ANTHOLOGY: ALISON RIBEIRO DE MENEZESreviews Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language NovelistsForeword by Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles Granta, 324pp. £12.99
LAST YEAR was a good one for literature in Spanish. Mario Vargas Llosa, whose latest novel deals with Roger Casement's investigation of abuses against Putomayo Indians in the Peruvian rubber industry, became the 11th Spanish-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He follows in the footsteps of such greats as Márquez, Neruda, Mistral and Cela. The Nobel is not always a predictor of enduring canonical status, of course, but as a snapshot of literary stature at a particular moment the award is an important indicator. Looking to the future, Granta, the magazine of creative writing, has published this anthology of new narrative in Spanish by 22 authors from across the Hispanic world, all of whom were born after 1975. The collection confirms the health and promise of literature in Spanish as a continuing force in world fiction. Indeed, what is striking about it is the prominence of writers from Spain itself – five in all, outstripped only by Argentina's seven. Since the 1980s Spain has been largely outshone by the international success of the Latin American Boom writers; this issue of Grantais a welcome consolidation of Peninsular letters on the international stage.
Granta's editors chose as a cut-off point for their collection the year in which Spain's Franco dictatorship ended, arguing that the mid 1970s also marked the waning of French influence on Latin American writers. But what is most evident is the ever greater importance of the United States for Latin American writers, and it is a shame that there are no examples of young Chicano authors working on that creative border between US and Hispanic cultures. (Presumably, their predominant use of English and the linguistic idiom popularly known as Spanglish precluded their inclusion.) Nevertheless, the stylistic breadth and thematic range of the 22 pieces here are impressive. Many are new short stories, a few are excerpts from forthcoming novels and all have been sensitively translated.
The overwhelming impression created by Granta's anthology is that the trend towards first-person narratives of a highly intimate and reflective nature continues to hold sway in Hispanic fiction – often allied to an exploration of individual alienation, conflict and a search for roots and connections. One sees this in The Place of Losses, a story by the Bolivian Rodrigo Hasbún, which displays an accomplished technical experimentation with shifting narrative voices. The Mexican Antonio Ortuño also pushes formal experimentation in Small Mouth, Thin Lips, an examination of power play and mind games between a prisoner and his doctor. The Spaniard Javier Montes has written a tongue-in-cheek narrative comparing review journalism to voyeurism with his story of a travel critic who is lost for words when he stumbles on a pornography shoot in a hotel bedroom. The Colombian Andrés Filipe Solano provides a delightful exploration of children's reactions to difference in his story of the fantasies created by a group of boys about two new arrivals at school. These, along with Patricio Pron, are the only writers to adopt anything approaching humour. The contrast is evident, for instance, with regard to Santiago Roncagliolo's tender but unsettling examination of a Peruvian boy's obsession with baseball, about which he knows nothing, because it comes from the US, where his absent father frequently works. The lure of North America, for many of the writers in this anthology, is troublesome and poses a challenge to local communities and identities.
Despite the strong showing of writers from Spain, the stars of this collection are the Argentinians. Lucía Puenzo opens the volume with a story about a creative-writing course in Cuba, and includes a cameo of Márquez, complete with colourful tracksuit. Márquez's insensitivity to the violence and strife around him is presumably a dig at the early support of many Boom writers for the Castro regime. Pola Oloixarac is another writer who openly tackles a political theme, examining the legacy of Perónism in an ambitiously complex third-person narrative. Matías Néspolo deftly creates tension in the parallel between a chess game and a brutal thug's search for his latest enemy in an excerpt from a forthcoming novel that is one to watch out for. But the best piece of all is surely the closing one: Patricio Pron's wry reflection on the literary profession itself in A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs. It tells the tale of a struggling writer from the provinces who moves to the city in search of fame, and finds himself under the influence of "the living Argentine writer" – literally so, as he inhabits the flat below him. This is not Borges, of course, although Pron notes that all Argentine writers live under his influence, but his swipe at the myth of the literary hero is a highly satisfying end to a super collection of new creative writing.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in Spanish and Portuguese at University College Dublin. Her most recent book, War and Memory in Contemporary Spain, edited with Roberta Quance and Anne Walsh, was published by Verbum, Madrid
