Latin American Literature Flashcards
This Chilean author wrote about three generations of the Trueba family in the mystical The House of the Spirits, about how the title character rose out of poverty in Eva Luna, and Daughter of Fortune about how Eliza Sommers journeyed to California in gold rush times to search for Joaquin Andieta.
Isabel Allende
This Guatemalan author wrote about foreign control and exploitation of the natives in the title industry in his Banana trilogy as well as the advisor Miguel Angel Face to the title dictator in El Senor Presidente, He also wrote about the collision between the values of capitalist and indigenous societies in the complex novel Men of Maize.
Miguel Asturias
Best known for works in his two short story collections The Garden of Forking Paths and Ficciones, this Argentinian writer wrote about an unnamed narrator trying to find the meaning of life in a room with all possible permutations of messages in Library of Babel and about a point containing all other points in the universe (so one looking into it can see everything in the universe simultaneously) in The Aleph. He wrote about someone who was blessed and cursed with remembering absolutely everything in Funes the Memorious and about the search for a fictional country called Uqbar in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius.
Jorge Luis Borges
Last work in a namesake Borges collection in which Stephen Albert helps the German spy of Chinese origin living in the UK named Yu Tsun elucidate the title labyrinth created by his ancestor Ts’ui Pen.
The Garden of Forking Paths
Argentinian writer who wrote the convoluted novel Hopscotch about Horacio Oliviera’s many adventures and the short story Blow Up about how Michel’s photograph of a couple appears to have disturbing details when it is blown up on a screen.
Julio Cortazar
Mexican author of the Death of Artemio Cruz, about a business tycoon looking back at his life on his deathbed, and The Old Gringo, about the life of an American author Ambrose Bierce’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution. Lesser known works include Aura and Terra Nostra.
Carlos Fuentes
Author of 100 Years of Solitude. He also wrote Love in the Time of Cholera about Fermina Daza’s separation from Florentino Ariza and marriage to the rational Juvenal Urbino, and Florentino and Fermina’s reunion at old ages after Juvenal’s death. He also wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold about how the Vicario Brothers murdered Santiago Nasar as well as works such as Leaf Storm, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Fall of an Autumn Patriarch, and The General in his Labyrinth.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Chilean poet who wrote Sonnets of Death, inspired by the suicide of her lover Romelio Ureta, and Desolacion, a collection of poems designed to evoke the emotion of despair.
Gabriela Mistral
Chilean poet of the deep, emotional, collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, as well as Canto General - a collection of 15 long poems aiming to summarize the history of the New World from a Hispanic perspective. Lesser known works include Elemental Odes and Residence on Earth.
One of the most famous of his twenty love poems is “Tonight I can Write the Saddest Lines.”
Pablo Neruda
Author of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter in which the Panamericana radio station scriptwriter Mario falls in love with his uncle’s wife’s sister Aunt Julia after she gets a divorce. He quite negatively portrays his experiences in Leoncio Prado Military Academy in The Time of the Hero, and he depicts a riveting conversation between Ambrosio and Santiago Zavala in a bar called “the cathedral” in Conversation in the Cathedral. He also fictionalizes the brutal Canudos war, in which Brazilian soldiers overrun a small village in his novel The War of the End of the World
Mario Vargas Llosa
Author of the essay The Labyrinth of Solitude about how the title emotion is integral to the culture of Mexico, and the long poem Sunstone based around both the Mayan calendar and the planet Venus.
Octavio Paz
