Emerging from the supernatural shadows - Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning novel pulses with the energy of Latin America’s post-Marquez generation

In the Dominican Republic, “a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow”, as Junot Diaz observes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. In some ways, it was self-evident that Diaz would win the big prize this year: no other book on the American scene in 2007 had quite its pizzazz or freshness. Junot’s book was - as they say - long-awaited: eleven years had passed since Drown, his effervescent debut collection of short stories. Of course only rarely do long-awaited novels live up to their promise. This one really did.

But let’s go back to that “supernatural shadow”. In the wake of the Boom movement, one had begun to expect fictions from the Latino world to participate in the magic realism that fuelled the stories of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Alejo Carpentier and others. One got tired of writers who depended on this technique, so easy to imitate and yet difficult to use in any illuminating way. With understandable discomfort, the younger generation of Latin American novelists, such as those represented by the Bogota 39 group, which gathered in Bogota last August, have shrunk from the mannerisms of the Boom. As one of its members, the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez put it: “the Boom castrated the generation that followed it.”"*

*From: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk
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