u/perrolazarillo

Is there any news related to Latin American literature that you wish to share with the Sub?

Are you aware of any new book releases in the field of Latin American literature? Is there a literary event that you’d like to promote? Do you have any other pertinent information worth sharing here?

Thanks in advance!

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The main LatAmLit book release on my radar for the month of July yet again comes from our friends at Charco Press: One Hundred Guinea Pigs by Gustavo Rodríguez

Find a description of the forthcoming Peruvian novel, which is scheduled to be published sometime later this month, below:

>"Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too."

>"Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver—it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her now-obstructed view of the sea, she confronts the limits to her ability to help. That is, until Doña Carmen makes a big, last request: to transform her caretaking from helping her stay alive to helping her die. A good death has much in common with a good life, after all, and incapacity, loneliness, and isolation are devastations that a compassionate friend can help ease. Dignity, community, respect, and generosity—they’re what Eufrasia offers her clients, and what their friendship offers her. One Hundred Guinea Pigs is the lifegiving, warmhearted novel about euthanasia you didn’t know you needed."

Aside from the information I've come across on Charco's website, I really don't know much about Gustavo Rodríguez, however, I've been excited about this book release since February or so when I learned that the translator, Daniel Hahn, won an English PEN Translate Award.

I also just realized that the original Spanish-language novel, Cien cuyes, was awarded the Premio Alfaguara 2023, so now I'm even more curious to check out Gustavo Rodríguez's One Hundred Guinea Pigs when Charco Press prints it later this month!

Peace!

Hi, I’m u/perrolazarillo and I’m addicted to buying used books!

Honestly, I’ve been engaging in this type of behavior for quite some time, probably the last 15 years or so: I just can’t help but scour the usually picked-over shelves of thrift shops, secondhand bookstores, street sales, library discard stacks, etc., in a perpetual search for titles that I’ve heard/read about online or elsewhere (to this end, I’m constantly researching new writers whose works might be of interest to me). 

For me, buying used books is a bit like chasing the dragon, or a never-ending treasure hunt, if you will! Nonetheless, while I always enjoy the ephemeral high of striking gold on the shelves, at the same time, I feel weak for regularly giving into my consumeristic urges, but I suppose that, at least in that sense, I can blame my shortcomings on being a typical American (i.e. estadounidense) through and through.

In any case, at the end of the day, I really do get a matchless endorphin rush straight from the ether when, by chance, I happen upon—out in the wild to boot!—a used book that's been on my radar!

OK, so now that my confession is out of the way, here’s 15 works of “latamlit” that I’ve scored over the last few months:

1.) Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia)

• Ashamedly, I still haven’t made time to read any JGV, but I really need to correct that soon. I’ll likely start with The Sound of Things Falling, though this novel sounds promising too.

2.) The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos by Rosario Castellanos (México)

• I can’t believe I found this vintage edition at a thrift shop! This is a 1988 bilingual parallel-text publication from Graywolf Press. I read Castellanos’s Poesía no eres tú in grad school and enjoyed it!

3.) Nuestra señora de la soledad by Marcela Serrano (Chile)

• I was astounded to find a book published by Alfaguara (one of the best Spanish-language publishers IMO) at another one of my local thrift shops. I don’t know hardly anything about this author, but it’s supposed to be a "novela policíaca" of sorts, so I’m hoping for Claudia Piñiero-type vibes.

4.) Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández (Uruguay)

• I just snagged this one at my favorite local secondhand bookstore yesterday! I had never heard of this author before—Uruguay is a bit of a blind spot for me—however, apparently Hernández is considered to be one of the originators of magical realism, and has been cited by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar (not to mention Italo Calvino) as a major influence. This title is now available from New Directions, however, the copy I scored (believe it or not: for just $3 due to some laughably minor damage) is a first edition from Marsilio Press based out of Venice, Italy.

5.) George Washington Gómez by Américo Paredes (USA, Chicano)

• I heard about this book years ago in a grad seminar I took on US Latino/a literature, but had since forgotten about it. Still, I've always had good recall and was incredibly surprised to find this copy published by Arte Público Press (U of Houston) at one of my local thrift shops (no, I don’t live in Texas).

6.) The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (México)

• I was just out of town on vacation and came across this novel, which had been on my radar since I read Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends back in 2018, at a small yet labyrinthine secondhand bookstore. I love Coffee House Press—what a score!

7.) Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (México)

• This Luiselli title had also been on my radar since it first came out in 2019, but I finally just found myself a used copy in decent shape last month while thrifting. I’ve recently become even more interested in this novel after reading Álvaro Enrique’s Now I Surrender (FYI: Luiselli and Enrigue were once married; LCA and NIS were ostensibly both written, at least in part, during the same family road trip). Although I bought this book stateside, this particular edition is from 4th Estate out of London, England.

8.) The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Perú)

• I have never read any of Vargas Llosa’s work. In my mind, I’ve always been more interested in his earlier novels, however, I understand that this one is perhaps his most famous. Thus, when I came across this Picador edition at my local library, I jumped at the chance to take it home for the killer price of a mere 50 cents.

 

9.) I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay)

• This is the only book by a Paraguayan author that I own; it was a recent secondhand-bookstore find. I have seen this book mentioned/discussed quite a bit on social media, but have not yet tried it out for myself, as it’s a rather intimidating tome. Has anyone here read it? By the way, I own one other book from this “Aventura: The Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature” series (i.e. Julio Cortázar’s We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light), and have a hankering to track down more.

10.) Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (Brasil)

• I imagine that my love for New Directions is no secret. So, when I stumbled upon a near-mint-condition copy of Near to the Wild Heart at one of my local thrifts, you already know I got all giddy—and may have even jumped—with joy!

11.) The Land by Antônio Torres (Brasil)

• I didn’t know anything about this novel nor its author before laying my eyes on its spine in a secondhand bookstore a few weeks ago. This title is published by the non-profit Readers International, which I really don’t know much about (their website hits like an ode to the dial-up era!). I own one other title from this press: El Infierno by Uruguayan author Carlos Martínez Moreno, which I still have yet to read (are you noticing a pattern?).

12.) I’ll Sell You A Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos (México)

• This novel sounds crazy and hilarious to me; I haven’t read JPV to date but have heard Down the Rabbit Hole is especially great! Has anyone here read this one? In case you were unaware, And Other Stories is an excellent, UK-based press that mainly focuses on literature in translation.

13.) Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra (Chile)

• I was pumped to find this Zambra title while thrifting… then I started flipping through the pages and came across the unsightly snail trail of a yellow highlighter (generally, I can stomach others' marginalia and markings as long as they're written neatly, preferably in pencil rather than pen; however, I personally believe using highlighter in a book is an abomination! Anyway, the previous owner of this one only defiled four pages in total with his/her highlighter, so this time, I decided to let it slide). I read this brief novel last week and plan to post my thoughts in the coming days, so keep your eyes peeled (sneak peek: I loved it!).

14.) The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (Chile)

• Last month, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, and popped into one of the branches of their public library system on a whim; serendipitously (at the time, Fernández’s name had been coming up in discussion rather frequently here in r/latamlit), I was able to nab this discarded title for less than a dollar! Unlike the aforementioned Castellanos title, this is a much more recent publication from Graywolf Press, a publisher that I greatly respect.

15.) That’s Life / Así es la vida by Jack Delano (Puerto Rico, Ukraine)

• Finally, I also thrifted this intriguing book from University of Puerto Rico Press. I don’t know much about Russian Empire-born Jack Delano (1914, modern-day Ukraine) but I’m curious to learn more. Delano is primarily known for his photography, however, he was also an accomplished cartoonist (pen name: Joaquín); this bilingual book collects a large swath of Joaquín’s cartoons published between 1955 and 1963 in The Island Times, an English-language weekly located in San Juan. (See second attached photo for a small sample).

(Please note that this stack of books is not the same as my TBR stack, which is in a state of constant evolution. If I were to move one of these books up to the tippy top of my TBR stack today, I’d probably select Felisberto Hernández’s Piano Stories out of sheer curiosity, though, Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone is one that I’ve been intending to read for a little while now, so I’ll likely knock that one out before any other title pictured here.)

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a bit of a book-buying "problem," one which has led to a serious backlog of unread tiles. However, I opt to think of my immeasurable TBR stack along the lines of the Japanese concept of “tsundoku,” which the BBC distinguishes from bibliomania accordingly: “Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection” (free article: Tsundoku—BBC).

So, I guess this is all to say, I’ll eventually get around to reading all my books… one of these days…

Anyway, has anyone here read any of these titles? Please let us know in the comments!

Peace!

I picked up this NDP title at a secondhand bookstore recently on a whim, and now I’m just wondering if anyone here has read it and might be able to provide some insight…

Here’s the book’s description directly from New Directions’ website:

“The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: ‘I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.’ With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine: what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your ‘countrymen’; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women’s Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of the pavilion ‘This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.’”

Thanks in advance!

“If there is one contemporary writer who defies classification, it is César Aira… Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” — Roberto Bolaño (excerpted from “El increíble César Aira,” originally published in Entre paréntesis, 2004).

Well, I did it! I finally read my first Aira… now I only have one hundred or so more to go before I can call myself an “Aira Completist”… (/s)

In all seriousness though, have you read César Aira? If so, which book(s)?

For those of you who have yet to check out Aira, you might be wondering: ”Where does one begin?” (I’ve actually seen this very question pop up here in the community several times over the last few months).

Personally, I started with An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (published by New Directions) at the behest of u/sloweducation1, u/WhereIsArchimboldi, and u/2sweetsavage (you all might not realize it, but you definitely inspired me to seek out and read this true marvel of a novel, so thanks a million!).

Despite having only read a single work by Aira, I must say that I certainly do not disagree with what Bolaño himself had to say about the man back in 2004 (see quote above).

Let me be more direct: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter was amazing! I absolutely loved it and I’m looking forward to taking on more Aira soon! I have Ghosts and Shantytown at home, so my next read from Aira is liable to be one of the two, however, I’m super curious about How I Became a Nun as well (FYI: all of these English-language titles are published by New Directions). Which other Aira titles should be high on my list? The Literary Conference? The Hare? Something else?

In any event, so as to ensure that you all are up to speed, here’s New Directions’s synopsis of the Aira novel currently in question:

>“An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas’ trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the “physiognomic totality” of von Humboldt’s scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendoza gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense price—an almost monstrously exorbitant price—that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever read a work quite like Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter; it’s truly unique! In spite of its idiosyncratic nature, Landscape Painter resembles a rather traditional narrative, at least in the sense that it’s not highly fragmented nor structured around chapters, section breaks, or elipses. Instead, it is one single, flowing narrative, albeit broken up into paragraphs, consisting of approximately 85 pages (in English). Nevertheless, Landscape Painter is still an experimental, surrealist novel in my view, though, Aira’s form of experimentation occurs more at the sentence level, as some of the phrases he concocts and passages he stirs up are utterly unmatched in terms of novelty.

When the reader lays eyes on the text in its totality, that is, by simply flipping through the pages that comprise the novel, the structure of Landscape Painter appears deceptively straightforward. However, once one actually begins to read the text, they are met with surprise after surprise. In this vein, a particular aspect of Aira’s style that I’m just beginning to wrap my brain around is his use of “digression.”

Due to the fact that César and I are new acquaintances, I encourage you all to do your own research (straight up: just Google “Aira digression”), but in any case, allow me to attempt to put into my own words what exactly constitutes a “digression” in Aira’s oeuvre: OK, so basically you’re reading the narrative, right?, following along with the plot, getting to know the characters, etc., when all of a sudden, new sentence, Aira hits pause on relating the concrete action of the story and instead ventures off into an extended meditation on [insert heady epistemological/ontological topic here] for a paragraph or three before picking back up the plotline he suspended temporarily in order to resume telling the overarching narrative.

Such digressions are simultaneously jarring and exhilarating, as they often present the reader with delicious anachronisms that could only ever exist within the surrealist, dream logic of Aira’s literary aesthetic. Here’s an excerpt from the text that has really stuck with me since I finished Landscape Painter last week (marked appropriately for spoilers); to set this passage up for you all, what’s important to know is that the two protagonists of the novel have been tasked with representing “the physiognomy of nature” via their artwork:

>“Both of them had been making these discrete sketches with the sole aim of composing stories, or scenes from stories. The scenes would be part of the larger story of >!the raid!<, which in turn was a very minor episode in the ongoing clash of civilizations. There is an analogy that, although far from perfect, may shed some light on this process of reconstruction. Imagine a brilliant police detective summarizing his investigations for the husband of the victim, the widower. Thanks to his subtle deductions he has been able to ‘reconstruct’ how the murder was committed; he does not know the identity of the murderer, but he has managed to work out everything else with an almost magical precision, as if had seen it happen. And his interlocutor, the widower, who is, in fact, the murderer, has to admit that the detective is a genius, because it really did happen exactly as he says; yet at the same time, although of course he actually saw it happen and is the only living eyewitness as well as the culprit, he cannot match what happened with what the policeman is telling him, not because there are errors, large or small, in the account, or details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction (even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection) that the widower simply cannot see the a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife.” (73-74)

The above digression is one of many throughout the text of Landscape Painter. Nonetheless, this particular example illustrates some of Aira’s primary thematic concerns (as I see them) in the novel, namely the intrinsically imperfect nature of representation, both via the plastic arts as well as via literature, language. This is to intimate that Landscape Painter is, in part, a work of metafiction, as the narrator of the novel often reflects on the narrative while in the process of recounting it.

For me, Aira’s language in Landscape Painter is dense and borders on the baroque, albeit beautifully so; it’s also chocked full of symbolic meaning and surrealist imagery, and yet still, it’s highly readable (however, I will admit that I read this novel at a bit of a slower pace than usual). Much like Bolaño, in my view, Aira achieves a brand of literary surrealism that is plot-driven and character-forward, rather than being overly esoteric and abstruse, which frankly I believe to be the case with some contemporary surrealist authors I’ve read. So, I guess this is all to say, if you love Bolaño but have been looking to branch out, Aira just might be the writer you’re seeking!

By the way, just to put it on your radar: on July 28, 2026, New Directions will publish Five by César Aira, which is a collection of five (go figure!) short novel(la)s. At the moment, I’m thinking I’ll pick up a copy for myself, but that remains to be seen...

Anyway, have you read An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter? What about some of Aira’s other works? In either case, would you care to drop your thoughts in the comments below?

As always, thanks for reading… Peace!

Have you read Space Invaders? What about any of Nona Fernández's other works?

I read Space Invaders over the course of three hours or so last Friday and really enjoyed it! This was my first read from Fernández, however, I have a discarded library copy of The Twilight Zone, also from Graywolf Press, here at home as well that I'm planning to read sometime soon after liking this one as much as I did.

In case you're curious, Fernández has one more book (as far as I can tell) currently published in English (yet again by Graywolf) titled Voyager: Constellations of Memory, which is a memoir/work of non-fiction.

In October of 2025, Fernández published Marciano in Spanish (it has not yet been translated into English), and the 500ish-page novel appears to be racking up a number of highly positive reviews. Per the publisher description, it's one I'd be interested in getting my hands on in the original Spanish, as I'm not sure I'm willing to wait out the translation process, but I guess we'll see how much I dig The Twilight Zone...

Anyway, back to Space Invaders! I loved this little book, and must say that Graywolf's editions of Fernández's works in English are rather striking to my eye. I'm also quite fond of their size, format, and feel. Mad props, Graywolf!

Space Invaders is a surrealist novel which blurs the line between dreams and memory. To that end, check out this lovely, spoiler-free passage:

>"We don't know whether this is a dream or a memory. Sometimes we think it's a memory creeping into our dreams, a scene that escaped from one person's head, lurking in everyone's dirty sheets. It might have been lived once, by us or by someone else. It might have been staged or even made-up, but the more we think about it the more we're sure it's just a dream that gradually became memory. If dreams and memories were truly different, we might be able to identify its source, but on our memoryless mattresses everything is mixed-up and the truth is that it doesn't really matter anymore." (31)

The narrative is broken up into four sections, which mirror the titular video game from the title: "First Life," "Second Life," "Third Life," and "Game Over." Nevertheless, while this fragmented 70-page novel(la) takes its name from "Space Invaders", the video game itself only plays a small, albeit significant, role in the narrative. In other words, if you're like me and happen to more or less despise games of all sorts (I know, I'm such a curmudgeon), you'll still be able to appreciate Space Invaders regardless!

To be honest, after my less-than-worthwhile reading experience with Ito Romo's Filth Eaters immediately prior, I was a little apprehensive about reading another brief novel with lots of fragmentation; however, whereas Romo bit off more than he could chew in about 130ish pages, Fernández's style, themes, and narrative structure are all super well suited for 70 pages or so.

Despite the fact that, in my view, the real magic of Space Invades exists beyond the plotline at the sentence level, in order to avoid spoilers, I am largely going to refrain from discussing any concrete action from the story. In any case, just to make sure you're up to speed, below is the novel's synopsis taken straight from Graywolf's website:

>"Space Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella González Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella’s braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella’s father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends—from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme—were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told each other and the “ghostly green bullets” they fired in the video game they played obsessively."

>"One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral voice and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history."

Something that I wish to make you all aware of is the significance of the name Estrella González, which Fernández alludes to in the text. Each of the four parts of the novel is broken into smaller sections which occasionally vary in style and form. In particular, there are some sections which are epistolary in nature, as Fernández structures them as letters written from Estrella González to Maldonado, the only character to receive such correspondence. In light of this, in section IV of "First Life," Fernández writes:

>Maldonado dreams blue words in girls' handwriting. The most frequently repeated word is a name. It's written on he flap of the envelope and at the end of each letter. Beside it is the drawing of an inked-in star, like a kind of brand, and emblem fallen from some flag." (11)

If you've just read this quote and are now wondering: what's this dude's point? Take a look at the Chilean flag! Do you see which star—that is, estrella—Fernández is referencing? Also, in case you were unaware, "González" is the most-common last name in Chile. Accordingly, with this in mind, the character of Estrella González serves as a personification of Chile during Pinochet's regime (1973-1990); she is, from my perspective, the embodiment of the nation under dictatorship.

To wrap up my thoughts here, I wish to conclude by briefly thinking about the connection, as I see it, between Space Invaders and Roberto Bolaño's Amulet. Near the very end of Amulet, Auxilio Lacouture (the novel's protagonist) has a vision of sorts in which she sees "a multitude of young people, an interminable legion of young people on the march to somewhere" (181, New Directions). Subsequently, Auxilio goes on to relate:

>"The children, the young people, were singing and heading for the abyss... I hear them singing still... [And] although they were swallowed by the abyss, the song remained in the air... A barely audible song, a song of war and love... And that song is our amulet" (182-84, Ibid.)

Keeping this piecemeal Bolaño passage in mind, now check out these lines lifted from Space Invaders:

>"We've never done it before, but we're doing it... We go marching... Not retreating... Someone shouts something and someone repeats it. Somebody else shouts something and many others repeat it. We shout what's being shouted. We don't understand what it means, but that's what we do. We a howl a howl that comes from somewhere that isn't our mouths, a chant invented and started by others, but meant for us." (41-42)

So, here's my contention: the howl-like chant represented in Space Invaders is the "Amulet" of which Bolaño/Auxilio speaks. That is to say, the above passage from Fernández is an intertextual allusion referencing the "ghost-song or its echo" that was once sung—and is still being heard—by "a whole generation of young Latin Americans being led to sacrifice" (184, Bolaño) in Amulet!

If you've read both Amulet and Space Invaders, what do you make of this connection?

If on the other hand you've only read Fernández, would you care to share your thoughts about her work? Not only regarding Space Invaders but really any of her books!

Per usual, thanks for reading... Peace!

Deep Vellum published Ito Romo’s new novel Filth Eaters on May 19, 2026. About a week later, I finally mustered up the courage to brave the notoriously hellacious traffic of the major US city in which I currently reside in order to drive across town to my favorite local bookstore where prior I had preordered Filth Eaters on something of a whim. Once I got the novel home, I sat on it for a couple weeks, then finally read it over the course of three days (way more than needed), finishing last Monday, June 8. Accordingly, I’ve had a week to mull Filth Eaters over, and now must be frank, I didn’t love it.

Has anyone else here yet had a chance to read Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters? If so, would you care to chime in?

Not that it really matters, but the aforementioned whim I experienced was algorithm-induced no doubt, as I follow Deep Vellum on Instagram, which is how I first became aware of Ito Romo and his new novel. Here’s some biographical information on the author taken straight from Deep Vellum’s website (and also included at the end of Filth Eaters):

>“Ito Romo was born and raised on the border in Laredo, Texas. His work, dubbed “Chicano Gothic” and “Chicano Noir,” shows the dark and gritty life along Interstate 35 through South Texas, where his family has lived for 11 generations. A former Professor of English Language and Literature, Romo was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. His books include The Border is Burning  and El Puente / The Bridge, both published by University of New Mexico Press. He lives in San Antonio.”

I decided to read Filth Eaters based primarily on its synopsis (see below) as well as Deep Vellum’s reputation for putting out high-quality works of literary fiction and classics written by Mexican and Chicano/a authors (I own Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft and Juan Rulfo’s The Golden Cockerel from Deep Vellum too). Candidly, I was also quite intrigued to see what “Chicano Gothic-Noir” is all about, and furthermore, must admit that I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for vampire narratives. Now that I think of it, I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that I was more or less “glamoured” by the startling yet alluring image jumping out from the novel’s front cover.

In order to get everyone in the loop, here’s a synopsis of the novel also excerpted from Deep Vellum’s website (and found on the back cover of the book):

>“A high-strung and inventive literary horror that will delight fans of Stephen Graham Jones and Mariana Enriquez, Ito Romo’s debut novel traces the thousand-year lineage of a new kind of vampire—the mestizo Filth Eater.”

>“Granada, 1849. After centuries of scrounging in the shadows, the vampire Radamés discovers an ancient Aztec codex that reveals the vampires of the “New World” live a more “human” life—they marry, they give birth. Spurred on by tantalizing promise of a fuller existence, Radamés glamours and schemes his way onto a ship headed for Mexico. There, in the underbelly of the forgotten city of Teotihuacán, the Andalusian vampire falls in love with a member of this ancient sect of vampires who call themselves Filth Eaters. From their union, the mestizo vampire Doro is born.” 

>“Hopping back and forth in time from the Indus River Delta in 1099 to the Muslim Spanish empire of the 1400s to a flooded cyberpunk New York City of the future, Filth Eaters  pulls at the threads of empire, greed, and climate collapse, but the beating, bloody heart of the story is our very human desire for the love that gives life meaning. The debut novel from a celebrated writer of “Chicano Gothic” stories, this surprising, gory saga turns a new page for a centuries-old genre.”

I had never heard of Stephen Graham Jones before encountering Deep vellum’s description of Filth Eaters; nevertheless, I looked up some of his books (e.g. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, 2025), and have to say that they strike me, at least on the surface, as rather interesting. On the other hand, I have read some of Mariana Enriquez’s work, but only The Dangers of Smoking Bed. I would be curious to know if anyone here has read Our Share of Night as well as Filth Eaters (looking at you, u/workisheat), and in that case, if they happened to notice any parallels between the two novels, aside from the obvious, general horror connection.

My favorite part about Filth Eaters is its incredibly expansive scope (take a look at the second attached photo for a chapter breakdown demonstrating how much time and historical ground Romo’s brief, 130ish-page novel truly covers). Moreover, I greatly appreciated the speculative, sci-fi, and futuristic aspects of the narrative as well as Romo’s dialogues with world history, as he interweaves myriad historical threads with various vampire legends, and a number of different mythological traditions, including Aztec, Romani, Christian, and more. Beyond all this, Romo also plays with the national mythologies of Mexico, and in particular, the notion of mestizaje.

Although Romo deals with some really compelling artistic concerns in Filth Eaters, I am sorry to say that while reading the book I often felt the caliber of his writing did not live up to the creativity of his imaginative ideas nor the weighty themes with which he wrangled. In other words, there are moments in Romo’s novel that feel like literary fiction, and they are pretty great n my view, however, I believe those moments of greatness are overshadowed by the rest of the book which reads more like genre fiction, namely of the horror variety.

With that out of the way, it should also be stated that perhaps my distaste for genre fiction has more to do with my expectations as a reader than it does with the quality of writing in Filth Eaters, considering that I normally do not read much straight-up horror fiction (I know, I’m a super pretentious POS!). Then again, there were some sentences I came across in Filth Eaters that had me questioning the entire editing process of the novel; that is to say, whether certain sentences contained typographical errors, or were merely poorly constructed. To be blunt, on occasion, I even found Romo’s word choice to be somewhat pedestrian and repetitive.

Beyond the sentence level, I also believe that the narrative as a whole leaves a lot to be explained, and not in a way that reads like a sly stylistic choice meant to be thought-provoking for the reader, but rather, in a way that, to me, felt undeveloped or not fully conceived. For instance (don't worry, I won’t explain in concrete detail in order to avoid spoilers), I found the ending in particular to be especially disappointing, largely due to the fact that I don't think Romo sufficiently illustrates the primary motivations behind his main characters's actions. For me, most all the characters feel like flimsily formed foils who are motivated by such vague, yet easily summed-up, universal notions as “love” and “hate” (Romo literally employs these very terms in numerous instances throughout the text).

In spite of my general disappointment with the overall narrative of Filth Eaters, both in regards to plot as well as to style, the most fascinating aspects of Romo’s novel had to do with his speculative envisioning of the future. Romo’s vision of the future is definitely a bleak one, >!as New York City (and in my interpretation, by extension the world) have undergone an environmental disaster that has culminated in the form of a dystopian (global) society. However, in said society, Doro, one of the novel’s vampire protagonists, has made a fortune by creating video-drone technology that he uses to record his kills and then post the clips of himself feeding on human blood to his dark-web website, “VamPorn.”!< Although I was intrigued by these ideas while reading the narrative, again I believe that Romo could have explored such themes with much more breadth and profundity. To this end, I honestly think that Filth Eaters could (and probably should) be about 100 pages longer (at least!).

Anyway, all of this is to say, then, that I think you should read Filth Eaters if you are a steadfast fan of horror genre fiction, and vampire narratives in particular. I also think you should read Filth Eaters if you are interested in Aztec mythology and/or discourses related to Mexico’s national myth of mestizaje. In this vein, I believe Romo’s novel is ripe for serious critical analysis by a grad student or professor rather than a failed academic like myself, so if you’re in academia, you might also want to give this book a look.

Conversely, if you are searching for your next life-changing “latamlit” read, this most likely isn’t it. As much as it pains me to say—because I truly wanted to enjoy Filth Eaters a whole lot more than I actually did—I do not believe Romo’s writing is on par with the greats of Latin American literature. Frankly, even aside from the indisputable “greats,” I do not think, unfortunately, that Romo’s writing matches up with the likes of many Latin American, nor Chicano/a, authors writing literary fiction today. To reiterate, perhaps this again has more to do with my tastes and expectations as a reader, however, I believe Filth Eaters to be a work of genre fiction with flashes of high literature, but in my opinion those flashes are few and far between. But maybe that's your thing; it certainly isn't mine.

If you’ve read Filth Eaters and/or any of Ito Romo’s other books, would you please be so kind as to share your thoughts in the comments below? (Much appreciated!)

As always, thank you for reading… Peace!

Has anyone here read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s On Booze (NDP 1205)?

The only Fitzgerald I’ve read is The Great Gatsby (twice), and I did appreciate it, especially knowing that it was a big influence for Hunter S. Thompson!

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get around to reading this little NDP eventually… one of these days…

Peace!

Hi! I'm u/perrolazarillo, and for better or worse, I'm the founding MOD of r/latamlit.

Frankly, I don't even really remember June 10 of last year, but according to my MOD dashboard here, on that day I created this subreddit, half on a whim and in part out of boredom, sure, but also because I really wanted to discuss my recent reads with others, and I worried that the respective author-centric focuses of r/robertobolano and r/Borges (both of which are great communities by the way) were perhaps too narrow for me to post about all the different works of Latin American literature (broadly conceived) that I had been reading at the time (e.g. books by Ana Paula Maia, Samanta Schweblin, Hernán Díaz, etc.). Nevertheless, I also felt that the scope of r/TrueLit (yet another great community) was maybe a bit too vast...

Flash forward to today, and r/latamlit is now a community of 4000 members strong. Amazingly, it's all sort of gone just as I had hoped, maybe even better than expected to be honest, which of course is totally frickin' awesome!

So anyway, I guess this is me saying thank you for being a part of OUR community! Happy Birthday or whatever!

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Now here's My Top Ten Reads of the Year!

(Disclaimer: by "reads," I mean to say that I don't necessarily claim these books are the "ten best," they just happen to be the ones I enjoyed most.)

1.) Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue (México)

2.) Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (Chile)

3.) On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (Brasil)

4.) Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (México)

5.) Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto (Argentina)

6.) When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Chile)

7.) The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina)

8.) The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Brasil)

9.) Elena Knows by Claudia Piñerio (Argentina)

10). Not a River by Selva Almdada (Argentina)

Honorable Mentions:

Amulet by Roberto Bolaño (Chile)

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (México)

El Túnel by Ernesto Sabato (Argentina)

(Disclaimer regarding Honorable Mentions: I had already read Amulet once before, and thus, opted to leave it out of My Top Ten; I decided to limit My Top Ten to one book per author in the case of Melchor; in the case of El Túnel, which I read in Spanish, I also decided to limit My Top Ten solely to works that I read in translation.)

Remarks:

Now I Surrender had a profound impact on me, and I learned loads about the "Apache Wars" from this novel. I think it's going to be one of those books that sticks with me for a long time! I'm planning to read You Dreamed of Empires in the next month or two; I'll report back ASAP...

Chilean Poet really surprised me and hit me in all the feels. Seriously though, if you're a big fan of The Savage Detectives and you haven't read Zambra's magnum opus to date, what are you even doing with your life?! Yeah, it's a different cup of tea, but there's some extended moments of intertextuality that are sure to delight admirers of Bolaño and Nicanor Parra alike!

On Earth As It Is Beneath is dystopian and action-packed yet also grounded in a buried, forgotten history that Maia has since brought to the light of day. It's incredible what Maia can do in the span of a mere 100 pages, not only in OEAIIB but in Of Cattle and Men as well!

Hurricane Season was maybe the most messed-up book I read all year, and I absolutely loved it because of that. I appreciated Melchor's experimentation with style and form immensely, particularly how the novel itself is made up of a polyphony of six different narratives. Moreover, I think that Melchor tackles some really important issues related to misogyny, toxic masculinity, capitalism, and violence in both HS and Paradais.

Zama is an underappreciated Latin American classic that I feel more people ought to read. I'm overdue when it comes to reading The Silentiary and The Suicides, which complete Di Benedetto's "Trilogy of Expectation." I found Di Benedetto's writing in Zama to be completely mesmerizing!

When We Cease to Understand the World is truly one-of-a-kind, and although it's rather cliché, can best be described in my view as utterly mind-blowing! If you're interested in mathematics and physics, you really must read this book right away! Like with Enrigue, I learned so much history from Labatut as well!

The Invention of Morel is brief but a ton of fun! I really appreciated the proto-scifi elements to the narrative as well as its fantastic nature. Plus, the illustrations in the nyrb classics edition (done by Borges' kid sister) are a marvel in their own right. Admirers of Borges, you have to check this one out if you haven't done so already!

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas grew on me over time, and I have since come to really love Machado de Assis' most famous novel. It's certainly impressive how genuinely modern this work feels despite its having been written in the nineteenth century. Also, it's meta af!

Elena Knows is excellent! Piñeiro definitely managed to keep me guessing about what was going to happen next as I read the novel; she is indisputably a master when it comes to mystery and misdirection. I really ought to read more of her corpus in the near future! On that note, I'm itching to know how her most recent novel in English, Cathedrals, which was just published by Charco Press last month, stacks up against Elena Knows.

Not a River was one of the first books I read after starting the r/latamlit subreddit! Like with Piñeiro, I seriously need to read more of Almada's work soon! Not a River is something of a quasi-magical realist, environmental ghost story; if you like Schweblin and Maia, you should read this one stat!

Amulet is great, so great I decided to reread it this year! Personally, I feel this 1999 novel is often overlooked by those who are still getting to know Bolaño. Don't sleep on Amulet; I think it's at the crux of Bolaño's fictional universe. It's also a must-read in my opinion if you've already taken on The Savage Detectives.

Paradais is shorter and more straightforward than is Hurricane Season, but it's still a top-notch novel in my eyes. Some see Paradais as having less literary merit than HS, but I don't necessarily agree, as Paradais struck me as astonishingly powerful, and it hasn't vacated my headspace yet! Plus, Melchor selected a David Lynch quote as the epigraph to this novel, so she pretty much won me over from the start!

El Túnel is a wonderful, albeit dark and twisted, read! Truthfully, I believe it to be an undeniable masterpiece of Argentinian and Latin American literature. It's also a rather easy read in Spanish, so if you're seeking to begin that journey, it might be wise to start here. That being said, you could read it in English too and it would still be just as great!

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Thank you all again for making year one of r/latamlit such a success! I am sincerely grateful that so many have chosen to be a part of this community! Here's to further discussion and appreciation of Latin American literature in year two—cheers!

Have you read contemporary Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi's short-story collection, You Glow in the Dark (2024)?

You Glow in the Dark is the only book I've read so far from Colanzi, but I would no doubt read another after enjoying this brief collection as much as I did!

You Glow in the Dark was first published in Spanish as Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro in 2022. In 2024, New Directions published the English edition, which was penned by Chris Andrews, the Australian translator renowned for his Anglophone renderings of various Bolaño titles, such as Distant Star, By Night in Chile, and Amulet, etc.

On the back cover of the edition I have in front of me, New Directions asserts that "Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk as much as from classic horror writers." Although I certainly wouldn't dub myself an expert on classic horror writers nor cyberpunk (and particularly the Andean subvariety for that matter), such an assertion rings true to me.

In my eyes, You Glow in the Dark is grim, uncanny, and enigmatic. In spite of the fact that the stories that comprise the collection stem from the traditions of literary horror and science fiction, I find that Colanzi achieves an idiosyncratic, speculative aesthetic, one that is uniquely, simultaneously, both historical and futuristic to fascinating ends (you'll get what I mean when you finish the book!). Ultimately, Colanzi's thematic concerns are related to issues of gender and sexuality, indigeneity, humanity's impact on the environment, capitalism, and technology. Furthermore, Colanzi's work is very much embedded in the customs and cultures of Bolivia and the surrounding region(s), which I don't feel I can speak to with any real authority considering they generally fall outside my wheelhouse. Nevertheless, I do not think that one needs to be all that familiar with Bolivia to fully appreciate this awesome, little collection.

Sometimes rather than reading all the pieces in order, I will choose to jump around in a collection of short stories, but I instinctually, thankfully, did not do so in the case of this book, and I would recommend that you follow suit. That is to say, I believe the two pieces that bookend You Glow in the Dark are very purposefully—and astutely, I might add—placed, and I think that one could potentially circumvent Colanzi's intended effect if they were to blaze their own trail through the collection. Regardless, you do you!

"The Cave" — Of the seven stories included in You Glow in the Dark, perhaps the very first was my favorite! In each story, Colanzi definitely creates a unique atmosphere, yet still, for me, "The Cave" stood out from the rest due to the fact that it's the only story that does not center around a character or a group of characters; rather, the protagonist of "The Cave" is the titular cave itself. Via this authorial decision, Colanzi prepares her audience for the rest of the collection to follow, which is to say, from the start she prompts her readers to consider the Anthropocene. IMO: With this piece, Colanzi spurs her audience into seeing a long view of world history, one which includes the time(s) before and after humankind.

"Atomito" — This is the longest story in the collection. Colanzi also employs some intriguing pictoriographical elements in the narrative that one would perhaps more often find in manga. IMO: This story deals with the ways in which industry, corporations, and capitalism more broadly, shape Andean—and by extension, global—society. Honestly, this one didn't really do it for me, and I'm not even sure as to why.

"The Debt" — I liked this story quite a lot. There's a twist of sorts in this piece, which I won't spoil (don't worry), that truly caught me off-guard. This one in particular was quite a sensorial experience for me; I could really taste and smell the narrative in a way that almost made me queasy, yet which I also thoroughly enjoyed! IMO: This piece speaks to feminist issues especially.

"Chaco" — I thought this story was great too! In this one, Colanzi basically illustrates that although the world she is representing across the collection is bizarre and unfamiliar, it really is not all that different from the world we live in today. That is to say, in this piece, all the terrible things that happen in reality nowadays are reproduced to strange and unsettling effect. IMO: This narrative tackles issues of (toxic) masculinity while also representing the types of prejudices often experienced by the LGBTQ+ community in global patriarchal society.

"The Greenest Eyes" — This is the shortest story in the entire collection, and frankly, it seemed a bit rushed or unfinished—or, at the very least, confoundingly cryptic—from what I recall. Nonetheless, perhaps I should go back and reread this one, as I candidly don't really feel that I completely grasped it. IMO: This piece has something to do with the ways in which global capitalist society controls us all as citizens via our personal desires. (If you've read You Glow in the Dark, I'd greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts on this one!)

"The Narrow Way" — This story was published in English in The New Yorker in September 2023 (you can easily find it online, though there is a paywall on The New Yorker website) before the release of You Glow in the Dark by New Directions in 2024, and for that reason, I am going to assume that Colanzi, Chris Andrews, and/or the editors at The New Yorker found it to be one of the stronger stand-alone pieces of the collection. If that is indeed the case, I don't entirely agree... On second thought, maybe it's still a masterfully crafted short story but it didn't impact me in the same way as did some of the others. Perhaps it came off as a tad too direct and heavy-handed for me. IMO: This dystopian piece is all about religious dogma, authoritarianism, and fear of the "Other."

"You Glow in the Dark" — The final story of the collection really ties the entire book together. When I realized what Colanzi was up to with this piece, my jaw hit the floor, as she revealed a history to me that—I now can say—I ashamedly knew nothing of before. Personally, I believe sticking this story at the very end of the collection was a genius move on Colanzi's part. Throughout the process of reading the book, I felt myself drifting more and more into a world that felt like it was apart from our own; however, "You Glow in the Dark" (i.e. the story) grounds the collection in reality, history, in such a way that it becomes impossible for the audience to deny that there is real verisimilitude to all the ineffable madness that Colanzi represents in You Glow in the Dark (i.e. the book). IMO: This story deserves further research upon finishing it. In order to avoid dropping any serious spoilers, I won't link anything related to the titular piece here, but one should easily be able to come across some pertinent background information simply by surfing the web.

Anyway, have you read You Glow in the Dark? If so, would you please be so kind as to share your thoughts in the comments below?

Has anyone here by chance read any of Colanzi's other books?

Are there other any Bolivian writers you know of who I should look into? (I'd sincerely appreciate any recommendations!)

As always, thanks for reading... Peace!

how to pronounce the book 2666 in your country?

June is Pride Month, so to celebrate here’s half a dozen works of Latin American literature from my personal collection (disclaimer: technically, one is a Chicano novel)!

Have you read any of these books? What books would you recommend to celebrate Pride Month?

Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón (Puerto Rico) — Seven Stories Press

Stella Manhattan by Silviano Santiago (Brasil) — Duke University Press

El beso de la mujer araña (published in English as Kiss of the Spider Woman) by Manuel Puig (Argentina) — Vintage Español

We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Argentina) — New Directions Publishing

El vampiro de la colonia Roma (published in English as Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel) by Luis Zapata (México) — Debolsillo

The Rain God by Arturo Islas (USA) — Harper Perennial

To be clear, of the works pictured, I've only read half to date: Mundo Cruel, Stella Manhattan, and The Rain God.

I would especially recommend Luis Negrón's Mundo Cruel, which is a campy and satirical, if not brief, collection of short stories that manages to be hilarious and poignant at the same time.

Stella Manhattan revolves around issues related to LGBTQ+ identity, the global 1968 cultural revolution, and political exile. Also, Silviano Santiago's novel takes place in New York City, and therefore, in my view can be read as an example of "Brazuca" literature, which is to say literature written by Brazilians living in the United States.

The Rain God is a seminal work of Chicano/a literature; it is a richly layered, multi-generational family saga of sorts that is set in a fictional desert town on the Texas-Mexico border. Sadly, Arturo Islas passed away from complications related to AIDS in 1991.

Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman is a classic of Latin American literature that I am rather ashamed to admit I still haven't read, though I have seen Héctor Babenco's 1985 film adaptation, which I would highly recommend!

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling garnered a significant amount of public attention a few months back when it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026, but I still haven't read it. Have you?

I DNF'd El vampiro de la colonia Roma nearly a decade ago, however, that had more to do with my Spanish-language skills at the time, which have no doubt improved since then. Frankly, mi español siempre ha sido bien castellano, so I just simply was not prepared for the amount of Chilango slang found in Luis Zapata's narrative back then. Nevertheless, I definitely need to return to El vampiro one of these days now that I've experienced DF, not to mention my longstanding love for the picaresque mode. Although there is an out-of-print English translation in circulation titled Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel, I hear it's not great; on that topic and more, check out this 2020 article (no paywall) from the LA Times: "Appreciation: Why Luis Zapata’s breakthrough gay Mexican novel demands a new translation" by Daniel Hernandez

Anyway, what other works of queer and/or LGBTQ+ Latin American literature would you recommend?

Are you reading anything in particular to celebrate Pride Month?

Peace!

Is there any news related to Latin American literature that you wish to share with the Sub?

Are you aware of any new book releases in the field of Latin American literature? Is there a literary event that you’d like to promote? Do you have any other pertinent information worth sharing here?

Thanks in advance!

NOTE: This post was supposed to be made yesterday, the first Tuesday of the month (June), but I was sleeping, figuratively speaking... Anyway...

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The main LatAmLit book release on my radar for the month of June again comes from our friends at Charco Press: Animal Spiral (El gato en el remolino) by Luis Othoniel Rosa.

Find a description of the forthcoming Puerto Rican novel, which is scheduled to be published sometime this month, below:

"The post-colonial birth, life, and death of the collective consciousness known as the Animal."

"Middle-aged streamer twins in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, are the first human beings to successfully connect—sharing their consciousness across 34 translucent cables. In that moment, the Animal is born, an intracerebral force that quickly grows to encompass anthills of synaptically entwined bodies, a floating library kitchen redolent of rice and beans far above the Mississippi river, and a transhuman compound in a future Cuba on the Isle of Youth."

"Circling back and forth and ever progressing, Animal Spiral moves through 400 years of human, and then post-human history, beginning with a revolution on the streets of San Juan and ending with five brilliant siblings: the Squash (humanoid), Calima (beetles), Yemayá (eels), Coatlicue (serpents), and Juracán (anthropomorphic birds), who have millions of bodies and all the world’s intelligence, but only want to no longer be alone. This is a buoyant, joyous ode to possibility, a warning about the dangers of neglecting what makes us human, and an astonishing exercise of the flexibility and capacity of liminal spaces. Loneliness is a collective disease! We defend our right to madness! Brave are not the ones who resist; brave are the ones who let go!"

Apart from what I've read on Charco's website, I really don't know much about Luis Othoniel Rosa nor his work, however, per the synopsis above, Animal Spiral sounds absolutely fascinating! What's more is that Charco will be publishing this novel both in English and Spanish (El gato en el remolino). Charco continues to be nothing short of amazing in my eyes!

All of these are so good. I keep going back to some of the stories in Things We Lost in The Fire.

I'll admit: I'm a bit of sucker for online sales from my favorite publishers, like NYRB and New Directions.

Thus, when I became aware—rather last minute I might add—that New Directions was holding a Spring Sale (5/18-5/25), I jumped at the chance to pick up four more Latin American titles from one of the best independent presses in the game at a 40% discount! (For the record, most of the volumes in my home library I acquired from used bookstores, thrift shops, and library sales.)

Anyway, check out my haul (dates refer to year of NDP publication):

1.) Ghosts by César Aira (Argentina, 2009)

2.) Way Far Away by Evelio Rosero (Colombia, 2024)

3.) The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales (Cuba, 2009)

4.) The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems by César Vallejo (Perú, 2025)

Apart from dabbling in Vallejo's poetry, I have not read any of these works/writers before, though I do also own Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and Rosero's The Armies, both of which are published by New Directions as well (I know, my backlog of TBR books is starting to get out of control... oh well!).

Has anyone here by chance read any of these books? If so, would you please be so kind as to share your thoughts? Thanks a bunch!

Happy Saturday!

Have you read The Hole by José Revueltas?

According to contemporary Mexican author, Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive, Tell Me How It Ends, The Story of My Teeth), "It is impossible to understand contemporary Latin American literature without Revueltas's masterpiece, The Hole." Moreover, Luiselli claims, "Its current invisibility in the English language places works like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and César Aira's political novellas in a bibliographical vacuum" (NDP blurb).

Apart from Luiselli's glowing praise, Álvaro Enrigue, fellow contemporary Mexican author of Now I Surrender, We Dreamed of Empires, and Sudden Death, also lauds The Hole. In fact, in his "Introduction" to the 2018 New Directions Paperbook edition (pictured), Enrigue deems Revueltas's 1969 novella to be "one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century writing composed in Spanish" (19). Beyond this, Enrigue even features a quote from The Hole as the epigraph to Now I Surrender (Ahora me rindo y eso es todo).

After reading and absolutely loving Now I Surrender (see my review here), I was inspired to read The Hole as well, and it was no doubt a worthwhile experience. Candidly, although The Hole is a mere 50 pages or so, it was not my favorite recent read; nevertheless, I have certainly come to appreciate the novel's literary and historical significance, largely with assistance from Enrigue's truly illuminating Introduction.

Similar to Bolaño's By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile), the form of The Hole is a single, stream-of-consciousness-style paragraph. In my frank opinion, the novel's plot is related in a an excruciating level of detail that enigmatically moves like a sloth in a Lamborghini, which is to say fast and slow all at once, albeit purposefully, as the act of reading the narrative is supposed to take one about as long as it takes for the narrative events of the story to unfold. (Indeed, I would recommend reading The Hole in one sitting!)

With all the above being said, throughout the narrative, Revueltas uses particular plot points as launching pads to venture off, in print, into once-uncharted philosophical and political realms of thought. Or, to put Reveultas's "approach to the art of telling" differently, here is Enrigue's lucid description: a concept is distilled from a scene and then sublimated to produce a literary judgement on the limited condition of the characters" (15). In this vein, check out an intriguing example of Revueltas's capacity for the sublime below:

"In reality, the Prick hadn't stopped moaning ever since Polonio had pummeled him in the stomach. His moans were irritating , repetitive, and ingeniously false, revealing quite openly and in perfect detail the monstrous state of his perverse, contemptible, despicable, abject soul. The beating hadn't even been that bad—his miserable body was used to even more brutal and violent ones—so this phony anguish, affected purely to humiliate himself while pleading for pity had the opposite effect, producing a mounting hatred and disgust, a blind rage that unleashed the most lurid desires, from the very depths of his heart, that he should suffer to ridiculous extremes, that someone should inflict more pain, real pain, capable of leaving, him in shreds (and here a childhood memory), just like a malign tarantula, the same sensation that invades the senses when the spider, under the effects of boric acid, goes into a frenzy, shrivels into itself—making a furious but impotent sound—curling up inside its own legs, completely out of its mind, but doesn't die, it doesn't die, and you'd like to squash it but you don't have the energy for that, you don't dare, and not being able to go through with it is enough to drive you to tears" (50-51).

Personally, I feel that the wild enjambment and Russian-doll-like nestedness often evident in Revueltas's prose tends to rival the sprawling, paranoid-ridden yet revelatory, strung-together sentences found in some of Pynchon's most famous passages. Nonetheless, to be entirely honest, the Revueltas excerpt above isn't even the most impressive in my view (if you have the book in front of you, see page 47 instead), however, I selected it, in part, for its brevity, comparatively speaking, as well as for its imagery, which recalls a key Revueltas quote highlighted by Enrigue.

In his Introduction, Enrigue cites an April 5, 1969, journal entry from Revueltas scrawled just twenty days after he wrote the manuscript for The Hole from Lecumberri Prison that states: “‘An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape’” (24). Enrigue then continues, asserting, “The fiction that secures us as in a spider web is the whole political system—and its masters, us, the owners of speech, should be held responsible for the inequality it produces even when our acts are generally well intended and harmless. There is no way out, but there is a thread to follow: imagining a justice system that could do without the spectacle of punishment” (24). Thus, for Enrigue, the entire aesthetic project of The Hole is to reveal the political and psychological effects on society imposed by the Panopticon, that which is personified in the case of México by "the Black Palace," a.k.a. Lecumberri Prison, whose architect, Miguel Macedo, quite literally based his designs upon Jeremy Bentham's model (10-11). Stated in Enrigue's own words: "Reveultas's fable is a meditation on the way contemporary societies make a performance out of punishment" (12).

In order to conclude, let's dig up Michel Foucault, who in Discipline & Punish describes "the major effect of the Panopticon" accordingly: "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should never caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers" (201). If we extrapolate this dynamic of (bio)power and apply it to today's society—especially keeping in mind Enrigue's aesthetic project in Now I Surrender—the "spider web" of "fiction" that comprises "the whole political system" within which we are all entangled becomes impossible to ignore any longer.

Okay, I'll stop musing now...

If you've read The Hole, would you care to share your thoughts?

Has anyone here read any other works by Revueltas?

Do you think The Hole is as integral to Latin American literature as Enrigue and Luiselli claim? (Full disclosure: Enrigue and Luiselli were once married, and ostensibly, Now I Surrender and Lost Children Archive are two distinct products resulting, at least in part, from one family road trip. Do with that what you will!)

Anyway, thanks for reading... Peace!

Like Gabo was the greatest admirer of Faulkner and his first novel was highly inspired by Faulkner writings, which Gabo absolutely was ashamed of and later when he praised Hemingway to decimate the blind influence of Faulkner from his head.

Jorge Luis Borges' translation of The Wild Palms gave a way for Latin American writers.