Literature labeled “Andean” is usually limited to work from Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Less frequently, the zone in question expands to an imaginary line that runs from Venezuela to Chile. Nevertheless, considering cultural mobility, the Venezuelan sociopolitical situation, and Chile’s close relationship to the Southern Cone, the clearest receptive ties between current generations take place between Colombians, Peruvians, and Ecuadorians. Another factor that complicates a categorical understanding of the zone is what Harold Bloom termed the “anxiety of influence”—not only because Colombians and Peruvians must deal with the weight of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, whether locally or facing the foreign public’s perception. When La novela en América Latina: diálogo (1968; The Novel in Latin America: A Dialogue), a significant conversation between the two Nobel prize winners, was published, the Latin American Boom was already hegemonic, although it was not yet a creed. Republished later in a much-expanded form as Dos soledades. Un diálogo sobre la novela en América Latina (Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2021; Two Solitudes: A Dialogue About the Novel in Latin America), the prologue, “Palabras recuperadas” (Recovered Words), by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, perhaps describes a better world, when the novelists were learning from each other and held fewer grudges: “Here is that Vargas Llosa: the novelist-critic, owner of a conscience exacerbated by his profession, always with a scalpel in his hand. At his side, García Márquez makes a huge effort to defend the image of the almost wild, instinctive narrator, allergic to theory and a poor explicator of himself or his books. He’s not really like this, of course: García Márquez knew very well what each one of the screwdrivers in his toolbox was used for” (14). The importance of this dialogue diminished as its authors were enshrined/consecrated/sanctified and acquired apologists and imitators, a condition that has affected the authors featured in this issue much less, in part due to their access to the world-wide web, or because of the wear and tear the writer’s aura has suffered.
So, the roots of contemporary Colombian non-fiction are not to be found in García Márquez but rather in authors born in the 1950s, like Andrés Caicedo (1951-1977), short story writer, screenwriter, and literary critic. Part of Caicedo’s non-fiction has been recovered by Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet, a practitioner of the popular discourse that Caicedo proselytized, beginning with his novel ¡Que viva la música! (1977; Liveforever, 2014). In posthumous collections like Mi cuerpo es una celda. Una autobiografía (2008; My Body Is a Jail Cell. An Autobiography) or the memoir El cuento de mi vida (2007; The Story of My Life), one glimpses why Fuguet asserted that, “Caicedo is the Boom’s missing link. And the number-one enemy of Macondo.” Also admired by his contemporary Roberto Bolaño, Caicedo exercised his rebelliousness in a prudish Colombia, one that, despite the early disobedience of García Márquez, would have to wait for the work of Carolina Sanín (1973) to evaluate novel and daring peers. All in all, believing that national novelists always react to their predecessors ends up being a limiting mistake; the same thing happens in Ecuador and Peru, which respectively have never had equals to Juan Montalvo and Benjamín Carrión, nor to José Carlos Mariátegui and the very underestimated Enrique Verástegui.Footnote1
In November of 2022, after posting a video about feminism and the rights of transgender people, Sanín occasioned divisive disagreements and a broader reach for her arguments. A report in The New York Times described it as, “A Writer’s Post and Its Consequences Divide Latin American Literary Circles.” The debate affected only Sanín’s reception, not the appraisal of her as a writer. Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador, 1988) achieved something similar when she aired her personal traumas in the Spanish press rather than that of her home country. Both writers have an academic background. But Sanín’s prose is more in tune with the turn that characterizes the authors in this issue. Her most recent work, El sol (2022; The Sun), doesn’t exhibit clear generic distinctions, mixing essay, poetry, and narrative, values already present in the eight texts of Somos luces abismales (2018; We Are Enormous Lights). Sanín is also a cultural figure through her journalism, as Pasar fijándose. Columnas escogidas (2020; To Pass By Noticing: Selected Columns) demonstrates.
But in our current moment, Vásquez and the Chilean Alejandro Zambra (1975) are the most in-demand, respected, and popular Latin American writers outside of their home countries. In non-fiction, Vásquez has a national equal in Héctor Abad Faciolince (1958) and his Las formas de la pereza (2007; Forms of Laziness), and Zambra in Rafael Gumucio (1970) and his La situación. Crónicas literarias (2010; The Situation. Literary Chronicles). Vásquez’s resonance in other languages can only be compared to that of Zambra, although the latter now participates in journalistic endeavors only sporadically. The arc of Vásquez’s non-fiction (as happens with other authors in this issue) runs from Joseph Conrad. El hombre de ninguna parte (2004; Joseph Conrad: The Man from Nowhere), to El arte de la distorsión (y otros ensayos) (2009; The Art of Distortion [And Other Essays]), La venganza como prototipo legal alrededor de la Ilíada (2011; Revenge as a Legal Prototype Related to The Iliad), Viajes con un mapa en blanco (2017; Travels with a Blank Map), and Los desacuerdos de paz (2022; The Peace Disagreements).
Keeping in mind that, of all his journalistic writing, Vásquez has only collected his writing about the Colombian disarmament process from the last ten years, it’s possible to argue that his most accomplished non-fiction is that of his second and fourth books. In this work, there isn’t even the smallest “decolonial” need to explain the world contexts of literature in Spanish or to question his Westernness. In El arte de la distorsíon he deals with Philip Roth, Sebald, and Conrad, and provides abundant analysis of García Márquez, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, and Cervantes. In May 2023, continuing his focus on world literature in a column for Spain’s El País, he says of Faulkner, “No writer was more influential for the generation of Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, or Carlos Fuentes than this U.S. writer. And in addition, for some of us, it was he who showed us how to read those others.”
If, for Jonathan Franzen, Vásquez leads the generation that is reinventing the continent’s literature, within the Latin American context the essays in Viajes con un mapa en blanco come the closest to the novelist as cultural critic. In them, Cervantes and Conrad return, “pursued” by Tolstoy, Camus, Joyce, and Vargas Llosa, framed by various analyses of the mysteries of the novel vis-à-vis Vásquez’s own novelistic practice. Nor does he put aside the Latin American writer confronting tradition, which lends nuance to “El tiro en el concierto: política y novela en Colombia” (The Shot at the Concert: Politics and the Novel in Colombia), in El arte de la distorsíon. What happens in Colombia does not occur in Ecuador.
During the last three decades, some representatives of previous generations of Ecuadorian writers, with a respectable readership outside their home countries (above all in Spain), have insisted that the national literature is “invisible,” “imaginary.” Various prose writers from current generations are fond of this complaint, despite the novel character of their own prose. On a tour through Spain in the spring of 2023, one of them, the Guayaquil writer Ernesto Carrión, presented a pessimistic view, arguing that there was a “total” lack of knowledge of Ecuadorian literature both inside and outside the country. He’s right to attribute this situation to “problems that have been around for decades,” among them “the lack of a national reading plan,” “a poor cultural press,” and the scarcity of literary criticism; but only with respect to his present and the question of generational dynamics, because the conventional tradition of Ecuadorian essay writing is long and has been well received.
If it’s also true that “cultural institutions don’t play an important role” in achieving greater dissemination and that there exists “a kind of not looking and not allowing for the construction of an identity,” the problem is the emphasis on building a national identity and, thanks to the resignation that leads to the constant complaints, the lack of collectivism among the writers themselves, beyond personal preferences. Perhaps it’s necessary to add fratricidal struggles, the belittling of others, the persistent division between sierra and coast (less accentuated in Colombia, for example); and, with no sentimental spirit, the lack of generosity among authors.
In this context, the objective voice of Leonardo Valencia (1969) stands out. He rose to international prominence with the inclusion of his narrative in the still polemical, although mythic anthology McOndo (1996) and as an invitee to the 2007 “Bogotá39” project, in which some other authors in this issue participated. Deaf to the siren song that sent other generations to Spain or France, Valencia emigrated to Peru, then to Spain, the country where he earned a doctorate in literary theory and created creative writing workshops, only to return to Ecuador after almost two decades of nomadism. The avatars of those experiences inform his narrative and his non-fiction, and the regular column that he writes in El Universo, a liberal-leaning newspaper in his native Guayaquil, makes him a public and polemic intellectual for his countrymen.
Valencia has published the non-fiction El síndrome de Falcón (2008, 2019; The Falcon Syndrome), Soles de Mussfeldt. Viaje al círculo de fuego (2012; Mussfeldt Suns: Travel to the Circle of Fire), Moneda al aire: sobre la novela y la crítica (2017; Coin Toss: On the Novel and Criticism), and Ensayos en caída libre (2023; Essays in Free Fall). The first of these put him on the literary map—the homonymous essay is one of the most important both within and outside the country for its no-holds-barred revision of “national” literature, the critical tradition, and the weight of the past—and is more “essay-like” in style. The second is a generic hybrid with conceptual connections to his novel Kazbek (2008; Kazbek, 2020). The third tends toward theory, while the most recent brings together texts from the past decade on a wide range of cultural topics, and is the most complete, complex, and diverse of those published to date. Almost every article, talk, or review has as its subtext the virtures of the novel and the essay, and in the context of his work there are clear links to the essay-like, cerebral nature of his novels El libro flotante (2006; The Floating Book), Kazbek, and above all the celebrated La escalera de Bramante (2019; Bramante’s Staircase).
Gabriela Alemán, the only female writer from the Andean region in this issue, exemplifies the situation of the writer who slowly has established herself, without forming part of the solidarities in vogue in her country, as a respected figure who is consulted by writers from other countries, like Sanín. In spite of this, the Ecuadorian, also well known for her publishing initiatives, only sporadically makes an incursion into non-fiction. Alemán also tends to publish opinion pieces in Ecuadorian journals, though infrequently.
In Peruvian essay writing there was a noticeable leap, at least in the twentieth century and in terms of influence, from generally Marxist cultural criticism like Mariátegui’s to the not-at-all recovered hybridity of Verástegui, to the more globalized non-fiction of Vargas Llosa, which has been widely studied. It would be fruitless to summarize the coordinates of these precursors, in part because the latter’s production never seems to stop (a similar case is José Balza, the prolific Venezuelan prose master). Notwithstanding, if these prose writers did not limit themselves to literary topics and made their political preferences obvious, more recent developments in the genre in Peru, as in the Colombian case, have distanced themselves quite a bit from these totemic figures. There are few current non-fiction practitioners who follow Vargas Llosa, and a case like Alonso Cueto’s reveals in spades the burden of the author of García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971; García Márquez: Story of a Deicide).
For many readers, Gabriela Wiener (1975) is the boldest and most representative of the numerous Peruvian chroniclers, encouraged by journals like Etiqueta Negra (founded by the equally talented crónica writer Julio Villanueva Chang) and the “narrative journalism” pushed by the Fundación de Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (Foundation for New Iberian-American Journalism), a recognition of the genre as the ideal tool for social and political projects. Wiener sometimes seems to be everywhere in the media, both in Spanish and English. As with other authors, her publications on social media, without a consistent public or objective, have an ephemeral existence. Nevertheless, Wiener has compiled some of her chronicles: the collections Sexografías (2008; Sexographies, 2018); Nueve lunas (2013; Nine Moons, 2021); Llamada perdida (2015; Missed Call); and the “autobiographical fiction” Huaco retrato (2022; Undiscovered, 2023), which constitutes an excellent example of her ability to mix genres.
For a region so full of dystopian tales and facts narrated in somber tones, Vásquez, more political than his Colombian and continental peers; Sanín, more in tune with gender activism and prone to polemics; and Valencia, more intellectual and connected to world literary culture, never resort to regional tropes or clichés. Rather, they write about topics generally unknown to Anglophone audiences, which nevertheless can be transplanted to their own contexts. If neither humor nor a sense of resignation is prevalent in Valencia and Vásquez, in their work there is a clear resilience, an empowering of the autochthonous as cosmopolitan, and hope, without the sensation that they want to make us hostages of their stories with superfluous anecdotes to ingratiate themselves with their audience. In conclusion, these writers move beyond the dichotomies that define their countries abroad.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Antonio Villarruel
Antonio Villarruel is an Ecuadorian literary critic and postdoctoral researcher. His writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Quimera, World Literature Today, and L’Atelier du Roman, and he is a regular contributor to the cultural review Letras Libres. He directed the documentary “Versiones de la vecindad” (2010; Versions of the Neighborhood), about the Mexican essayist Carlos Monsiváis. He currently resides in Mexico City.
Emily A. Maguire
Emily A. Maguire is Associate Professor of Spanish at Northwestern University. The author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011), she has translated the work of Ángel Lozada, Sonia Rivera Valdés, and Aurora Arias.
Notes
1 For more on these developments and tendencies, see Rodrigo Pesántez Rodas, Panorama del ensayo en Ecuador (Pontevedra: Textos Hispanoamericanos, 2019), and Contrapunto ideológico y perspectivas ideológicas en el Perú contemporáneo, eds. Juan E. Castro and Leticia Robles (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2018). Neither study deals with the generations represented in this issue.