Book Reviews

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 2 311

Kristal, Efraín (ed.) (2005) The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel , Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), vii + 336 pp. £48.00 hbk, £18.99 pbk.

This compilation of essays seeks to expand the study of the Latin American novel by incorporating Brazil’s literary production, as well as giving close attention to parti-cular regions, authors and theoretical currents that have surfaced recently or been neglected in the past. The contributors aim to produce an overview of the area’s novel that acknowledges the heterogeneity encompassed by its different regions, identities, and histories. The book is composed of seventeen articles and is divided into four sec-tions and an epilogue.

The fi rst section, entitled ‘History’, reviews the rise of the genre in Latin America through a survey of both precursors and canonical works, with each of its four articles examining a specifi c literary current or period. Naomi Lindstrom expounds on the

Book Reviews

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American Studies312 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 2

relationship between romanticism and nationalism, the adoption of European trends such as naturalism and realism, and the advent of modernism during the nineteenth century. Brian Gollnick surveys the ties between the regional or telluric novel and the political projects that sought to modernise and consolidate the region’s states in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century. John King presents a concise history of the Latin American boom, accounting for its political context and repercussions. Phillip Swanson’s essay ‘The Post-Boom Novel’ stands out as a much-needed and helpful analysis of what is implied by the prefi x ‘post’ in the period following the area’s most successful, globally marketed, literary output. Swanson proposes an understanding of the post-boom as both a reaction to and a reconfi guration of the previous aesthetics and problems faced by the writers of the boom, differentiated by the marked effort to approach popular culture and move away from the limitations of the experimental novel.

The following section is titled ‘Heterogeneity’ and comprises surveys of regions that have not garnered the attention that Mexico and the southern cone have come to en-joy, be it because they lack important cultural centres or because of the restrictiveness of the Latin American canon. The four regions are Brazil, the Caribbean, the Andean region (limited to Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) and Central America. All essays present brief histories tracing the novel’s development in the different regions. The surveys create a good balance between the analysis of important works and authors, as well as extensive overviews of recent publications.

A special section is devoted to ‘Gender and Sexuality’. In ‘Gender Studies’, Cathe-rine Davies proposes a canonical re-evaluation based on gender. The essay presents a revision of women writers and calls attention to their works’ importance, particularly from those such as Elena Garro or Rosario Castellanos, who were overlooked while their contemporary male counterparts were celebrated as the new literary avant-garde. Daniel Balderston and José Maristany close the section with a fruitful discussion on the criteria needed to identify a tradition for the gay and lesbian novel in Latin America. The authors move away from the fi eld of representation as the basis for categorising novels as gay or lesbian – whether or not the author is herself homosexual or if there are homosexual characters in the work – in favour of criteria that take into account the ‘queering’ enacted by the texts, a complex representation of homosexual characters and an empowerment of the communities they narrate.

The fourth section consists of six readings of representative novels from the re-gion. The essays combine plot summaries, biographical information about the au-thors, and both anecdotal and historical contexts for the novels’ production. The section evinces the importance of the Latin American boom with respect to the novel. Aside from Marta Peixoto’s essay on ‘Dom Casmurro’ by the nineteenth-century writer Machado de Assis, all other selected novels were published between 1955 and 1982 and have a direct relationship to the boom: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo as the precursor of the experimental novel; One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, its most successful publication; Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World , an ambitious historical novel that exemplifi es the elaborate techniques used by the group; Isabel Allendes’ The House of the Spirits , the post-boom work that most clearly adheres to a rewriting of the previous current. Clarice Lispector’s The

Book Reviews

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 27, No. 2 313

Passion According to G. H. is the exception that makes the rule since the Brazilian writer could very well be placed in the same group as Castellanos and Garro as yet another female writer neglected by the Latin American boom. The compilation’s epi-logue addresses the translation of Latin American novels and their reception in the English-speaking world. Overall, the compilation is an excellent collection of articles that manages to expand the study of the Latin American novel while also being a useful reference companion.

Manuel Chinchilla University of Michigan