Gonzalo Barr

James Joyce knew that one way to assure the longevity of his works was to fill them with literary and other cultural references that would keep generations of graduate students fishing for material on which to write entire theses and dissertations. Academics often play a big role in the life of a writer. I would bet that their role is greater than the one played by critics. Critical reviews may affect the immediate sales of a work, but their impact likely fades faster than thunder on a rainy afternoon.Other times, it is a writer or writers who bring attention to the work of another writer. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. And that is the case of deceased Colombian writer, Andrés Caicedo, who overdosed on sixty Seconals in 1977 at the age of 25. Now Alberto Fuguet, the Chilean film auteur, writer, and co-editor with Sergio Gómez of the collection of short stories, McOndo (Mondadori 1996), is writing Caicedo’s “autobiography.”

Fuguet is basing his work on the letters and writings that Caicedo left before he committed suicide. I don’t know Caicedo’s work.  I had never heard of his name until Fuguet brought it up in his blog.  I have to admit that I am more than a little suspicious of anyone who is known for having committed suicide at a young age and cut short a career robust with promise.  The exploitation by the media of that particular narrative after James Dean crashed his Porsche, after Jim Morrison overdosed, has done a lot to lighten its tragic weight.  Doesn’t Meursault, in The Stranger, relate the story of a young writer who publicizes his debut novel by committing suicide? The critics take notice, so he achieves that much. But in the end, they judge the novel mediocre.

Most of Caicedo’s work is out of print and difficult to find outside Colombia.  It was chance that led Fuguet, while in Peru, to pick up Caicedo’s book of film criticism, Ojo al cine, and to discover that the deceased author had views similar to his own. Fuguet tells us that Caicedo’s other works, including his novel, ¡Que viva la música!, in many ways preceded the McOndo writers, of which Fuguet is considered a founding and pre-eminent member.

Who are the McOndo writers and isn’t it spelled Macondo, not McOndo? you ask.

The McOndo writers, to the extent that it is an actual literary movement (and even Fuguet sometimes doubts that it is), seeks to replace Magical Realism with urban, pop-inflected globalism. McOndo is a play on the name of Garcia Marquez’s village in One Hundred Years of Solitude.  But it is also meant to resonate with the global brand, McDonald’s, and the ethos of consumerism that has done as much to transform the world today as guns and religion did hundreds of years ago.

The group of writers who have come to be associated with McOndo, some of the ones whose work first appeared in the collection mentioned above (as well as those belonging to national variants of the movement, like the “Crack Movement” in Mexico, of which Jorge Volpi is probably the best known here) also seek to liberate the Latin American writer from having to take a political stand or even to write about his own country and time.  Volpi, for example, wrote a novel about Nazis and physics.  Fuguet’s own novels and stories have little to do with Pinochet and everything to do with urban disaffection and banality.  If you had to compare his work with that of another writer, Isabel Allende is the last name that would come to mind.  He is closer aesthetically to the early Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

McOndo and the Cracks want to give Latin American writers the same freedom that other writers take for granted –

El gran tema de la identidad latinoamericana (¿quienes somos?) pareció dejar paso al tema de la identidad personal (¿quién soy?). Los cuentos de McOndo se centran en realidades individuales y privadas. … No son frescos sociales ni sagas colectivas. Si hace unos años la disyuntiva del escritor joven estaba entre tomar el lápiz o la carabina, ahora parece que lo más angustiante para escribir es elegir entre Windows 95 o Macintosh.

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It appears that the great theme of Latin American Identity (Who Are We?) has yielded to the theme of personal identity (Who Am I?). The stories in McOndo are about individual and private realities… They are not social frescos or collective sagas. If years ago the young writer had to choose between grabbing a pencil or a carbine, now it seems like his toughest decision before writing is choosing between Windows 95 and Macintosh.

From “Presentación del país McOndo” by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in McOndo (1996) [translation to English mine]

Of the McOndo writers, Fuguet has clearly made the biggest inroads into the US. McOndo, the collection of short stories is unfortunately out of print in Spanish. To my knowledge it was never translated to English. This is a shame. The book, like all collections of short stories, is uneven. The editors included works by writers whose selection we could take issue with and excluded others who should have been there. No one can argue, though, with the proposition that the book is one of the most important to appear in Latin American letters in the late twentieth century.Several of Fuguet’s books are available in English (which I indicate by italicizing the English translation of the title) — Sobredosis (Overdose), Mala Onda (translated as Bad Vibes), Las películas de mi vida (The Movies of My Life) and Cortos (Shorts). Unfortunately, Tinta roja (Red Ink), a novel that also takes place in Santiago but has the flavor of 1940s noir has not appeared in English. Neither has Por favor, rebobinar (Please rewind).

Other members of the McOndo writers include Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia) and Santiago Gamboa (Colombia). Paz Soldán’s novels are now being translated to English, which is a boon. He is still under forty and has written numerous long novels and collections of very brief stories. They include El delirio de Turing (Turing’s Delirium), a political and techno-thriller, La materia del deseo (The Matter of Desire), a romance across two cultures, Sueños digitales (Digital Dreams), Río fugitivo (Río Fugitivo), and most recently, Palacio quemado (Burnt Palace). His collections of very short fiction include, Amores imperfectos (Imperfect Loves), which reminded me a little of Italo Calvino’s collection of short stories Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves) and Desencuentros (Misencounters).

On the other hand, Santiago Gamboa’s works remain out of reach unless you read them in the original Spanish (or the Italian, French, Greek, Portuguese, Czech or German translations). And that is a shame because he is as talented as they come. His novel, El síndrome de Ulíses (The Ulysses Syndrome), about young Latin American intellectuals trying to find their way in a distant, cold, and foreign Paris, is brilliant. Other novels include, Perder es cuestión de método (Losing is a Question of Style) and Páginas de vuelta (Turned Pages).

Other writers were published in McOndo and are associated with the group — Rodrigo Fresán, for one — but I have not read them yet and cannot comment.

There is the grossly unfortunate tendency in the US to view Latin America as a whole — one people, one race, one ethnic group — when the opposite is true. A single ethnic group of “Hispanics” does not exist any more than does an ethnic group called “United Statesians,” comprised of anyone and everyone who comes from the US.  Latins can be European, African, Amerindian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, or everything in between. The irony is that just when we should be discovering that no one south of Central America eats tortillas and tacos and no one north of Rio Grande do Sul drinks mate, and that café in the hispanophone Caribbean means something like foamy, rich espresso, where most everywhere else it is a stronger version of the foul-tasting reheated drink that people sip continuously in offices all over the US, along comes this group of writers who create stories about people who could be living anywhere in the world. And that is as far away from the affectedly exotic world of Macondo as the urbane planet of McOndo can get.

Whether Caicedo was a precursor to the McOndo group, as Fuguet maintains, remains to be proven. Perhaps his “autobiography” will bring Caicedo’s works back into print. Then we will be able to judge for ourselves.

Sources: El tiempo (Colombia), McOndo, edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Sergio Gómez, articles on Andrés Caicedo, Alberto Fuguet, McOndo, Crack Movement, and Jorge Volpi, Wikipedia, biography of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Houghton Mifflin website, biography of Santiago Gamboa, Editorial Seix Barral website