The Best Of Young Spanish Novelists
Granta $35
The 22 Spanish writers in this entertaining collection were all born in or since 1975, the year General Francisco Franco died after 36 years of repressive rule in Spain. Many of the autocratic regimes in South America were also coming to an end in the 1970s.
These stories are written in the second most spoken Western language - after English - and nowadays the first language of millions living in the US.
Spanish has a great tradition of fiction writing, starting with Cervantes' Don Quixote and continuing into modern times. Three writers who have affected me as deeply as any over the past few decades are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and that great man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges.
The environment these young writers have been brought up in means they are less affected by the great stresses of the past, and they are "unfettered by the shadows of yesterday's literary masters", as the introduction claims.
But it has to be said they have moved away from the engagement with life in the broadest social sense of the word that was so characteristic of their forerunners; and there is no trace either of that sparkling magic that made so many of us followers of Spanish writing. Indeed, most of the stories are personal, introspective, even solipsistic - very much like the contemporary obsessions of fiction writers in other Western counties.
The contributions are either short stories or excerpts from novels recently completed or in progress.
In most cases they are well crafted and written with enough elan to carry a reader along.
Almost all the characters are sexually charged, perhaps because of the writers' relative youth, but then that could be said of the characters of all the great modern writers in Spanish.
The first story is most perhaps the most extraordinary, written by Lucia Puenzo of Argentina. Neatly constructed, it begins with breathtaking tension, and ends with a shock.
While most of the South and Central American countries are represented by at least one or two stories, Argentinians outnumber even the European Spanish with more than a third of the contributions, and they are the most inventive story-tellers in the collection.
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
