Barcelona, Dec 3 (EFE) A new collection being put out by Barcelona-based publishing house Barataria will put the spotlight on precursors of the 1960s and 1970s “Latin American boom”, among them Chileans Juan Emar and Marta Brunet, Peru’s Martin Adan and Argentina’s Silvina Ocampo.
“Considering the books that reach Europe, it would seem the ‘Latin American boom’ emerged from nothing, as if there was no classic Latin American literature,” Barataria publisher Carola Moreno said Wednesday.
The “Latin American boom” is most closely associated with the acclaimed work of Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature; Argentina’s Julio Cortazar; Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes; and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa.
The editor of the “Humo hacia el sur” (Smoke Towards the South) collection, Chilean writer Claudia Apablaza, said the authors that will be included, “through their work with narrative structures and content, marked a turning point vis-a-vis the costumbrista (who depicted everyday life, mannerisms and customs) and realist writers of their era”.
They are “the literary forefathers of what became known as the ‘Latin American boom’,” and exercised an influence on their writing, she added, “even though later writers like (Jorge Luis) Borges, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez forged (a body of) work completely different from their predecessors.”
Barataria, which will publish works by one or two authors from each Latin American country over the coming years, has opened the collection with “Un ano” (One Year) by Chile’s Emar and “La casa de carton” (The Cardboard House) by Adan.
This new collection “bridges the gap that exists in Spanish bookstores, in which there are classic European authors, some Americans, but not the Latin American vanguardists,” Apablaza said.
“Humo hacia el sur” refers to the same-named novel by Chilean writer Marta Brunet (1897-1967), a work in which she broke with her realist and Creole past and launched an new avant-garde stage in Latin American literature.
Barataria, Apablaza said, has a distribution network in Spain and Mexico, but now with this collection it has begun making contacts with distributors in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia to bring the books to markets across Latin America.
