cover image Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction

Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction

. Icon Editions, $28 (385pp) ISBN 978-0-06-431502-9

Reading this anthology is like relishing a tamale: it's an exotic but delicious mix of flavors wrapped in one powerfully spiced package. Combining selections from the work of eight authors from three eras and six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Uruguay), Canfield acknowledges the dual ambition of introducing readers to the rich variety of Latin American literature as well as to a genre only sparsely published in the U.S.--the novella. (In Latin America, as Ilan Stavans points out, the novella is a popular literary form.) Most of the writers in this collection represent the ""Boom Generation,"" that is, the group who, in the 1960s, focused on Latin American political and social themes, often expressed in the style called magic realism. Some of them--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and G. Cabrera Infante--will be familiar to readers here. Less well-known but equally significant are Alvaro Mutis, Alejo Carpentier and Joao Guimaraes Rosa, whose works feature quixotic characters who explore Latin American self-definition. When Maqroll the Gaviero in Mutis's ""The Snow of the Admirial"" states, ""I embark on enterprises that are branded with the mark of uncertainty, cursed by deceit and cunning,"" he could be speaking for the narrators of these novellas, each of whom pursues a quest for a private utopia. Pre- and post-boom writers who established their own narrative innovations are also represented. Felisberto Hernandez's eclectic and experimental influence is evident in the magnificently eccentric ""The Daisy Dolls,"" while post-boomer Ana Lydia Vega's ""Miss Florence's Trunk"" eschews the surrealism and fantasy that many of her peers had embraced. Stavans's introduction provides an excellent, if brief, overview of each writer's work. Though short on women writers and inexplicably ignoring Mexican authors, this imaginative collection renders a portrait of a culture still in the process of inventing itself. (Oct.)