‘It’ll jolt you out of an Anglophone sensibility’ – Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists

It’s difficult to approach this text: the weight of expectation is pretty damn heavy.  Granta make it their business to pick out the Best of the Best – so here we’ve got a text that’s allegedly guaranteed to ooze quality and envy and admiration and ought to probably guide your reading for the next ten years (until a new list is published) – but what if you don’t like it?  Or don’t get it?  Or don’t agree with it?  Well, liking and understanding are anybody’s domain, but unfortunately, given the dismal state of translated literature in English in the UK, in the case of the Spanish Language Novelists, like me, you’re unlikely to be able to offer an alternative list of your own, and you’ll have to take Granta’s editors’ word for it.  I hadn’t heard of any of these writers before, and that was simultaneously exciting (a whole new field!) and depressing (why aren’t we getting this work over here?).  Many of the writers, though widely read in the Spanish-speaking world, haven’t been published in English before.  So, unlike the Granta lists I’m used to, there’s little chance that I’ll be able to offer an opinion on the included authors based upon previously-encountered works – and it’ll probably be a while before even the most successful of the lucky authors within get their new works out in English.

All of which is preamble; you want to hear about the actual book and the actual writers.  The editors (Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles) have included a decent foreword explaining their selection procedure and how they whittled down the list, and that alone was mouth-watering – there’s so much out there, if only I’d just learn Spanish.  Then we get down to the nitty-gritty – twenty-two pieces by twenty-two novelists, all born in or after 1975 (all of them over thirty but under thirty-five, by my calculations), and all Spanish-speaking, whether based in, or originally from, South or Central America, or Spain itself. The key-word in here is ‘novelist’ – though many of the writers write short stories, poetry and/or criticism as well as longer works, and though some of them have yet to publish a novel, they’re all defined as novelists – but what we’ve got here is a mix of novel-extracts and short stories.  It’s not clear whether it was the editors or the writers themselves who chose which piece to include, but my preference would have been to read twenty-two novel extracts, since that’s what these guys (and girls) are being feted for – but never mind.

A final couple of generalisations:  I noticed a tendency towards summary throughout – an abandoning of the English-speaking imperative to ‘show, not tell’ – a move away from the dirty realism than dominated (and still dominates, to a large extent, I think) English, and particularly American, literature, and towards a more abstracted literature with vague physical settings, unnamed characters, an undefined point in time.  The editors point out a lack of overt politicisation amongst this new generation; this isn’t uniformly true, but there is a notable presence of personal/suburban/literary plotlines, rather than a focus upon the local histories of dictatorships, repressive regimes and revolution, which their predecessors (Mario Vargas Lloha, Isabelle Allende) tended to gravitate towards.   Anyway – to the stories!

For the hell of it, I’m going to group them in two main chunks – extracts versus short stories – rather than by country or by order of inclusion.  Oliverio Coelho, Javier Montes, Alberto Olmos, Andres Ressia Colino, Carlos Labbé,  Elvira Navarro,  Matías Néspolo,  Andrés Felipe Solano and Alejandro Zambra are the extract posse; Lucía Puenzo, Santiago Roncagliolo, Andrés Barba, Rodrigo Hasbún, Pola Oloixarac, Pablo Gutiérrez, Andrés Neuman, Sònia Hernández, Carlos Yushimito, Federico Falco, Antonio Ortuño, Samantha Schweblin and Patricio Pron are represented here by their short stories. 

Extracts first, then: Coelho’s ‘After Effects’ has a young man hunting down his absent father; Montes’ ‘The Hotel Life’ features a man spying on a teenage couple starring in an amateur porno flick – it reads like a strange type of urban thriller, and I liked it.  Olmos’ ‘Eva and Diego’ deals with a couple’s marital problems, capitalism and mortality; Colino’s ‘Scenes From A Comfortable Life’ is about a young man and his relationship with his girlfriend’s father – this was an odd one, as it switched POV halfway through, and it took me about two pages to work out which character had taken up with story.  I’m sure this says more about me than it does about the story, mind.  Still, I couldn’t figure out what motivated the switch, and I wasn’t very keen to keep an eye out for the novel in its entirety.  Labbé’s ‘The Girls Resembled Each Other In The Unfathomable’, ostensibly a straightforward enough story about a kidnapping, ultimately confused me – as it developed, I hadn’t much of an idea what was going on, who was narrating, what the timescale was, and I thought two of the characters were actually the same person – that doesn’t bode well, does it?  It reminded me a little of scenes from the murder section of Bolaño’s 2666, though it seems a little facetious to make the easy and obvious comparison with Latin America’s most famous recent export.  Navarro’s Gerardo’s ‘Letters’ is about a couple breaking up in a motel;  Néspolo’s ‘The Bonfire And The Chessboard’ is about a gangster on the run and the chess-playing thugs that are after him – I found it pretty tedious, and other than the chess (which felt a bit gimmicky), it was pretty generic crime writing.  Solano’s ‘The Cuerva Brothers’, though, I loved: a young kid and his mates swap crazy gossip about their odd new neighbours, until the narrator actually befriends them – it’s full of excellent detail, fascinating characters, and I’d love to find out what’s really going on with the mysterious Cuervas.  Finally, another stand-out extract for me, there was Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Ways of Going Home’ – a touching and humorous story about another young boy, this one befriending an older girl who asks him to look out for her strange, solitary uncle.  It’s full of carefully-observed details about childhood social life and local colour, and of all the novel extracts, I think this was the one I’d most like to hunt down in real, uncut life.

Short story time! Puenzo’s ‘Cohiba’, the book’s opener, is a tense, atmospheric piece set at a Havana film festival – it’s full of a barely repressed sense of panic and topped off by an inevitable murder.  Good work. Roncagliolo’s ‘Stars and Stripes’ is about two boys in Lima that grow up and apart; the narrator’s friend, Carlitos is an oddly compelling character and the story’s a sad one.  Barba’s ‘The Coming Flood’ is a creepy, surreal story about a prostitute who keeps getting more and more extreme plastic surgery – it’s more descriptive than I’d normally like, but despite the peculiar subject matter it’s a happy and almost hopeful tale, and really memorable.  Hasbún’s ‘The Place of Losses’ wraps one story up in another and errs on the side of postmodern trickery: it cleverly forestalls criticisms by including them in the text, but for me that doesn’t make it clever, and rather than eradicating any problems with the text, it just tries to excuse itself.  Next up there’s

Pola Oloixarac’s ‘Conditions for the Revolution’, which reminded me of a less horrific version of Larry Clark’s film, Kids, starring a group of detached, bored teens talking about revolution, sex and, well, boredom. It nails the generation gap between the revolutionary parents and the uninterested kids, and though the jumping perspectives make it a little disorientating to read, the crowding suits the tone, and the ending is fantastic.   Gutiérrez’s ‘Gigantomachy’, the breathy, desperate monologue of a ruined sports star, seemed rather unoriginal, and likewise, another monologue, Sonia Hernández’s ‘The Survivor’, didn’t inspire me and was too lacking in drama.  Two further stories just baffled me: Yushimito’s ‘Seltz’ seemed to be another gangster story, but I couldn’t really get a handle on what was happening, and Antonio Ortuño’s ‘Small Mouth, Thin Lips’ was about a prison doctor and a captive, but what lay behind the surface seemed to also lie beyond me.  Give it a go, though – maybe I wasn’t being too bright at the time.  We’re nearly there, now:  Schweblin’s ‘Olingiris’ was an almost fairy-tale-like story about two women with very strange jobs – I’m not sure of it was supposed to be metaphorical or literal, but either way, I liked it.  Neuman’s ‘After Helena’ was a blackly comic story about grief and bitterness, forgiveness and revenge; it’s got a great narrative pull and a brilliant ending.  Pron’s ‘A Few Words On The Life Cycle Of Frogs’ presents us with the old favourite, a writer writing about writing, and though it was funny and well-written, it read more like a memoir or a manifesto or an encouraging editorial than a short story.  And finally – phew! – in Federico Falco’s ‘In Utah There Are Mountains Too’, an Argentinian teenager tries to seduce an American Mormon missionary.  Comic gold, and one of my absolute favourites in the collection. 

Any Cop?: Like any other anthology, there were parts I liked and parts I didn’t.  Do I think these will be the Spanish-language literary superstars of the next ten years?  I find it hard to tell.  Without sounding like I’m dodging the issue, I think the dearth of translated Spanish works in the UK makes it hard for me to judge the field.  Certainly this is a talented bunch, and Granta have picked a diverse lot, so ultimately I’d be surprised if at least some of them weren’t big names, at least in certain parts of the world, before too long.  But, the future aside, taking this as a stand-alone, straightforward anthology, it’s solid, various and impressive, and it’ll jolt you out of an Anglophone sensibility and the usual round of British/American themes and stylistic tropes.  So give it a shot, and then claim you were in on the ground floor when these guys go stratospheric.

Valerie O’Riordan