Las cartas del Boom brings together 207 letters from the four greats of the so-called Boom: Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, written from 1955 until the disintegration of the Group in 1976, almost as shocking as the disappearance in 1970 of the four aces of music, the Beatles, so admired by García Márquez. To complete this vision of the group, an introduction, a note to the edition and a series of documents and a chronology are added.
The term Boom is due to Luis Harss in his celebrated Los nuestros (1966), to which can be added the Nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969) by Carlos Fuentes and the personal Historia del Boom (1972) by José Donoso. Boom as the economic one, which can be applied to them, also known as the Group or the Mafia. In the introduction we are told that “there was never a lack of critics who dismissed the Boom as an advertising mirage, whose novels would not be superior to those of its predecessors.”
And, I add, above all because they silenced, among others, José Donoso and, first of all, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his Three Sad Tigers. Another absentee is the one mentioned by them with praise and reservations, Alejo Carpentier. The absences have been blamed on Carmen Balcells, who for Carlos Fuentes “seemed to have in her hands the strings that made everyone dance like puppets” and who we see at a party at Luis Goytisolo’s house, “reclining between pulpy cushions of a couch, he licked his lips stirring the ingredients of this tasty literary stew”.
This review is written by a convert. My reading and my relationship with other Latin American storytellers made me see the Boom as a pure editorial maneuver. Boom cards are a powerful argument to change your mind. The group conscience is in all of them. For García Márquez, “the only associations of writers that I consider useful and necessary are those that are established through personal contact and private correspondence between friendly writers.” Cortázar warns Vargas Llosa that there is a new publishing house, Seix Barral, “so you have to take advantage of it before all the mediocre ones who are legion in Latin America . For Fuentes, “underlining this sense of community, of group task, seems to me extremely important for the future.” For Vargas Llosa, “I also believe that the nerve center of storytelling is today in Latin America and that energy, myths, procedures capable of saving the genre have to be born there, which here in Europe everyone seems determined to liquidate” .
The group shares the reading of their works. Praise dominates. Fuentes, after reading Las armas secretas , “is the most excellent volume of short stories that has ever been published in Latin America” and, after reading Hopscotch , “What can I tell you? That never in Latin American literature – and I fall short – have I experienced a novel more intensely”. From La ciudad y los perros: “I feel envy, the good kind, before a masterpiece that suddenly takes the Latin American novel to a high level.” García Márquez opts for wit over hyperbole when he writes: “Mercedes discovered that money yields more when she hides it between the pages of de Fuentes. For his part, Cortázar, with his perceptive and diplomatic qualms, adds a good dose of objectivity to the praise.
Many things remain in the pipeline before a book that reads like one of the best novels of the boom.
The letters of the Boom Edition by C. Aguirre, G. Martin, J. Munguía and A. Wong Fields. Alfaguara 569 pages 22.70 euros
