I have never been to Latin America. (Well, I've not been to the current representation of Latin America. The pictures here are from California, which used to be part of Mexico, and the Philippines, which some see as an extension of Latin America. Regions are shape-shifters.)

I have also read extraordinarily little Latin American fiction. I so hated Love in the Time of Cholera that I think it inoculated me against Latin American writers for many years. But of late, I've dipped the toes in again.



1.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 1996, Death in the Andes

Well, it's bleak. The mountains are menacing, with their thunderstorms, their landslides, and their precipitous paths. The villages are depressing. Lituma, one of the central characters, is from the coast, and he definitely struggles with this "murky, mountainous universe unamenable to the rule of reason".

And as if that's not bad enough, there's a constant threat of violence, both from the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas, whose ideology-driven destructiveness is reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge, and from the locals' superstition, which pushes certain of them all the way to human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Even the "light relief", the love story narrated by Tomasito, Lituma's naively romantic subordinate, is pockmarked with murder and violence.

It's a powerful book, for sure. The reader gets sucked into the suspense and the looming atmosphere. And there is, as many reviewers point out, a brilliance in the way the author links conversations past and present.

I'm not equipped to judge whether "the violent past that haunts the hemisphere still lingers starkly in Peru". But I'm intrigued by the perspective of one of the characters, a European scholar. Peru, he argues, "is a country nobody can understand... and... nothing is more attractive than an indecipherable mystery."





2.
Paolo Coelho, 2005, The Zahir

There's something about Paolo Coelho, it seems, that invites people to let rip. "Nothing hurls a writer into stupidity more rapidly than the desire to be thought wise," says this reviewer, for example. Coelho is a purveyor, says another, of "one-size-fits-all flat-pack spirituality".

Some are rather more even-handed, acknowledging the appeal of The Zahir (or indeed Coelho's work in general) to "those who look for meaning".

But the book was a challenge, I found. Mostly because the narrator is SO annoying. So infuriatingly self-satisfied, self-centred, pompous, vain, and disloyal... The novel revolves around the abrupt disappearance of Esther, his wife. But really, there were so many reasons any partner would leave this guy that the whole thing fails to stack up as any sort of mystery...

And the irritating qualities are doubly grating given the supposed spiritual themes.

A particularly scathing Kirkus review spits: "Abstractions, bromides and oversimplifications abound, as Coelho's scarcely fictionalized narrator holds forth on freedom, love, the 'Divine Energy' through which love flows and the enigma of self-realization."

And yes, indeed, all that lerrrve stuff that Mikhail spouts is definitely a little hard to take...

In this interview, Coelho says he is "stoical" about bad reviews:

"'No one is going to change the way I write,' he said. 'Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.'"

The voyage... And that's where he gets me, even if only a little bit. I'm a sucker for a voyage story.

Coelho has had a colourful life. What kept him going, despite mental hospitals, prison, and torture, "was his belief he would be a writer. It took a long time. His turning point was a 800km pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain in 1986. 'At the end I thought either I forget my dream or write a book.'"

There's a resonance about that story...

And every now and then, amidst forests of vacuousness, there's a kind of gem. Esther, for example, asks a classic "noble nomad" character why people are sad:

"'That's simple,' says the old man. 'They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.'"

That's true, right? Again, it resonates. And it's that occasional flash of brilliance that's Coelho's key to success, I suppose.

I can't imagine returning to this author. But I'll hang on to what he holds out.





3.
Isabel Allende, 1982, The House of the Spirits

This is another family saga. I love that genre, and Allende very successfully conveys the endless roll of social and political history through the eyes of three generations of the Trueba family. That's what keeps you reading.

The writing is also tremendously evocative. You can feel that hot farmland, and that shadowy old house where the spirits roam.

There were certain annoyances, however.

The book, in the words of one reviewer, "seems guilty of that extravagant and whimsical fabulousness so dear to the imagination of many South and Central American fictionalists". This is apparently "magical realism", and I guess I'm not a fan.

And Estaban Trueba, the monstrous male lead, is indeed "a boringly stupid and vicious man".

It's a credit to the author that the violence he is depicted as using to advance and defend his sense of rich-male entitlement is sickeningly believable, and the story clearly shows how his abusive behaviour sows seeds that will ensure foul harvests in the future. But he dominates the story like a hippo in a bathtub. Against his, the characters of others (particularly the women) just do not have the space to unfold. Whereas we end the book feeling that we really know and hate this ghastly colossus, there's always something fuzzy-edged and elusive about the depictions of the women.

Whereas I read Vargos Llosa in English, and Coelho in Indonesian (because my 46% Duolingo score for Portuguese does not quite equip me to read novels yet), I read Allende in Spanish. It's actually not easy Spanish, and the paragraphs are immense (exactly the kind of paragraphs I tell my students not to write).

I end my little literary excursion with the renewed feeling that I know nothing of Latin America.

But what a continent. What a history.

Must visit.