways, these authors were all exploring different iterations of the very-literary-writer-as-protagonist, as you suggest. After that, it seems to me that the influence becomes more diffuse, and the politics of Bolaño envy becomes more complex. In part this is because there was a determined effort on the part of certain Latin American critics and writers—Valeria Luiselli is the first name that comes to mind—who tried to downplay what they took from Bolaño because of his extreme popularity in the US and his perceived gender politics. Thankfully, a lot of young writers are now discovering Bolaño and recognizing his extraordinary talent.
The next “installment” of the series will be on contemporary autofiction. I may say a bit about Bolaño, but it will be more about the prehistory of the genre in the US. I do share your sense though that he is a key figure in the contemporary development of the mode!
I look forward to reading the next installment, especially the pre-history part. I was specifically curious about anyone new publishing in the last five years, but like you say, it seems to get more diffuse. I'm hoping to write a post soon about why I think Bolaño is more relevant than ever before to US writing, but we'll see when/if I have time for that...
I'm in Madrid right now and planning to get the biography this weekend at the feria. Thanks for sharing the article! I'll check it out. Would be fun to have a convo about the bio at some point if you're interested. Seems like we have lots in common.
That's right! The feria del libro. Yes, I'm sure we do have a lot in common, although I haven't read much Bolaño—some short stories in English and half of Detectives Salvajes en castellano. Both impressed me. These days I'm reading Chaves Nogales, A sangre y fuego. Es otro peso pesado. He beat the estadounidenses to New Journalism! Amazing.
Interesting piece, but it’s ironic that a critique of Anglo-American ignorance toward Latin American literature ends up reducing Latin America to the Spanish-speaking countries and leaving Brazil out almost entirely. Brazilian and Hispanic American literatures have been in dialogue for decades (or centuries even) and that split itself distorts what “Latin American literature” actually is.
The point about the use of Latin America is fair. To me, this is partly a problem of nomenclature. In the intro to the book, I explain my decision to use Latin American rather than Spanish American lit, because it was the main designator in the Spanish-speaking Americas beginning in the late 19th century. But I’d probably use “Spanish American” if I were to write the book again today. I’d dispute the claim that Brazilian and Spanish American lit have been in dialogue for centuries. The widespread availability of translated Brazilian literature in the Spanish Americas is very recent. The Latin American Boom almost entirely excluded Brazilian authors, even in its own self-conception.There’s no “irony” in recognizing the relative separation between the Hispanophone and Lusophone literary fields. It’s a historical phenomenon.
This is not a problem of nomenclature alone, although it’s most noticeable in it. It’s a problem of interpretation of the world, identities and culture expression that’s still under colonial order.
The separation of Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries in latam is also a separation of colonial heritage that ignores how these cultures have interacted and produced meaning (and text) outside the scope of interest of the dominant cultures in the US and Europe.
The Argentinean Juana Manso for instance was the first woman to create a newspaper in Brazil in the 19th century (for a women’s audience). She also lived in the US and Cuba, writing and published about these cultures. These displacements, often due to political persecution, but also motivated by traveling, created an abundance of literary exchanges that are hardly studied in this more conventional analysis.
Borges was a reader of Machado de Assis, also a writer of the 19th c. Borges wrote and discussed the realism and innovative writing of Assis.
The modernist movement in Brazil in the 1920s, a precursor of later modernist expressions in other latam countries is considered to have influenced later expressions in their conception of producing within and to the local culture.
The Latin American boom after all is a movement that emerges from the outside, looking to define Latam’s literary production in ways that are at their service, not ours.
Luckily, culture (and history at large)
is much more than what academia is capable of apprehend, these few examples are just a fraction of what sits outside the foreign gaze, and will always exist whether we validate as true literary or not.
I'm a specialist in US and Latin American literature. I have a reading knowledge of Portuguese, have studied contemporary Brazilian literature, and I have thought deeply about the relationship of Brazilian and Spanish American literature. In the introduction to my book, I speak to exactly the problem you discuss here. My entire argument is based on the idea that we cannot erase historical divides across the linguistic boundaries of the Americas based on a kind of literary/scholarly wish fulfillment (i.e. the various parts of the Americas should exhibit solidarity, therefore they have in fact done so). Of course there are examples of Brazilian/Spanish American exchange over the past two centuries. My point is that that exchange was relatively limited until recently, and that it's a mistake to assume that because there is widespread cultural reciprocity today, this was also true historically. There are countless examples of US writers who took a deep interest in Spanish American literature (including myself)--would you therefore say that we should ignore the historical divides between US and Spanish American literature because a small minority of people have overcome them? It seems to me that what you're ultimately interested in telling me is that I possess a "foreign gaze," which is true. But if that's the purpose of your comment, let's just skip the pretense of historical/literary analysis (especially since your examples above sound suspiciously Wikipedia-like) and I'll grant you your essentialist point.
Of course you have a foreign gaze, and of course your comprehension what it’s actually like being a latam writer and our understanding of our culture is limited. If I thought you didn’t know this I wouldn’t have comment here, I’m not here to point fingers because that’s unfruitful and a waste of my time.
I made a point about what I thought you missed and I still think it’s valid. It’s problematic to exclude Brazil when discussing “Latin America literature” as with other culture expressions that to my view only impoverish our understanding, because, as I’ve pointed out, these expressions exist whether we perceived them as valid or not. That’s simply no way that we can know such thing as historical truth about how much influence these culture exchanges might have, we can discuss this all you want but the honest answer about history is that we have always had a partial and limited interpretation of it.
This is why I don’t think that the foreign gaze is necessarily a problem. But if you’re this keen about bringing authority to this comment, let me introduce mine. I’m a philosopher and a biographer of feminist history and philosophy in Brazil. I work with decolonial theory as framework to deconstruct our preconceptions about truth in history. The examples that I brought, apart from Borges that I know due to my love for his work, are from my research. I’m more than happy to discuss them at length, as I’m sure you know how happy researchers are to speak about their work, but I refrain because I don’t really think this is the place, but just to take the opportunity. Juana has an immense influence in the formation of feminism in Brazil, just like Nisia Floresta is essential for the feminist movement in latam at large. And this is an extrapolation, but I have my suspicions that first book published in Brazil by a woman, Ursula, wouldn’t be possible without these first spaces for women writers.
I think you and I speak from very different frameworks, and mine is very set of the idea of the coloniality of knowledge which continues to dictate how we organize our understanding of the world. This is not about you the foreign vs us the colonized. I can’t afford to be essentialist because that would be the end of possibility for change. But in this framework of mine, it’s relevant to investigate and situated our point of view, and be open to its limits. It seems to me that you however are not open to this sort of critique and is very annoyed by it. That’s fine too, o don’t wish to prolong this discussion, since at least in my view we can both be right, and more or less wrong too.
Thanks for that clarification. I have no problem recognizing that there are many cultural dialogues between Brazil and the Spanish Americas, or in recognizing your expertise in philosophy and feminist theory. But my point was about specifically literary interactions. You left a short comment based on a short excerpt from my book in which you implied that I didn’t understand the literary relationship between Brazil and the Spanish Americas. As you surely know, the use of Latin America as an identifier is hugely contested, as is the designator Spanish Americas (for the reasons decolonial scholars have specified). I very clearly explain in the intro why, for all its imperfections, I used Latin America as a descriptor for the Spanish Americas, and why I excluded Brazil from consideration in my book. If your first comment had been a question about my use of that the term, rather than an implicit accusation about an issue that was not directly addressed in the passage you read, I would have responded to you differently. I’m still struggling to understand what in my comments about contemporary US-Spanish American literary interactions in the passage implied a negation of Brazil’s role in hemispheric literature, beyond the point of nomenclature. I have no problem addressing decolonial critiques, though I do have a long section in chapter 1 of my book about why I find the decolonial deconstruction of geographic boundaries unsatisfying. I’m interested by the argument about the crosscultural connections in feminist history that you mention, and again, I’m not saying there is no dialguw at all. As for the notion that the Boom is an external construction, I’ve always felt that’s an essentialist argument. Fuentes, GGM, Cortázar Vargas Llosa, and Donoso were all talented authors from the Spanish-speaking Americas who had deep literary, intellectual, and personal connections. To assume that the boom is foreign because it was promoted in Spain and the US is to take agency away from those writers in helping construct a worldwide phenomenon. The fact that this was linguistically determined—ie all those writers wrote in Spanish—does not seem to me extraneous to the discussion of their work or to the broader question of how literary fields were constructed.
Lol, I hope this is a clumsy attempt at trolling on your part rather than a genuinely misogynistic comment. I talk about many Latin American women novelists in the book, and I’m on record as saying that Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season are my favorite contemporary Latin American novels.
Here we go again, American writers entertaining feelings of inferiority to another culture's literature. Same thing happened back in the twenties, and then the Americans came back to their own country and started writing books that would get them Nobel prizes. I myself think Bolano is very much oversold. I do believe that 2666 is totally epic, but THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES suffered from a shocking lack of craft and it made me long for the clean formalism of Jack Kerouac, y'know? I think we are going through a fallow period in Am lit, to be sure, but a country that has given the world DeLillo, Pynchon, Gaddis, McCarthy, Morrison, Wallace and, now, Vollmann, doesn't have to tug its forelock in a Southern direction. Giving up is not a strategy.
I mean, tell me a book that captures our moment better than CATCH-22. You can't.
Riiiiight, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, straight from the soil, learned nothing from Europe, just had to come back and breathe in that fresh American air.
I love all those writers you mention, and I’m not giving up on American literature. This is a diagnosis of a certain contemporary line. Also, I have never seen Kerouac referred to as a “clean formalist.” What do you mean by that?
That was sarcasm, obviously failed. And look, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa got a lot of their chops from Faulkner, so what comes around goes around.
Totally! In the book, I talk about American writers who don’t see their relationship to the Latin American tradition as a means of displaying their sense of inferiority (Morrison is imo one of them). It’s worth saying I have some affinity for Leaving the Atocha Station. In a lot of ways, I see it as a performance of ignorance, and it’s clever in how it stages the character’s bewilderment. But I’m also drawn to authors who take on the influence without irony, as GGM and MVL did with Faulkner
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the book Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe by Chris Andrews, one of Bolaño’s main translators and one of the 1st books if not the first to discuss Bolaño’s popularity in The US.
In the 1st chapter he shows how this “exceptional” writer became a lodestar in American publishing and literary circles:
“Why has the case of Bolaño proven to be exceptional? What caused and is causing the Bolaño anomaly? At least seven explanations can be proposed, which I will characterize very badly as follows, before considering each in turn:
Bolaño is an exceptional writer
Bolaño is an American writer
Bolaño is a translatable writer
Bolaño has given rise to a myth
Bolaño supplies a lack in North American fiction
Men like Bolaño’s books
Bolaño has been misread.”
This book is imperative if you want to understand the issues brought up in this post-essay.
As someone who’s been quietly involved—on the fringes—in American experimental literary circles as writer, editor, publisher & letterpress printer I can say that I’ve mostly ditched that so-called American scene in favor of literature from other countries and Bolaño had a lot to do w / it.
Books such as Beyond Parentheses and Antwerp continue to influence me to this day after first reading them years ago.
American lit and poetry is mainly processed in MFA programs now; it’s very middle class and lacks a certain daring, hostility or rage, & tenderness which one finds plentiful in Bolaño’s writing and stance.
Just for context, this is an excerpt from my 2018 book, which was itself based on a 2014 article that laid out my main thesis about US-Latin American literary relations
Lately, I have been noticing this Latin American influence in some of the texts I receive as submissions to journals I work for. I am genuinely curious about the new influence of Rulfo on the Anglo writers of NA. Rulfo keeps popping up more and more. Yet, I find this weird. Especially since Rulfo seems to be very localized both in time and place to Mexico and it's revolution. Moreover, I never have read good translations of his work in English. So, what gives? Where is this all coming from?
My understanding is that most of these Latin American writers in question were polyglot and seriously read Marx, so they had a substantial economic framework from which to view both their own societies and America's, whilst most American literary writers at best (most charitable reading) do a very convincing job of seeming theoretico-economically (scientifically) illiterate. There's also the matter of the absolute degradation of the Spanish language, in no small part the lifeblood of the (cynical?) careers of many Chicano and/or Latino writers. Case in point: Junot Díaz, whose articulateness in Spanish, of whatever national flavor, is easily superceded by a bright four year old native speaker's.
I agree with the assessment to a certain point, though I think it partially has to do with the different roles that writers tend to occupy in the US and Latin America (in Latin America, writers are public intellectuals in a way they aren’t in the US). And yes, I talk about Díaz’s relationship to Spanish in the book. Clearly there’s some compensation happening there, but I still feel that in the fiction itself nobody has surpassed his ability to incorporate Spanish words into the English language.
This is great. The thing with Lerner, whose writing I like, is that it doesn't seem like the gravitas of his work could ever approach someone like Sebald because Lerner is writing about the concerns of highly educated cultural elites whereas Sebald is grappling with the Holocaust and the fact that his father was a Nazi. I don't know how Lerner escapes this, except by recognizing it (the excerpt about his friend in Mexico getting "experience" is a good example). This conversation also makes me think of Richard Ford and especially The Sportswriter. Ford seems to also recognize the "experience" issue, but his solution in The Sportswriter is the opposite: he writes about the most boring, nondescript place possible (the New Jersey suburbs) and a guy with what he considers a meaningless job, writing puff pieces about athletes (after failing to be a novelist). He creates something really moving and one of the best descriptions of the USA I've ever seen.
Yeah, well put Derek. I agree there is something compelling about Lerner’s recognition of that gap. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about the novel, even though I find the Adam character irksome (as I said in my comment on your review).
I think culture of tertulias and just the general level of philological discourse is much much higher in Latin America. The average student of literature in Latin America is much wider and better read than their contemporary counterparts in the anglosphere. Latin Americans respect writers and literature as a vocation more than the anglosphere which is mostly driven by mercantalism.
Well put. I agree about the vocationalism 100%. For all its problems (and they are many), the Latin American literary field remains far more intellectually serious than the US one, in part because Latin Americans take their writers more seriously.
I’m curious how the specific example of Bolaño’s adoption compares to the earlier popularity of boom writers like García Márquez or Allende, or post boom writers like Puig or Lispector. As you note with Borges, the U.S. tends to have waves where publishers, authors, and critics “dicover” the literature of the rest of the Americas and talk about them a lot for a few years. What do you think is different about the Bolaño example from, for example, Lispector who was a few years earlier (I think, I confess my timeline of uptake of authors is not the strongest).
Good question. I think there has been a stronger push in the post-Bolaño period to create sustainable institutions for the distribution of Latin American literature in the United States than there was at the height of the Boom. There are now publishers in the Anglophone world that focus purely on Latin American literature (Charco, Sundial House, Cardboard House, etc), and a far more diverse offering among major and independent presses. The issue of visibility remains, but it’s a shift from the days when a single publisher (Knopf) was publishing the vast majority of Latin American works in translation.
I read one Puig, La traición de Rita Hayworth. It was very difficult, )if my memory is correct) it being peppered with Lunfardo. I've read the complete works (I think a '74 edition) of Borges, and he was very interested in a Gauchesco of course, but then at some point he decided to write in a rather traditional Castellano. I feel like he said as much in an essay. So coming from the POV of someone reading in Spanish, whose knowledge of Spanish is Mexican-American Spanish in Texas, and the stuff they teach in school, Puig is a whole different ball game.
Of course, I haven't read another Puig. So he might not always write in the mix of dialects that he does in Betrayal.
I had a Cuban professor who must have been trying to challenge me because he was always suggesting material with a lot of Italian in it.
I guess a part of me wants to mold this into some sort of argument for why Borges is popular, but really I just wanted to share.
Haha, Puig is certainly a challenging author, in large part because almost all (if not all) of his books are written as scripts where you never get the character name in front of the dialogue. His language also varies between books- I don’t find his “el beso de la mujer araña” as challenging to read as “la traicion” in part because that book is *relatively* standard Argentine Spanish. His uptake in English is also interesting, “el beso” is a major hit and spawns a successful movie and successful (if imo mediocre) stage musical, while “la traicion” (which I believe critics preferred at the time of release) is pretty much unknown in English circles. At a certain point though, Puig also starts writing his novels in English, which opens the door to things like “eternal curse on the readers of these pages” getting a widely available mass market edition.
Borges starts writing in a more standard style after “La historia universal de la infamia.” In the introduction he gives to later versions of that book, he refers to himself as seduced by the baroque as a youthful error. Personally, I don’t think it’s particularly baroque, but when you get to the famous stuff, I.e. ficciones, the style is very simplistic. Personally, I would attribute his u.s. success to that stylistic simplicity making for relatively easy translation, the strong influence of anglophone science fiction on Borges’s writing making him easy for anglophone audiences to pick up on, the seeing novelty of some of his ideas (I know this isn’t anglophone, but the French love the ideas in “Pierre Menard”), and the fact that he can be pretty easily slotted in with the postmodern fiction that was starting to become a major player in anglophone publishing. Who knows it could also have to do with the fact that the first translated book of Borges doesn’t exist in Spanish; “labyrinths” is a mash-up/greatest hits of “ficciones” and “el aleph” with some poetry and essays thrown in for extra spice.
If people from the U.S. are serious about learning the literary canon of the Spanish-speaking world, they'll have to jump over the language barrier. It's not impossible. After all, most famous Latin American writers were/are fluent in English. The reverse can also become true.
The article is very interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Cultural insularity gives rise to professional intellectuals, that is they know too much about their own world. Cross pollination is essential even if translations are not perfect.
Thanks for the excerpt. I'd seen notices for your book, and now I'll go get a copy. This essay raises a question for me about the extent to which the value of an author is independent of their original cultural context.
In my field, art history, if a scholar or critic notes the belated emergence or canonization of an artist who was previously unknown or marginalized, the moral might be that the sudden acceptance of the artist says more about the people who are finally "discovering" them than it does about the artist themselves. At the beginning of your piece I thought you were going to say that the recognition of Bolaño was a North American phenomenon, best understood by studying North Americans who read him, and that he might have different values elsewhere. So when you say "we are still far from recognizing just how 'epoch-making' a writer he was," it's surprising: isn't it possible that he seemed epoch-making from an early 21st-century North American perspective, and that his value and stature might be quite different in Mexico, Argentina, or elsewhere in the world? In other words: are you arguing he is important in general, and North American readers and critics have been discovering that? Or that he has become important for particular reasons in North America, which might be irrelevant or even incompatible with judgments about him in Latin America? Sorry if this is off-base as a question: ordinarily I'd read the book first! but this is, after all, Substack.
Great questions! Happy to answer them on here. In the intro to the book, I discuss the view that Bolaño was an American product, and why I ultimately don’t find it that persuasive. He won the Rómulo Gallegos for Savage Detectives in 1998, and was clearly recognized by Latin American writers and critics as the major author of his generation before he was widely translated into English. As for his continuing relevance in Latin America, I think it’s massive, and if anything underdiscussed. You can see his influence, among other places, in Chile (Alejandro Zambra’s extraordinary Chilean Poet is very Bolañian) and Mexico (in Cristina Rivera Garza’s work, for instance, or in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season). Ironically, some of the writers most influenced by Bolaño—like Horacio Castellanos Moya and Valeria Luiselli—did a lot to fuel the idea that Bolaño’s influence was due to his posthumous celebrity in the US. I suspect this was partly to create space for their own work. But it led imo to a distorted sense that Bolaño’s aesthetic was somehow extraneous to the Latin American tradition, which couldn’t be further from true. Of course, different traditions select different things from authors, but I’m less suspicious than other critics that what American readers see in Bolaño is vi merely a reflection of themselves
Really enjoyed this. I'm curious if, in the years since writing this, you've observed other US writers you feel are absorbing the influence of Latin American literature, and/or Bolaño specifically, in interesting ways. I actually can't think of that many (though I have a hard time keeping up with recent writing), but I do wonder if the rise of autofiction in the US in the last 15 years is partially attributable to Bolaño, not as much for the autobiographical gamesmanship he played but in the permission he gave writers to have main characters who are writers, and to legitimize literary careers and literature itself as worthy thematic material and even plots.
Yes, I do believe that US writers absorbed the Bolaño influence intensely! I think the strongest uptake was among the generation of writers I cite in this excerpt—and I would include Latino writers such as Junot Díaz (post-Drown), Daniel Alarcón, and Ana Menéndez in that group (I discuss them in another part of the epilogue to Anxieties of Experience). In different ways, these authors were all exploring different iterations of the very-literary-writer-as-protagonist, as you suggest. After that, it seems to me that the influence becomes more diffuse, and the politics of Bolaño envy becomes more complex. In part this is because there was a determined effort on the part of certain Latin American critics and writers—Valeria Luiselli is the first name that comes to mind—who tried to downplay what they took from Bolaño because of his extreme popularity in the US and his perceived gender politics. Thankfully, a lot of young writers are now discovering Bolaño and recognizing his extraordinary talent.
The next “installment” of the series will be on contemporary autofiction. I may say a bit about Bolaño, but it will be more about the prehistory of the genre in the US. I do share your sense though that he is a key figure in the contemporary development of the mode!
I look forward to reading the next installment, especially the pre-history part. I was specifically curious about anyone new publishing in the last five years, but like you say, it seems to get more diffuse. I'm hoping to write a post soon about why I think Bolaño is more relevant than ever before to US writing, but we'll see when/if I have time for that...
I heard your interview with Manuel Novillo. Very interesting. A new biography of Bolaño has just come out in Spain. I haven't read it yet, but the writer is very talented. A controversy has blown up around it that might interest you: https://www.jotdown.es/2026/06/por-que-estoy-pensando-en-denunciar-a-alberto-olmos/
¡Ay! El ego y la envidia!
I'm in Madrid right now and planning to get the biography this weekend at the feria. Thanks for sharing the article! I'll check it out. Would be fun to have a convo about the bio at some point if you're interested. Seems like we have lots in common.
That's right! The feria del libro. Yes, I'm sure we do have a lot in common, although I haven't read much Bolaño—some short stories in English and half of Detectives Salvajes en castellano. Both impressed me. These days I'm reading Chaves Nogales, A sangre y fuego. Es otro peso pesado. He beat the estadounidenses to New Journalism! Amazing.
Interesting piece, but it’s ironic that a critique of Anglo-American ignorance toward Latin American literature ends up reducing Latin America to the Spanish-speaking countries and leaving Brazil out almost entirely. Brazilian and Hispanic American literatures have been in dialogue for decades (or centuries even) and that split itself distorts what “Latin American literature” actually is.
The point about the use of Latin America is fair. To me, this is partly a problem of nomenclature. In the intro to the book, I explain my decision to use Latin American rather than Spanish American lit, because it was the main designator in the Spanish-speaking Americas beginning in the late 19th century. But I’d probably use “Spanish American” if I were to write the book again today. I’d dispute the claim that Brazilian and Spanish American lit have been in dialogue for centuries. The widespread availability of translated Brazilian literature in the Spanish Americas is very recent. The Latin American Boom almost entirely excluded Brazilian authors, even in its own self-conception.There’s no “irony” in recognizing the relative separation between the Hispanophone and Lusophone literary fields. It’s a historical phenomenon.
This is not a problem of nomenclature alone, although it’s most noticeable in it. It’s a problem of interpretation of the world, identities and culture expression that’s still under colonial order.
The separation of Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries in latam is also a separation of colonial heritage that ignores how these cultures have interacted and produced meaning (and text) outside the scope of interest of the dominant cultures in the US and Europe.
The Argentinean Juana Manso for instance was the first woman to create a newspaper in Brazil in the 19th century (for a women’s audience). She also lived in the US and Cuba, writing and published about these cultures. These displacements, often due to political persecution, but also motivated by traveling, created an abundance of literary exchanges that are hardly studied in this more conventional analysis.
Borges was a reader of Machado de Assis, also a writer of the 19th c. Borges wrote and discussed the realism and innovative writing of Assis.
The modernist movement in Brazil in the 1920s, a precursor of later modernist expressions in other latam countries is considered to have influenced later expressions in their conception of producing within and to the local culture.
The Latin American boom after all is a movement that emerges from the outside, looking to define Latam’s literary production in ways that are at their service, not ours.
Luckily, culture (and history at large)
is much more than what academia is capable of apprehend, these few examples are just a fraction of what sits outside the foreign gaze, and will always exist whether we validate as true literary or not.
I'm a specialist in US and Latin American literature. I have a reading knowledge of Portuguese, have studied contemporary Brazilian literature, and I have thought deeply about the relationship of Brazilian and Spanish American literature. In the introduction to my book, I speak to exactly the problem you discuss here. My entire argument is based on the idea that we cannot erase historical divides across the linguistic boundaries of the Americas based on a kind of literary/scholarly wish fulfillment (i.e. the various parts of the Americas should exhibit solidarity, therefore they have in fact done so). Of course there are examples of Brazilian/Spanish American exchange over the past two centuries. My point is that that exchange was relatively limited until recently, and that it's a mistake to assume that because there is widespread cultural reciprocity today, this was also true historically. There are countless examples of US writers who took a deep interest in Spanish American literature (including myself)--would you therefore say that we should ignore the historical divides between US and Spanish American literature because a small minority of people have overcome them? It seems to me that what you're ultimately interested in telling me is that I possess a "foreign gaze," which is true. But if that's the purpose of your comment, let's just skip the pretense of historical/literary analysis (especially since your examples above sound suspiciously Wikipedia-like) and I'll grant you your essentialist point.
Of course you have a foreign gaze, and of course your comprehension what it’s actually like being a latam writer and our understanding of our culture is limited. If I thought you didn’t know this I wouldn’t have comment here, I’m not here to point fingers because that’s unfruitful and a waste of my time.
I made a point about what I thought you missed and I still think it’s valid. It’s problematic to exclude Brazil when discussing “Latin America literature” as with other culture expressions that to my view only impoverish our understanding, because, as I’ve pointed out, these expressions exist whether we perceived them as valid or not. That’s simply no way that we can know such thing as historical truth about how much influence these culture exchanges might have, we can discuss this all you want but the honest answer about history is that we have always had a partial and limited interpretation of it.
This is why I don’t think that the foreign gaze is necessarily a problem. But if you’re this keen about bringing authority to this comment, let me introduce mine. I’m a philosopher and a biographer of feminist history and philosophy in Brazil. I work with decolonial theory as framework to deconstruct our preconceptions about truth in history. The examples that I brought, apart from Borges that I know due to my love for his work, are from my research. I’m more than happy to discuss them at length, as I’m sure you know how happy researchers are to speak about their work, but I refrain because I don’t really think this is the place, but just to take the opportunity. Juana has an immense influence in the formation of feminism in Brazil, just like Nisia Floresta is essential for the feminist movement in latam at large. And this is an extrapolation, but I have my suspicions that first book published in Brazil by a woman, Ursula, wouldn’t be possible without these first spaces for women writers.
I think you and I speak from very different frameworks, and mine is very set of the idea of the coloniality of knowledge which continues to dictate how we organize our understanding of the world. This is not about you the foreign vs us the colonized. I can’t afford to be essentialist because that would be the end of possibility for change. But in this framework of mine, it’s relevant to investigate and situated our point of view, and be open to its limits. It seems to me that you however are not open to this sort of critique and is very annoyed by it. That’s fine too, o don’t wish to prolong this discussion, since at least in my view we can both be right, and more or less wrong too.
Thanks for that clarification. I have no problem recognizing that there are many cultural dialogues between Brazil and the Spanish Americas, or in recognizing your expertise in philosophy and feminist theory. But my point was about specifically literary interactions. You left a short comment based on a short excerpt from my book in which you implied that I didn’t understand the literary relationship between Brazil and the Spanish Americas. As you surely know, the use of Latin America as an identifier is hugely contested, as is the designator Spanish Americas (for the reasons decolonial scholars have specified). I very clearly explain in the intro why, for all its imperfections, I used Latin America as a descriptor for the Spanish Americas, and why I excluded Brazil from consideration in my book. If your first comment had been a question about my use of that the term, rather than an implicit accusation about an issue that was not directly addressed in the passage you read, I would have responded to you differently. I’m still struggling to understand what in my comments about contemporary US-Spanish American literary interactions in the passage implied a negation of Brazil’s role in hemispheric literature, beyond the point of nomenclature. I have no problem addressing decolonial critiques, though I do have a long section in chapter 1 of my book about why I find the decolonial deconstruction of geographic boundaries unsatisfying. I’m interested by the argument about the crosscultural connections in feminist history that you mention, and again, I’m not saying there is no dialguw at all. As for the notion that the Boom is an external construction, I’ve always felt that’s an essentialist argument. Fuentes, GGM, Cortázar Vargas Llosa, and Donoso were all talented authors from the Spanish-speaking Americas who had deep literary, intellectual, and personal connections. To assume that the boom is foreign because it was promoted in Spain and the US is to take agency away from those writers in helping construct a worldwide phenomenon. The fact that this was linguistically determined—ie all those writers wrote in Spanish—does not seem to me extraneous to the discussion of their work or to the broader question of how literary fields were constructed.
smh
Too bad there are no women novelists in Latin America.
Lol, I hope this is a clumsy attempt at trolling on your part rather than a genuinely misogynistic comment. I talk about many Latin American women novelists in the book, and I’m on record as saying that Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season are my favorite contemporary Latin American novels.
Here we go again, American writers entertaining feelings of inferiority to another culture's literature. Same thing happened back in the twenties, and then the Americans came back to their own country and started writing books that would get them Nobel prizes. I myself think Bolano is very much oversold. I do believe that 2666 is totally epic, but THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES suffered from a shocking lack of craft and it made me long for the clean formalism of Jack Kerouac, y'know? I think we are going through a fallow period in Am lit, to be sure, but a country that has given the world DeLillo, Pynchon, Gaddis, McCarthy, Morrison, Wallace and, now, Vollmann, doesn't have to tug its forelock in a Southern direction. Giving up is not a strategy.
I mean, tell me a book that captures our moment better than CATCH-22. You can't.
Riiiiight, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, straight from the soil, learned nothing from Europe, just had to come back and breathe in that fresh American air.
I love all those writers you mention, and I’m not giving up on American literature. This is a diagnosis of a certain contemporary line. Also, I have never seen Kerouac referred to as a “clean formalist.” What do you mean by that?
That was sarcasm, obviously failed. And look, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa got a lot of their chops from Faulkner, so what comes around goes around.
Totally! In the book, I talk about American writers who don’t see their relationship to the Latin American tradition as a means of displaying their sense of inferiority (Morrison is imo one of them). It’s worth saying I have some affinity for Leaving the Atocha Station. In a lot of ways, I see it as a performance of ignorance, and it’s clever in how it stages the character’s bewilderment. But I’m also drawn to authors who take on the influence without irony, as GGM and MVL did with Faulkner
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the book Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe by Chris Andrews, one of Bolaño’s main translators and one of the 1st books if not the first to discuss Bolaño’s popularity in The US.
In the 1st chapter he shows how this “exceptional” writer became a lodestar in American publishing and literary circles:
“Why has the case of Bolaño proven to be exceptional? What caused and is causing the Bolaño anomaly? At least seven explanations can be proposed, which I will characterize very badly as follows, before considering each in turn:
Bolaño is an exceptional writer
Bolaño is an American writer
Bolaño is a translatable writer
Bolaño has given rise to a myth
Bolaño supplies a lack in North American fiction
Men like Bolaño’s books
Bolaño has been misread.”
This book is imperative if you want to understand the issues brought up in this post-essay.
As someone who’s been quietly involved—on the fringes—in American experimental literary circles as writer, editor, publisher & letterpress printer I can say that I’ve mostly ditched that so-called American scene in favor of literature from other countries and Bolaño had a lot to do w / it.
Books such as Beyond Parentheses and Antwerp continue to influence me to this day after first reading them years ago.
American lit and poetry is mainly processed in MFA programs now; it’s very middle class and lacks a certain daring, hostility or rage, & tenderness which one finds plentiful in Bolaño’s writing and stance.
Yes, Chris Andrews’s book is excellent. I should have mentioned it in the intro to this excerpt.
Just for context, this is an excerpt from my 2018 book, which was itself based on a 2014 article that laid out my main thesis about US-Latin American literary relations
Lately, I have been noticing this Latin American influence in some of the texts I receive as submissions to journals I work for. I am genuinely curious about the new influence of Rulfo on the Anglo writers of NA. Rulfo keeps popping up more and more. Yet, I find this weird. Especially since Rulfo seems to be very localized both in time and place to Mexico and it's revolution. Moreover, I never have read good translations of his work in English. So, what gives? Where is this all coming from?
Interesting. I always thought Latin American Literature was preeminent, starting at least with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
My understanding is that most of these Latin American writers in question were polyglot and seriously read Marx, so they had a substantial economic framework from which to view both their own societies and America's, whilst most American literary writers at best (most charitable reading) do a very convincing job of seeming theoretico-economically (scientifically) illiterate. There's also the matter of the absolute degradation of the Spanish language, in no small part the lifeblood of the (cynical?) careers of many Chicano and/or Latino writers. Case in point: Junot Díaz, whose articulateness in Spanish, of whatever national flavor, is easily superceded by a bright four year old native speaker's.
I agree with the assessment to a certain point, though I think it partially has to do with the different roles that writers tend to occupy in the US and Latin America (in Latin America, writers are public intellectuals in a way they aren’t in the US). And yes, I talk about Díaz’s relationship to Spanish in the book. Clearly there’s some compensation happening there, but I still feel that in the fiction itself nobody has surpassed his ability to incorporate Spanish words into the English language.