In September 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa held a public conversation at Peru’s National University of Engineering about the extraordinary recent surge of creativity in the Latin American novel, already known as ‘el Boom’. García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude) had just been published, and had catapulted its author to international celebrity, as well as becoming the signal work that embodied the many successes—aesthetic and commercial—of the Boom itself. Yet during the dialogue in Lima, García Márquez cast doubt on its existence: ‘I don’t know if the phenomenon of the Boom is in reality a Boom of writers or a Boom of readers’.
Self-deprecating irony aside, García Márquez was pointing to what would become recurrent problems of definition. Was the Boom a matter of literary supply or readerly demand? And how should the Boom be situated relative both to Latin America’s previous literary production and to other novelists currently writing? Chilean novelist José Donoso, in his 1972 Historia personal del ‘boom’, went so far as to say that it mainly existed in the negative. ‘If the Hispanoamerican novel of the 1960s has acquired that debatable unitary existence known as the Boom’, he wrote, ‘it is largely because of those who have dedicated themselves to denying it’. Defined principally by its detractors or those who remained outside its charmed circle, it was ‘the product of hysteria, envy and paranoia’. Others saw the label as reductive: in a 1984 interview, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier referred to the Boom as ‘a victim of its name’, adding that it was ‘insulting to refer to Latin American literature in this way since booms are inherently ephemeral and lack substance’.
Many critical accounts of the Boom have sought to problematize its boundaries, extending them either chronologically—incorporating precursors such as Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti or Juan Rulfo—or numerically, to include a wider range of writers active in the 1960s and 1970s: Donoso himself, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Lezama Lima, among many others. The four editors of Las cartas del Boom—two Peruvians (Carlos Aguirre and Augusto Wong Campos), a Mexican (Javier Munguía) and an Englishman (Gerald Martin)—make the opposite move, holding up the relations between Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa as not simply emblematic, but constitutive of the Boom. Their guiding premises are that the Boom’s four most prominent figures were not only the ‘biggest’ Latin American writers of the time—the most successful and internationally renowned—but that they shared three other characteristics that singled them out. First, they wrote ‘totalizing novels’, assuming and surpassing their own regional literary traditions while assimilating and redeploying global modernism’s aesthetic breakthroughs—those of Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka. Second, they ‘forged a solid friendship among themselves’; third, ‘they shared a political vocation’, marked above all by solidarity (at least initially) with the Cuban Revolution. As a result, they were a self-conscious unit, individually and collectively aware of their role in the political and aesthetic battles of the time. For the editors, the correspondence between these four writers thus offers unique insights into the Boom phenomenon. Not quite a collective autobiography, it is both more and less than a chronicle of that common project, shedding new light on many aspects of the Boom even as it leaves others in shadow.
Comprising some 207 letters plus a selection of articles, interviews and documents, Las cartas del Boom covers a period from 1955 to 2012. But the bulk of the book—the first 183 letters, occupying just under 350 pages—comes before 1975, with the rest effectively a postscript. Geographically, the correspondence spans Latin America and Europe, with three of the four spending considerable time in Paris, Barcelona and London as well as in their native countries; Cortázar, based in France from 1951 until his death in 1984, was the expatriate exception to the nomadic rule. If Paris was an all-purpose cultural crossroads and Barcelona a crucial editorial centre—both the publisher Seix Barral and the powerful agent Carmen Balcells were based there—Mexico City was another important node: García Márquez lived there from 1961 to 1967, writing most of Cien años de soledad in the Mexican capital, and he was based there again from 1975 until his death in 2014.
Geographical separation was, of course, a precondition for the correspondence between the four. For each of them, distance from their homelands was often a political necessity; but it also clearly contributed to their creativity, whether by reducing distractions around them or by detaching them enough from their contexts to enable them more freely to re-engage these artistically. Their global mobility also contributed to another distinctive feature of the Boom: all four authors might be said to be located simultaneously within their respective national literatures and within a newly solidifying pan-regional Latin American literature. To be sure, the notion of a common literary tradition based on a shared language had been present since colonial times; but after independence its unity and coherence had often been tenuous, the dream of a continent-spanning Bolivarian republic of letters competing with or overshadowed by the construction of national cultures. It’s no accident, then, that the figures most closely associated with the emergence of a broader Latin American literature—José Martí, Rubén Darío—were often exiles; the Boom in a sense repeated this pattern but on a much larger scale and with greater success.
The first link between the four was laid down in 1955 by Fuentes, writing to Cortázar asking him to contribute to the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. Born in Belgium to Argentinean diplomat parents in 1914, Cortázar was the oldest of the quartet. By the mid-1950s he had acquired a dedicated following for his short stories: Bestiario (Bestiary) was published in 1951, and Final del juego (End of the Game) in 1956. Tall, bearded, with a broad face and wide-set eyes, Cortázar had an otherworldly air, though his earnestness and ironic humour also come across in the letters and in his fiction, known for its uncanny atmospheres and psychological reversals; Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) was based on Cortázar’s 1958 story ‘Las babas del diablo’ (‘The Devil’s Drool’). He was also the most formally innovative of the four: his best-known work, Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), laid out two different sequences for reading the novel’s numbered chapters.
Fuentes, born in Panama in 1928 and like Cortázar the son of a diplomat, grew up roving between Mexico and Chile, Brazil, the us and Switzerland; his first book of stories, Los días enmascarados (The Masked Days), appeared in 1955, but it was his polyphonic debut novel, La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958), that made his name. Prolific across several genres—by the time of his death in 2012 he had produced more than twenty novels, eleven short story collections, five stage plays and more than a dozen books of essays—Fuentes was a charming, dapper figure, debonair and outgoing where Cortázar was more withdrawn. In literary terms, while he shared the limelight with the other three at the Boom’s peak, his present-day legacy outside Mexico is less substantial by comparison.