Roll Over, Vargas Llosa

Abstract

Thirty years after its original explosion, the Latín American literary boom can now be seen in full scope, its legacy assessed. This most commercial phenomenon, in part the result of the hugely capable Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells, has had far-reaching but sometimes troublesome echoes. While writers from countries like Argentina, Mexico and Colombia were far the first time read seriously and widely in Europe and the United States (Rubén Daría, the most celebrated late-nineteenth-century Modernista p oet, remained applauded only in the Iberian Península), the refreshingly baroque style and thirst far stereotypes that emerged south of the Río Grande also reduced the region to a theater of exoticism and magic-a surreal Banana Republic. Tourists traveled deep into the Hispanic hemisphere in search of mythical coastal towns where beautiful women eat earth, a rain of butterflies descends at winter' s end and every Gypsy is a prophet. What is really to be faund, of course, is a tense present and a painful collective past.