What’s happened?
Carlos Fuentes died on Tuesday night.
Who was he?
He was a revered Mexican novelist, a crucial part of the literary movement in Latin America that came to be known as ‘El Boom’.
What was ‘El Boom’?
It was an artistic movement that emerged in the ‘60s. The writers were mavericks who defied the conventions of Latin American literature. They emphasised the modernist traits found in earlier European and American literature, and many of them experimented with form: they were exponents of magical realism, stream of consciousness and dialogue through question and answer.
What about substance?
This being South America in the mid-20th Century, they were preoccupied with politics, nationalism and history. Many of these writers were left-wing (or at least liberal) and were influenced by the revolutions in Latin America during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, although they decried the authoritarian regimes (both left and right) that emerged thereafter.
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