I read these days The Boom Cards, a volume of more than five hundred pages of uninterrupted joy, at least for those who have, like me, the incurable vice of correspondence. I don’t know since when this fever overwhelmed me, and I have verified with some scandal that not everyone shares it, but the private letters of writers have always occupied a considerable space in my life as a reader. In one of the most difficult moments I have lived, a collection of letters helped me a lot: those that were written over a little more than twenty years by Ernest Hemingway and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. There was a whole instruction manual there on the one thing that great novels cannot teach a novelist: how to deal with frustration and discouragement, or, in other words, with those strange forces that come from outside – envy, resentment, slander and gossip – and also with those that come from within – cynicism, uncertainty, bitterness and the feeling of failure -. I still have the book within constant reach, like a good friend’s phone. And of those there are very few.
But I stray. The Boom Cards It is a comprehensive compilation of the correspondence between the four most notable novelists of that generation, who were united by the strange circumstance of being great writers and great friends at the same time. In order of appearance: Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa formed or occupied, to the monumental rage of so many then as now, a kind of central place in Latin American literature (the cogollito, as José Donoso called it, another great novelist who felt both inside and outside the group, and who left his testimony about it in a book that is both deliciously gossipy and irrepressibly serious: Boom’s Personal History). I have for me that they continue to shape it, because time, which puts everything in its place, has perhaps passed with less indulgence for some novels than for others ―I can no longer read Manuel’s bookfor example—, but the work as a whole of these novelists continues to be—and will be more and more so, I fear—one of the most solid and true phenomena of 20th century literature.
It must always be repeated, a little tiredly, that the movement called Boom was by no means limited to these four names, but in the same breath it is necessary to concede the inevitable truth that one cannot speak of the Boom without beginning with them. Perhaps we have become accustomed to his presence and the mention of his books, because our relationship with all of them is already celebrating its years, and perhaps they have turned into a landscape for us and the sense of astonishment that readers from other countries must have had has softened. decades, but the coincidence in just a few years of their masterpieces must be a source of fascination, or at least perplexity, for anyone who knows the almost insurmountable difficulty of writing a decent book. The four editors of this book—in order not of appearance, but of alphabet: Carlos Aguirre, Gerald Martin, Javier Munguía, and Augusto Wong Campos—seem to be well aware of this. In an informed and insightful prologue, and also gracefully written, they identify the four features of that sacred game that was the relationship between these novelists: the writing of totalizing novels, friendship, political vocation, and the international impact of their books. I think they hit the mark when they cite a phrase by Vargas Llosa in a letter to Carmen Balcells as a premise: the ideal novel should be at the same time The Three Musketeers and Ulises; that is to say, a novel that is about adventures without ceasing to be absolutely modern.
In the center of the conversation – not only the political one, but also the literary one – is Cuba. Without the Cuban revolution, which appears very soon after the first letter in the lives of these novelists, it is impossible to think of the Boom; and not only because he brought them together and put a common purpose on the table, but because he committed them so intensely that it was also one of the reasons for their disagreements. But in addition (and this is also pointed out by the forewords) the great novels of that generation tried to do in fiction the same thing that the Cuban revolution tried to do in reality: rewrite history. Latin American history, which had been so lavish in lies and interested distortions, began to encounter the annoying truths of fiction in novels like one hundred years of solitude either The death of Artemio Cruz either Conversation in the Cathedral; On the other hand, the revolution, which tried to impose absolute categories on annoying human relativity, would end up illustrating the mistake that can be made when the ambitions of literature are applied to political life.
But none of the above would be enough to explain the happiness that is to read this book, or it would not if we did not take into consideration the most important reason: these four writers were also extraordinary correspondents. I already knew about Cortázar, whose five volumes of letters have the only defect of not being ten or twenty, because he was so intelligent, and his humor was so cultivated and so stripped of pretensions, that each page of his leaves us wanting to continue. hearing that voice until the end of days. But in The Boom Cards there is also the intelligence and erudition of Carlos Fuentes, who seems to have read all the books from before and all his friends from now, and also has time to write about them; and the quick wit of García Márquez, who wrote his letters with one stroke of the pen with the same prose incapable of commonplaces that he used for literature. Vargas Llosa is perhaps the one who was least enthusiastic about his letters, and more than once he declared himself a lousy correspondent for the sufficient reason that he did not like the task of being one. But in his letters he also portrays himself: generous, tirelessly curious and committed to the death with the art of the novel.
The book is full of great moments: the writing process of one hundred years of solitudethe critical readings that Cortázar makes of Fuentes and vice versa, the constant attacks they all receive from what Fuentes calls “the pygmies”, the deep irritation caused by their success, the disorders of Padilla case, the joys of some for the good things that happen to others. And the strangest thing, for our culture of the ubiquitous image, for our overly photographed world, is that there is only one image of the four novelists together. It was taken in a restaurant on August 15, 1970; they all came from a play by Fuentes, the one-eyed man is king; they were going to the house of Julio Cortázar in Saignon, in the south of France. They would continue corresponding, but they would never be together again. The closest they came to occupying the same place is the last chapter of Terra Nostra, the enormous novel that Fuentes published in 1975, where his characters meet. That will have to be enough for us.
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