"The Boom Letters"

In his own lively way, Borges asserted that Flaubert's best work was his epistolary. This is certainly not the case with the four epistolary writers in this book: Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. All possess a rich and diverse body of work that places them at the top of the list (if such a list exists) of the best writers of the 20th century. However, their correspondence proves fundamental to better receiving and exploring their respective literary output.

The Boom Letters , a book that hit national bookstores this year, is comprised of all the letters (unless hidden) that the four men exchanged. We're talking about 207 pieces (the first letter is dated November 16, 1955, and the last, March 14, 2012), which occasionally include postcards, telegrams, and faxes. The editors proposed the following criteria for the official constitution (other authors were possible): "1) they wrote comprehensive novels; 2) they forged a strong friendship; 3) they shared a political vocation; and 4) their books had a wide international distribution and impact." In our approach, we will not analyze any of these topics individually , with which we agree, but rather attempt to provide a specific perspective on the work, a perspective that can only be foreshortened.

Thus, these four authors constitute the core of what at some point began to be called the Boom of Latin American literature. Comprising works (novels and short stories) that, roughly speaking , fall within the period 1959–1975, the Boom can be considered an initially lateral and regional movement that, over the years and thousands of pages, became a literary phenomenon on a Western scale. According to critics and academics, it was precisely with these authors that the literature of those lands definitively left its local bias and tone and became international. In other words, literarily, and, let's be Churchillian, commercially, the Boom was a success. Works like Rayuela, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Green House, and The Death of Artemio Cruz are references that current and future writers certainly keep on their shelves and in their memories. The same goes for those who, like me, are nothing more than avid readers.

The best way to approach this long and wonderful process of reading this book is to read it like a novel. In addition to the four characters (they're not the only ones, as they're transparently detectable—friends, friends of friends, girlfriends, wives, children, and family members) we're presented with a plot where literature, friendship, love, hate, and politics intertwine in a vibrant and complementary way. If we can consider a good novel as a piece of life's puzzle , this thought is even more fitting and fitting for documents that, precisely and intentionally, are addressed to that particular flesh-and-blood person. A person, we might add, with the capacity—and kindness—to respond in kind. Obviously, without the linearity of a traditional novel or short story, the reader finds themselves before written stones where, with extreme care, they must place their feet so as not to fall into the puddles of silence and oblivion. We lived in an analog era, where communication took time and daily life, also due to logistical constraints, evolved more slowly than today. It is precisely in this rumination that letters are conceived and written, in a time and space that demands seclusion, creating a parenthesis in a four-way relationship that constantly seeks renewal and fulfillment. Living most of the time in different latitudes—there's always at least one boomer on another continent, there's always at least one boomer who can't be reached or whose address is unknown—the need and urgency to keep up with friends and colleagues is heightened, to receive news, good and bad, from each other, to read books still in print, to stay up to date with new projects, and, of course, to have the ever-awaited, and often postponed, face-to-face encounter. Let us not forget that Cortázar, despite being Argentinian, lived in France, Fuentes was Mexican, García Márquez Colombian and Vargas Llosa, despite his pilgrim spirit, Peruvian.

For this is also a novel of disagreements. In the beautiful pages that make up this collection (if we weren't talking about great writers), and despite the shared language (Spanish), there are different idioms, rhythms, desires, dispositions, concerns, and beliefs. The editors emphasize that the four authors wrote together, each with their own style, the great modern Latin American novel and, for a time, fostered a bold attempt at a Cuban-style socialist revolution in the Southern Cone countries. We cannot ignore, however, that, from a certain point onward, positions will readjust and directions diverge. The most important factor was precisely the Cuban Revolution. Initially staunch and public defenders of Fidel, after a court case (according to Vargas Llosa, Stalinist in tone) in which several Cuban intellectuals were accused of treason, a split developed within the group that eventually culminated in a fistfight in a movie theater (Vargas Llosa's famous punch to García Márquez). This moment, with its symbolism but also its concreteness, signified for many readers, intellectuals, and writers the unofficial end of the Boom.

How can we interpret these words from García Márquez addressed to Carlos Fuentes other than within a novelistic framework? "Mercedes looks at the boundless sea in the four quadrants of the nautical rosette with the secret suspicion and failed hope that someday a floating warehouse will arrive, and I wander aimlessly, imagining what the world will be like when they invent it." Instead of attending questionable creative writing courses and classes to write novels, art lovers should devote themselves to reading this work, which, in its own way, is a masterpiece. Cortázar's aesthetically critical analyses of Fuentes's books remain in our memory, exposing the small flaws, limitations, and mischaracterizations, but also the strengths and achievements, their richness and mastery. These are lessons from one of the greatest literary writers of the last decades of the 20th century to one of the greatest literary writers of the last decades of the 20th century—what more could one ask for? In fact, all of the Argentine's letters are small works of art, extremely well written and with a simplicity that, for example, his interlocutor sometimes fails to achieve: when Fuentes is baroque, Cortázar is vangoghian (in his epistolary version).

It is, as we said, a collaborative work, in which each author adds their own artistic flair, their own facet. It is an unconscious work, and while for Jungians this doesn't pose a conceptual difficulty, the truth is that there are few works to which this characteristic can be so consciously attributed. The Boom Letters is a decisive work, not only for those who appreciate Latin American literature, but also for those concerned with the literary phenomenon as a whole—that is, as art and existence.