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Originally Posted by evollove

The 20th century was breathtaking in the amount of great literature produced. Making a list, though, seems pointless. I'm incredibly well-read and I'm sure I've read .00001 of everything worth reading. The very best author of the 20th century is probably someone none of us has heard of.

sure but name your favorites and say why

i mean one of the reasons i rate GGM so high is that with him latin american literature truly came of age in teh sense that a particular vision of the world finally found its shape in letters.

previously literature in the continent had been more or less european, an imitation and recycle of what happened across the atlantic, following more or less the currents that came out of spain first, paris later.

and there were some original figures there, but with some exceptions (maybe ricardo palma in peru, and machado de assis in brazil... sorry for names i can't recall off the top of my head) their visions weren't "of" the place but were european transplants "applied" to the americas.

like, the germans discovered the alps and suddenly we "discovered" american geography. so you put the andes or the amazon instead of the alps and same shit, go on with the poems about the sublime, blabla.

it goes on and on... "independence" took a long time culturally (more so than politically). i mean there were native cultures, and african cultures, but they never saw book form. you might hear them in stuff like the rumba, or chicha music, though. literature was mainly a "white" thing.

garcia marquez managed to finally create a vision that was properly latin american, mixing myth and folktale and history and town gossip and everything else. of course it had to be in the caribbean-- the biggest melting pot in history.

sure, he was a great admirer and disciple of faulkner so it's not like he invented everything he did. but the things he incorporated, the elements that are properly local, caribbean and colombian in his case, are what made his books a new thing completely. plus he's waaaaaay funnier and more imaginative and livelier than faulkner ever way.

he managed to give a mongrel culture a proper mongrel form-- and he was suddenly the vanguard, and no longer the imitator, when he did.