Mario Vargas Llosa and the Latin American ‘boom’: The extinction of the literary barbarians

MADRID.— If there was any string that united the authors of the Latin American Boom, a thread that later became a fuse and exploded with incandescence in a literary generation and in a language, Mario Vargas Llosa was the one in charge of carrying it. It was Ariadna and it was Theseus. It was he who walked along the paths of the egos and, before he was a friend of drunkenness and wanderings, he was a faithful and generous reader whose greatest g…

In the 60s and 70s, a phenomenon flourished in the literary world as unexpected as it was powerful.The first, the surprise, was passed, but the second, its enormous strength, would last with the passage of decades, to the point of turning that into a new and perennial genre: the Latin American boom.This cultural fact, closely linked to the convulsed times that Cuba lived with its revolution (1959), was sustained by some cultural events, such as …

Analysis by Alfredo Meza, CNN en Español Mario Vargas Llosa was the last living representative of the Latin American boom, that generation of writers who between 1960 and 1970 transformed the identity, customs, and obsessions of Hispanic America in the second half of the 20th century into literature. Born in Arequipa in 1936, the Peruvian writer is the author of several key works of that movement, whose effervescence has been portrayed in theses…

Buenos Aires seemed to him one of the most literary and loving cities in the world. During his remote childhood in Peru, the entire family received every week three eager Buenos Aires magazines: his father read 'Leoplan', his mother 'Para Ti' and Mario was delighted and instructed with the colorful pages of 'Billiken'. Then at 17 years old, already with a determined and firm vocation, he assessed whether he should develop as a writer in Buenos A…

We have never known as well as now how truly barbaric two dozen writers from many Latin American countries were more than half a century ago. There was hardly any similarity between them, even though they were all heirs and intellectual sons of another handful of previous names without too fertile a bond with Spain (with the exception perhaps of three poets, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, and an early storyteller with few bad Spani…

Writers, poets and lovers of culture, in particular; and the speakers of Spanish, in general, we feel the sensitive disappearance of the last figure of the famous Latin American boom, of which Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes were part, whose works in our language were projected throughout the world. Read also: El [...] La entrada Pedro Lozada Sira: With the passing of Mario Vargas Llosa disappears the last figure of the…