Like most English speaking North Americans, South America - or more truthfully, Spanish speaking America - is somewhat of a mystery to me. I'm sure for us up in Canada, where we sometimes forget that Mexico is even part of North America, it's even more of a closed book than for Americans who have a sizable Spanish speaking population. Like most of us, my introduction to South American literature came through One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, deservedly one of the most celebrated books that came out of that continent.
As good as Marquez is, he's not the only - or even the best - voice to come out of Latin America. While I've read the work of a few other authors, I can't pretend to be in any sort of position to be making generalities about South American literature. Yet I think it would be remiss if we didn't keep in mind (when reading the work of authors born from the 1950s onward) the violent and volatile political situation of that continent.
Nearly every country south of Mexico has had one form of violence or another shape the political landscape of the country. From American backed insurrections and coups in Nicaragua and Chile to the military juntas of Argentina and drug wars of Columbia, you would have been hard pressed growing up in South America during that period to live a life that wasn't impacted on by violence in some form or another. When William Faulkner accepted his Nobel Prize for literature in the 1950s, he talked about American writers having their prose affected by living under the shadow of the threat of nuclear war. In South America, writers of the same generation have lived under the shadow of writers, academics, school teachers, trade unionists, and artists being rounded up and shot by their governments.
The author of Last Evenings On Earth, a collection of short stories just released by Random House Canada, Roberto Bolano was imprisoned in the early days of Pinochet's regime in Chile, freed after a year, and spent the rest of his life in exile. Prior to this collection of stories, only two of his novels had been translated into English, so don't feel bad if you've never heard of him. I think once you have read him, you won't easily forget him.
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