In Latin America, novelists emerge from the shadows

(Guadalajara) Make way for the heirs of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa and Sepulveda: from Mexico to Argentina, from Peru to Chile, women emerge from the shadows in the very masculine world of Latin American letters, which celebrates its reunion from this Saturday at the International Book Fair (FIL) in Guadalajara.

With Peru in the spotlight, hundreds of book professionals are expected in Mexico’s second largest city until December 5 for one of the major meetings for the purchase / sale of editorial rights, after Frankfurt.

“We have publishing houses from 48 different countries, Latin America, Europe, Taiwan, South Korea”, underlines the director of the FIL, Marisol Schulz, according to whom Guadalajara expects “only” 225,000 visitors. over nine days against 828,000 in 2019, due to health restrictions.

Suspended last year due to a pandemic, the “FIL” will reward Uruguayan Fernanda Trias with a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize for her novel Mugre Rosa.

In his novel translated into French The invincible city (Heliotropisms), Trias retraces an intimate cartography of Buenos Aires at the crossroads of fiction and autobiography, where she meets “uprooted people for whom the conquest of a new space and a circle of friends are conditions of survival ”.

Fernanda Trias embodies the rise of a literature that is increasingly written in the feminine in Latin America, with six other authors identified by the AFP network: Claudia Piñeiro (Argentina), Alejandra Costamagna (Chile), María Fernanda Ampuero (Ecuador), Karina Pacheco (Peru), Djamila Ribeiro (Brazil) and Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico).

Literary agents

For a long time women published in the shadow of the giants of the continent, their magical realism or their political commitments: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda (to name only Nobel prizes, to which we must add, is true, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, laureate in 1945).

An exhibition in the FIL premises in Guadalajara also pays tribute to the Peruvian novelists who published in Lima during the convulsions of the 90s (terrorism, hyperinflation, coup de force by President Fujimori in 1992, hostage-taking in the 1990s). Embassy of Japan in 1997), without ever reaching a hundredth of the notoriety of Vargas Llosa, a brand new member of the French Academy.

“As in many cultural expressions, women have been reduced to invisibility for a long time,” says Peru’s new Minister of Culture, Gisela Ortiz Perea, who welcomes the advent of “a feminist narrative”: ” It is a space that is opening up ”.

In their prime (between 40 and 60), Latin American novelists know how to organize and “network”. Four of them (Nettel, Trias, Costamagna and Pacheco) use the services of Ident Literary, a New York literary agency that represents Spanish, Anglo and Portuguese-speaking authors around the world.

In terms of content, the success of women can be explained by the fact that readers are more interested “in minorities, in much more intimate stories”, according to Mexican Guadalupe Nettel.

“And women have always been the great narrators of daily life, of interior life,” adds the writer whose story The body where I was born (translated into French by Actes Sud) plunges into the throes of the educational novel and the family chronicle.

Business concept

Is there a common theme among Latin American women? The Ecuadorian Maria Fernanda Ampuero, living in Madrid, evokes violence, fear, victims.

Demystifying motherhood and confronting “the different forms of violence from which the body of women suffers” is a theme “inevitable because it marks you from birth”, affirms the Uruguayan Trias.

The Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro is part of the broader current of “intersectional struggles” with her A little anti-racist and feminist manual translate in French.

Authors of course reject the journalistic figure of a “boom” of Latin American novelists, a “commercial” concept, according to Argentina’s Claudia Pineiro. Chilean Alejandra Costamagna prefers to speak of a “historic moment” after a long struggle for the recognition of women.

Peruvian Karina Pacheco hails a “wonderful liberation of voices” which sweeps away the prejudice that “a woman could not write as well as a man”.

“I am sure that after being silenced for centuries, women have interesting things to say and I want to listen to them,” concludes Trias.