South America

Overview

In the sixties the continent produced a generation that Spanish publishing launched together, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar, whose books sold in the millions: the word boom names a literary moment as much as a bookselling operation. Before them, Machado de Assis had written novels in Brazil that Europe ignored for a century, and Borges had published Ficciones in 1944. Cinema follows the same movement with New Latin American Cinema, from Glauber Rocha's Barravento to Sanjines's Ukamau, shot in Aymara. The word boom names a bookselling operation as much as a literary moment.

What circulates

Buenos Aires long printed for the whole continent, and the exile of Spanish houses under Franco strengthened that role; Barcelona later took it over. Brazil, Lusophone, has its own market, larger than all the others combined, and communicates little with them: a Brazilian novelist is often translated in Paris before being read in Bogota.

Limits of this grouping

The zone puts together two worlds that read each other little: the Hispanophone and the Lusophone, whose traditions and dates do not coincide. It also holds three countries belonging to neither, French Guiana, Dutch-speaking Suriname and anglophone Guyana, whose literature is read with that of the Caribbean.

Works cited

• NovelThe AlienistO alienistaJoaquim Maria Machado de Assis · 1881A satirical tale in which a physician, in the name of science, locks up in his asylum a growing number of his fellow citizens.LiteraturePublic domain
• Short storiesFictionsFiccionesJorge Luis Borges · 1944Short tales in which a library, an encyclopaedia or a memory that forgets nothing become vertigos.Literature
• NovelChronicle of a Death ForetoldCrónica de una muerte anunciadaGabriel García Márquez · 1981Two brothers announce everywhere the murder they are preparing, and an entire town lets it happen.Literature
• CinemaUkamauJorge Sanjinés · 1966An island on Lake Titicaca and the altiplano, where a peasant and a mestizo share neither the same language nor the same rights.Cinema