The Latin American boom is a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s when a prodigious renewal of the Latin American narrative took place. Readers from all over the world discovered authors as representative today as Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. The works of these writers are characterized by a great thematic variety, with a preference for the urban novel (Cortázar, Fuentes) and a renewed treatment of the rural (Rulfo, García Márquez). 

Defining feature is the masterful fusion of the fantastic and the real, what is known as 'magical realism', the most representative example of which is García Márquez's extensive novel Cien años de soledad. These authors produce a total renovation of the structure of the story, often breaking the plotline, with habitual changes from the perspective of the narrator and jumps in the time during the action. The experimentation is so extraordinary that it ends up affecting the language itself, overlapping styles and registers and often distorting the syntax and lexicon, many of the authors of this time becoming icons of the history of literature.

Latinoamerican Literature

García Márquez writes Cien años de soledad, novel that recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, today it is still considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature and one of the classic examples of magical realism.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes La ciudad y los perros, novel about the one related to the violent experiences of the interned cadets of the last three years of Secondary Education of the Leoncio Prado Military School in the capital of Peru.

Julio Cortazar writes Rayuela, a novel whose story puts the reader's subjectivity at stake and has multiple endings.

Carlos Fuentes writes La muerte de Artemio Cruz,  a milestone in the Latin American Boom.

María Luisa Bombal writes La amortajada,  novel that reflects the social conditions of the 1930s in Chile.

Spanish Bites

About

Book Club

Library

Premium

Latinoamerican Literature

1938

1962

1962

1963

1967

Spanish Bites

External Resources

Maria