Volume 33, Number 5 · March 27, 1986
Broken Blossoms
By Michael Wood
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Alfred MacAdam
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 310 pp., $16.95
Farewell to the Sea
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley
Viking, 413 pp., $18.95
Until recently Latin American fiction was preoccupied with forms of helplessness. History was seen as farce or fable, an endless parade of ogres and thieves. Decent people could watch it, run from it, hide in it, subject it to mockery, ravel it in fantasy. What they couldn't do was change it. The Cuban revolution suggested that the helplessness was willed rather than fated, a victory of irony and schism and despair over action, but this lesson only deepened the problem. The parade continued in most places, and a lack of historical necessity never made anyone's plight less real. Indeed, much of the energy of the so-called boom in Latin American writing, chiefly associated with the work of García Márquez, Fuentes, Donoso, and Vargas Llosa, seems to have come from a new awareness of how much style and imagination had been devoted to life in an impasse: a cultural triumph, no less, the preservation of wit, even gaiety, through a hundred years of turpitude.
Review, 3864 words
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