Forgive my temporary amnesia but I cannot recall what caused the heightened awareness of Latin American literature resulting in the so-called Latin American Boom of the ’60s and ’70s (both the rubric and the fact attached to it)—the conventional wisdom holding that it was the confluence of the emergence of a group of young writers and their publication by Europe’s literary presses. Looking back, I find it hard to believe Latin American literature(s) weren’t being regularly refreshed by young talent and that it took European acknowledgment to validate it. In any case, the cause of this (my) contemplation in the rearview mirror has to do with my burgeoning awareness of some recent wonderful fiction by South American writers. Call it a boom, call it a new wave, call it the next big thing, call it an alert insight by a vigilant enthusiast—here they are:

The mini, posthumous renaissance of Chilean Roberto Bolaño is a natural result of New Directions and FSG (re)publishing his works. It’s not often that “exciting” is used to describe a writer, but that adjective (and many enthusiastic others) fits Roberto Bolaño. The most recent book published, The Skating Rink (New Directions, translated by Chris Andrews), takes place in a Spanish seaside town on the Costa Brava and revolves around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Martí, and the havoc that follows when an admiring civil servant builds her a skating rink with public funds. Crimes take place, investigation seems in order, odd characters appear. Bolaño seems to be having fun and so should the reader.

Argentine writer Cesar Aira’s (How I Became a Nun) Ghosts (New Directions, translated by Chris Andrews) tells the story of a migrant Chilean family squatting in an unfinished Buenos Aires apartment house. The family’s patriarch, Raul Viñas, hosts a New Year’s Eve party in which the ghosts that inhabit the building become visible to his wife and daughter. La Patri, the daughter, becomes involved with the ghosts, putting her at great risk—the entire story spinning out as an allegory of class consciousness.

The regime of Alberto Fujimori in ’90s Peru has been exposed to have been brutal and corrupt (Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was set in one of the more memorable episodes of the time). Peruvian novelist Santiago Roncagliolo’s first novel Red April (Pantheon, translated by Edith Grossman) is set in rural Peru, where a minor bureaucrat, Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, presses for an official investigation regarding the discovery of a charred corpse. This sheds skeptical attention on the party line that the Shining Path revolutionaries were no longer in play. Saldívar’s naivete leads to his reassignment, where he stumbles (given his clumsiness, “stumble” is exactly the correct verb) onto more corruption. Along with the protagonist’s idiosyncrasies, which add depth to this crime story, Roncagliolo vividly portrays life under a repressive government.

Given the dramatic history of Colombia in the latter part of the 20th century, the civil unrest known as La Violencia and then the emergence of the drug cartels, I did not expect that Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers (Riverhead, translated by Anne McLean) would involve the slightly more distant past of WWII and home-grown Nazi sympathizers and the case of a father and son’s relationship to a Jewish emigre family fleeing the Reich in 1938. The father, a famous scholar, has refused to discuss the past even as the son writes a book about their friend Sara Guterman of that emigre family. The elder Gabriel Santoro’s declining health moves him to disturbing revelations that end up with his being denounced on national television. All of which showcase the moral ambiguities and ethical dilemmas facing the younger Santoro as he processes his father’s past and his own complicated present.

Mexican Mario Bellatin’s short allegory Beauty Salon (City Lights, translated by Kurt Hollander) is set in a salon that has been transformed into an ad-hoc hospice for the victims of an unnamed lethal plague (AIDS). Managed by a former stylist, “The Terminal” has been adapted to meet the needs of its occupants—though he does keep exotic fish as well—and as he becomes symptomatic, he notices an angelfish with a growing fungal infection that kills the other fish. Hmm, what could that represent?

The Halfway House (New Directions, translated by Anna Kushner and José Manuel Prieto) by Guillermo Rosales, a Cuban-American writer who destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, tells of a Miami home for the mentally ill that reverberates as a latter-day One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Rosales was early diagnosed as a schizophrenic and Manuel Prieto’s preface sympathetically lays out Rosales’s fascinating personal story, putting, The Halfway House in heart-wrenching focus.

Chilean Alejandro Zambra’s novella Bonsai (Melville House, translated by Carolina De Robertis) is less than a hundred pages, and charts the ebb and flow of Julio and Emilia’s relationship—whose narrative arc somehow parallels the care and nurturing of a bonsai (tree).

Born in Uruguay and well traveled, De Robertis offers up The Invisible Mountain (Knopf), an ambitious debut novel that begins on the first day of the 20th century in a small town in Uruguay and follows the lives of three woman—Pajarita, Eva, and Salomé—through to the cataclysmic ’60s, also assembling an album of snapshots of Uruguay’s history.

Though not a work of fiction, I would be remiss if I didn’t note Harper’s magazine book guy Benjamin Moser’s universally praised Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press). Lispector (Near to the Wild at Heart, The Passion According to G.H), who died in 1977, was born in the Ukraine in 1920 and immigrated to Brazil and was immensely popular there and in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere and is credited as the author of, according to Moser, “perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century.” Moser writes of his fascination:

Outside Latin America, I found to my dismay very few people knew her, and I long wondered why. Was it because she wrote in Portuguese, a language whose literary productions were so invisible outside its own territory that it was once nicknamed “the tomb of thought”? Was it because nobody expects the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka to be a part-time beauty columnist whose Chanel suits and wraparound sunglasses made her look more like a Rio socialite than a mystic genius?

…Guillermo Arriaga, a famous Mexican novelist and screenwriter, said that you can’t read Clarice Lispector without falling in love with her.

And that is exactly what I hoped I could make happen by writing “Why This World”: to get more people, not just the literati, but everyone who cares about art and literature, to fall in love with her.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 28, 2009

The holiday (publishing) hiatus did not much change my reading habits other than two glorious days spent in total horizontal bibliophilic repose. I was able to read Louisianan writer Tim Gautreaux’s new opus, The Missing (Knopf), which doesn’t quite rise to the level of his gripping The Clearing, but close. Set in the late 1920s, a New Orleans department-store floorwalker with heavy personal baggage is fired when a young girl is kidnapped from the store on his watch. The store’s owner suggests he might have his job back if he can find the toddler, setting in motion a rich internal and external journey.

Amy Koppleman (A Mouthful of Air) can write, and if you like stories about smart, disaffected, and disconnected middle-class women struggling with family issues and such, I Smile Back (Two Dollar Radio) is for you.

Having been impressed with Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (which was a 2007 Pulitzer finalist) and owning all of his books, I dipped into his 2000 novel Plowing the Dark (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), which features an odd commingling of plotlines—a pack of computer experts employed by a seemingly hip (cool, whatever) software company work at constructing a virtual environment that contains all the images ever imagined or created. A Chicagoan fleeing a desperate romance takes a job teaching English in Beirut during one of the civil wars. You can guess what happens to him. I found the software creation interludes tedious.

If you read anything or watch anything (where people opine), Roberto Bolaño is the new literary it-boy of 2008 (and promises to be of 2009, as more of his work becomes posthumously published in English). 2666 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) seems to be his magnum opus, and put simply it’s an amazing work of literature and an amazing read. My only reservation arises from the fourth chapter/section, “The Part About the Crimes.” Bolaño recounts a long list of unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (near the Texas border in the Sonoran Desert); 250 pages of incidents of human depravity and Bolaño managed to keep me interested. For a very fine account of Bolaño (without the complication of a review of 2666) read Francisco Goldman’s insights.

Matt Wieland suggested Benjamin Markovits’s subtle and finely wrought A Quiet Adjustment (Norton) continues the author’s use of Lord Byron’s biography as a platform for his fictive urges—in this case, teenager Annabelle turns aside countless suitors and fixes her sights on the newly famous Byron (just on the heels of the publication of his celebrated Childe Harold).

At the time of his 1942 suicide Stefan Zweig was one of the most well-regarded writers in the world; John Fowles fulminates: “Even ‘famous writer’ understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed in the last decade or so of his life, when he was arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.” The short story The Royal Game (Harmony), the last he wrote—about a very unusual chess game and its players—is a short lesson in why, as is Letter From an Unknown Woman.

Rodes Fishburne debuts with Going to See the Elephant (Delacorte Press), a novel about Slater Brown, a young man who arrives in San Francisco to become a world-famous writer, in pursuit of which he takes a job with a lackluster weekly and proceeds, with echoes of Voltaire’s Candide, to achieve fame. Fishburne is clearly fond of San Francisco and if I could have summoned up some interest in Slater I might have enjoyed this effort more. (The phrase in the title, by the way, once implied the search for fame and fortune.)

Melville House has a series entitled The Art of the Novella (What’s a novella you ask? A short novel or a long story—Jim Harrison writes novellas—is the best I can do.) The series includes some classics (Melville, Tolstoi), some moderns (Steve Stern, Imre Kertez, Gilbert Adair), and now Alejandro Zambra, who elliptically lays out a story of young love that has echoes of the above cited Roberto Bolaño. Published in Chile in 2006, Bonsai won Chile’s major literary prize. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 7, 2009