The Great Latin American Novel

An extraordinary contribution to global understanding of Latin American literature and culture, these essays demonstrate the polymathic intellectual power of an Umberto Eco, Alberto Manguel, or Octavio Paz. Given that Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz) ranks among Mexico's greatest novelists, this intellectual heft is unsurprising. The author died in 2012, but this posthumous translation captures all the richness and precision of his style. Eschewing footnotes or other scholarly conceits, Fuentes adapts the framework of mestizaje (ethnic and cultural intermingling) to trace common themes and distinctive permutations—memory, violence, utopia, identity, etc.—across a smorgasbord of literary genius throughout Latin America. Audiences meet familiar titans such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges yet also discover novelists overlooked by the English-speaking world: writers—most of them men—such as José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, or João Guimarães Rosa. Fuentes appears skeptical of the continent's 1990s multicultural shift; he acknowledges indigenous and Afro-Latin American cultural contributions but declares Spanish the real marker of "us."