Gritty as Opposed to Magical Realism from Latin America

Francisco Goldman, who moderated the "Gritty Realism" panel at the recent PEN World Voices festival, proved an expert guide through the shift from magical realism to "gritty realism" in the work of a new generation of Latin American writers.

The four authors on the panel, whose work is set in the sometimes violent, sometimes fragile metropolitan landscapes of Lima (Daniel Alarcon), Medellin (Jorge Franco), Mexico City (Guillermo Arriaga), Rio and Sao Paulo (Patricia Melo), provide a twenty-first century alternative to the great Latin American trio of Borges, Garcia Marquez and Vargas-Llosa. Their work reflects the migrations from the countryside to cities, from the interior to the coast, from the south to the north, with accompaniments of violence, dislocation, and cultural chaos. Fertile ground for fiction writers.

Alarcon, who is an associate editor for the Lima monthly Etiqueta Negra, read from Chapter 10 in his newly published first novel, "Lost Radio City." (The title refers to a radio program common now in metropolitan areas with chaotic migration patterns; people call into the program in hopes of tracking down missing relatives and friends.) In this chapter, Norma, who later becomes host of the radio program, is a young copy editor at the radio station during a time of repression and civil war. She witnesses a house burning. No one tries to put out the fire. A fireman on the scene tells her, "There's a man inside. He's tied to a wooden chair."

Alarcon referred to "a demographic shift" to urban from rural. "It's impossible to avoid intimate contact across class lines and cultures. That's part of the zeitgeist of Latin America now. The urban environment is the primary source material for our work." In his novel, the Latin American city recovering from war is unnamed, although he acknowledges it is based on Lima.

Guillermo Arriaga, best known for his screenwriting credits ("Amore Perros,""21 Grams," "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Babel"), read from his first novel, "The Night Buffalo:"

"Gregorio died in his mother's lap....He killed himself with the same gun we'd stolen years ago from a cop guarding the entrance to a convenience store. It was a rusty .38 Brazilian revolver...The bullet crossed diagonally through his brain, bursting through arteries, neurons, desires, tenderness, hatred, bones. Gregorio collapsed on the tiles with two holes in his skull. He was about to turn twenty-three."

Arriaga spoke of growing up in one of the most violent sections of Mexico City, of being beaten with a bat at age 11, of seeing buddies knived and shot. He mentioned Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison as influences, and railed against excessive political correctness and those who portray violence without moral consequence.

Jorge Franco was dubbed the "accidental pioneer" of a new wave of Colombian urban realists when his first novel, "Rosario Tijeras," about a female assassin in Pablo Escobar's Medellin, was published in 2000. (The opening lines:""Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love." )

Franco noted that violence has always been part of literature, reading back to Homer's "Iliad." "Urban violence is something we live and breathe now in Latin America," he added.

Rather than read from her novels ("The Killer" and "Inferno"), Patricia Melo offered a cogent analysis of the drug gangs and murderers-for-hire in contemporary Sao Paulo (population 17 million at the time she was writing her novel) and Rio, drawn from her research for her work. She said most of the contract killers she interviewed while working on "The Killer" were physically unimposing men recently moved to the city from the country, struggling for a sense of identity, feeling invisible. The gun, she said, transformed the nonentity into a somebody in a reverse Kafka-esque manner. Many of them saw themselves as "avenging angels."

Listen to podcast of the panel, with readings from the participants, here.