Published in Bulletin of Latin American Research 31.4 (September 2012) 519-20.
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of
California, Merced
The strange title
of this book responds to the fact that
it is divided into two parts: while the first one contains an interview and four
essays on the works of Peruvian author Alfredo Bryce Echenique read at the
Cervantes Institute in London in October 2004 to honor the author’s visit, the
second one includes four essays devoted to two Peruvian poets and Peruvian
culture in general. The first three essays cover general topics and approaches
in Bryce’s opus and, inevitably, coincide in several of them. As the title of
James Higgins’s article, ‘Inadaptados en la ficción de Alfredo Bryce Echenique,’
indicates, it deals with the image of the social misfit. Like many studies on
Bryce’s narrative, Higgings’s celebrates his oral style of writing. According
to him, Bryce’s narrators seem to have a conversation with the reader and often
abandon any pretension of being impartial. For different reasons, the
protagonists of his short stories and novels are often people maladjusted to
the societies in which they live.
In ‘La palabra de Bryce
Echenique,’ César Ferreira analyzes Bryce’s depiction of the Peruvian middle
class, both in Peru and abroad, as well as his exploration of the theme of love.
This essay connects with the previous one in its emphasis on orality, humor, displacement,
and the type of narrators chosen by the author, as well as on the characters’
inability to find a place where they belong: ‘Esta psicología del sujeto
desclasado y solitario, sin un sitio seguro en el mundo, y la exploración de su
extraviada peruanidad desde un mundo cultural distinto al propio será dos temas
que Bryce desarrollará a plenitud en toda su obra novelística posterior’ (p. 18).
The third article, ‘El valor de lo popular en
la obra de Bryce Echenique’ by David Wood, analyses the representation of
indigenous characters as well as popular culture—including orality, street
parlance, sports , television, soap operas, dance, and popular music, such as
the bolero—in relation to personal and collective identity. In turn, the fourth
article, the narratological study ‘Implied Reader and Narrator in Bryce’s El
huerto de mi amada’ by Helene Price, concentrates on Bryce’s narrative techniques:
the types of narrators and readers, the multiple narrative points of view, his
use of orality, and the self-reflective nature of the novel. It also addresses
Bryce’s parody of both high and popular culture, including theatre, cinema,
melodrama, the thriller, and the detective novel. Price also notes the novel’s
aural and visual narrative strategies, its intertextualities and intratextualities,
Cervantine parody, heteroglossia, metanarration, and the role of popular
culture and music.
David Wood’s interview with the author closes
the first part of the book by providing an insight into the author’s perception
of his own writing. Interestingly, some of Bryce’s answers would have
upset his compatriot José María Arguedas, as happened when Julio Cortázar made
similar remarks several decades earlier: ‘Europa se convirtió en la mejor
escuela para mí de lo que era mi propio país’ (66). Bryce distinguishes his works from those of
the Latin American Boom authors through the presence of irony and humor in his
works, which creates fraternal links with the reader. He also claims that,
except for Cortázar, Boom authors did not write about the cities where they
lived, as he has done.
In a somewhat disconnected manner, the
collection of essays is ‘rounded out,’ as Stephen M. Hart states in the
prologue, with four essays. Whereas Jason Wilson’s ‘The Sole Surrealist Poet:
César Moro (1903-1956)’ analyses the influence of French surrealism on the
works of this Peruvian poet, David Bellis’s ‘“Yo no me río de la muerte”: The
Poetry of Javier Heraud” focuses on political commitment in this poet’s opus.
Moving on to Peruvian culture in a broader sense, Robert Barker’s ‘The
‘Disappeared’ Incas’ problematises John Rowe’s chronology of the Inca Kings,
claiming that several figures in their lineage were eliminated. The essay that
closes the book, Stephen M. Hart’s ‘Metaphor versus Metonym in Peruvian
Culture,’ argues that metaphorical readings of Peruvian culture (as proven in
the cases of the slums in the outskirts of Lima, the Republic, the Incas, César
Vallejo’s poem ‘Intensidad y cultura’, and José María Arguedas’s novels) have
given the impression of an erroneous homogeneity.
Overall, the three first essays of the
collection, which give the reader an idea of the main characteristics of
Bryce’s fiction, seem somewhat redundant. As stated, the essays in Part 2 seem disconnected
from the first ones, hence giving the impression that they were included
because otherwise the book would have been too small. However, perhaps the most
insightful essay in the collection is the last one, which uses four cases to
prove his point about the tensions arisen when analyzing Peruvian literature
through the lens of metaphor or that of metonym.
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