Snippet: “Naming Central America” (literary but not Iberian)

From Nov. 25 to Dec. 3, 2017 took place the Guadalajara International Bookfair (FIL). Its guest of honor was Madrid, near year’s will be Portugal, but there also took place a meeting called “Nombrar a Centroamérica” [Naming Central America; website]. Writers from the region met, and among other things, remembered the 50th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature being awarded to Miguel Ángel Asturias from Guatemala in 1967. His best-known book is The President, a pioneering work in the genre of “dictator-novels”.

El País dedicated 80% of one of its culture pages to the event and here are some further excerpts of the article by Javier Rodríguez Marcos:

It could be said that for a Central American writer it is easier to add up prizes than readers. … So what has happened in the region that one talks about its literature again? “What has happened is peace,” answers Claudia Neira, the director of the Centroamérica Cuenta [Central America tells] festival [Nicaragua; website in Spanish]. “It so happened that the political context doesn’t any longer oblige the young people to take the path of either military service, of war or of exile. A lot of them were born in the 1980s, just when institutional normality returned to their countries, even though the problems and a violence of non-political roots survive.” Neira concedes it is still to be seen what happens to the generation that today lives surrounded by the maras [youth gangs] and drug trafficking, but she insists there exists a series of “educated, well-read, and widely traveled” authors… They face the reality of their countries with a cosmopolitan view – several of them have been scholarship students at universities in the United States – and without defeatism.

[The article then mentions some of these younger and older authors:]

José Adiak (Nicaragua, 1987), Lennon bajo el sol [Lennon under the sun] – what if the Beatles were Central American;

Catalina Murillo (Costa Rica, 1970), Tiembla memoria [Tremble memory] – an immigrant’s life in Madrid;

Erick Blandón (Nicaragua; blog in Spanish; book and author information in English), Vuelo de cuervos [The ravens’ flight] – cult book published anew 20 years after its original publication, about the forced resettlement of indigenous Caribbean islanders;

Giovanni Rodríguez (Honduras, 1980; WordPress blog in Spanish), La caída del mundo [The fall of the world] – from San Pedro Sula, the “most violent city in the world”;

Luis Diego Guillén (Costa Rica, 1972; blog in Spanish), La alquimia de la bestia [The beast’s alchemy] – showing the reality of his country, once called “the Switzerland of Central America”.

These authors are published by small publishers, such as Uruk (Costa Rica) with average print runs of 500 copies. This blogger hasn’t managed to find any of their books as translated into English (yet).

SOURCE: El País, Dec. 2, 2017, p. 26 [printed edition; also online]