New and inconvenient

To escape her husband and children, a woman dives to the bottom of the deep lake behind her house and holds her breath for hours under water. In her short story collection “Good and Evil and Other Stories,” Samanta Schweblin explores isolation, the desire for human closeness and how we overcome misfortune. The Argentinean writer, who has been nominated for the Booker Prize, is a leading voice in contemporary Latin American literature. “Fever Dream,” her disturbing tale about pesticide poisoning children was adapted into a film by Netflix in 2021.

Schweblin is probably the best known of a new generation of Latin American female authors who are gaining international attention. Among the main topics they unpack are environmental crises, violence against women, social injustice, colonialism, racism and migration as well as new forms of love, motherhood, identity and community.

Even when they get political, the authors' approach is often highly personal. In her novel “Liliana's Eternal Summer”, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the autobiography category and is now available in German, Cristina Rivera Garza tells of her sister who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 1990, at the age of just twenty. Garza describes in detail the emotional impact the femicide had on her in the context of Mexico, a country with one of the highest rates of femicide in Latin America. “Living with grief,” she writes, “means exactly that: never living alone again.”

In her autobiographical novel “Undiscovered: A Novel”, Peruvian journealist Gabriela Wiener also takes a close look at her great-great-grandfather, the Austrian “explorer” Charles Wiener, who took thousands of pre-Columbian artefacts back to Europe, but left his Peruvian wife and child behind in the New World. Wiener touches on topics such as racism, identity and colonialism. She attempts to “decolonise” herself, among other things by questioning her own long-held assumption that history is fundamentally “white and male”. A characteristic of the new authors is their stylistic diversity, despite often similar thematic approaches.

In her book “A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories,” Mariana Enriquez attempts to capture the horror that lurks in seemingly harmless everyday life. In twelve stories written in her specific take on the horror genre, Enriquez highlights the omnipresent violence and consequent wave of trauma in today's Argentina.

“I don't want to be part of the silence,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “Maybe I turn the volume up to eleven sometimes. That may be because of the genre I write in. But that's exactly how you can shed light on the real horror that sometimes hides behind terms like political violence.”

These four books, translated into German, are part of a sweeping shift in Latin American literature. They refelect how the selection of what gets published is becoming increasingly democratic. Finally, a wider range of voices can be heard.

“Even when it's political, the authors favour the personal”

This has led to the rise of exciting new authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Valeria Luiselli, Claudia Piñeiro, Margarita García Robayo and Guadalupe Nettel, to name but a few. They all stand in stark contrast to the long-standing tradition of Latin American literature that has gained prominence elsewhere in the world, including Germany. In the past, a key milestone was the so-called Boom movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Stylistically, it is associated with magical realism, a narrative form in which fantastical and supernatural elements were combined with descriptions of supposedly everyday life.

The Boom was characterised by what could be described as masculine mysticism, a celebration of (supposedly) extraordinary protagonists. Like the authors themselves, these protagonists were predominantly male: great adventurers, politicians, dreamers, freedom fighters, explorers and generals of the Latin American revolution. The female characters, on the other hand, included an alarming number of prostitutes. The books of the Boom movement revolved almost entirely around overarching themes such as death, love, justice, or the search for meaning.

Cultured and educated literary celebrities were behind this movement and their names lined bookshelves around the world, including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar. The alpha males of the intellectual elite, so to speak.

The female writers of that time, however, did not make it to the forefront of the Boom, only appearing a decade or two decades after the movement began, in a phase known as the post-boom. Authors such as Isabel Allende belonged to this group, which was characterised by a simpler language and narrative style.

In the years that followed, Latin American literature was less present internationally, and the flow of translations almost dried up. Fortunately, this has now changed. Compared to the Boom, the authors now coming into translation are significantly more feminist and diverse. Their output is characterised by the fact that topics that have been historically silenced are back on the agenda. History is being rewritten – and Latin American literature is being revolutionised in a way that is long-overdue.