When last July the newspaper The New York Times presented its list of the best books published so far in the 21st century, many voices were raised to complain about what seemed like notable absences. However, where some saw a problem, The Conversation He saw an opportunity.
And when our colleagues from Australia and New Zealand presented the lists of their respective countries, we reaffirmed that idea of opportunity.
The American newspaper’s list only included six mentions of Latin American writers, and two of those books (“The Marvelous Brief Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Díaz, and “Fortuna,” by Hernán Díaz) had been originally written in English.
But we have always defended the power, plurality and richness of our language as a transmitter of knowledge.
So, so that the representation of literature in Spanish was not only the responsibility of those who had managed to find a place in that selection, we contacted 38 experts from various Spanish and Latin American universities to choose the 20 best books originally written in Spanish since on January 1, 2000.
We asked our volunteers to choose a first book and two mentions. Based on that, we prepared the list of 20, which we preferred not to number due to the various ties that have occurred in it.
Some of the authors who voted for the chosen books have written a few lines to explain what is special about that work. And at the end of the article are included all those number 1 of the selectors who did not make it onto any other teammate’s list, but who deserved a first place in their hearts.
The lists, in the end, rather than establishing an order of preference or quality, serve to recover titles that some of us did not remember, or that we did not know we had liked so much. No one doubts the quality of the first three selected, which have been on everyone’s lips since their publication, but some of the other selected books may be a discovery for many readers.
“2666”, by Roberto Bolaño
For quite some time I dreamed about Hans Reiter, a character from “2666”. Hans Reiter came back to me like every Sunday afternoon. In the same way, the police coldness of the files on those dead, raped, missing, tortured women became a fire of rage and pain.
Roberto Bolaño seems to announce in “2666” the end of the West, a chaotic apocalypse in which the characters move in spaces that are difficult to define, with contours marked by diffuse and unreal borders; spaces inhabited, to a large extent, by beings who know horror.
The ghostly murmurs of Juan Rulfo can no longer be heard due to the no less ghostly screams that come from the violent horror of the Mexican border, from Bolaño’s Santa Teresa, although there, along with the whores and the executives, we also see the “ Indian women with packages on their backs”, the same Indian women photographed by Rulfo who have arrived at a destination where they are only allowed to continue carrying their packages forever.
Isabel Giménez Caro, professor of Spanish Literature, University of Almería
“Infinity in a reed”, by Irene Vallejo
“Infinity in a Reed”, by Irene Vallejo, offers an amazing journey through the history of books, pieces of times intertwined through papyrus, parchment and paper.
Thus, this essay invites us on a journey that goes from the Greek classics to medieval manuscripts, passing through the Library of Alexandria, the copyists’ workshops and digital screens.
All this masterfully weaving a large number of historiographic, literary and cultural sources together with intimate experiences about the infinite dialogue involved in the preservation of knowledge, culture and identity at the heart of the written word.
María Di Muro Pellegrino, professor and researcher at the Humanistic Research and Training Center, Andrés Bello Catholic University
“The Feast of the Goat”, by Mario Vargas Llosa
Published in 2000, “The Feast of the Goat” may be the last of the great novels of the Peruvian Hispanic writer Mario Vargas Llosa, after titles of the relevance of “The City and the Dogs”, “The Green House”, “ The war at the end of the world” and, above all, “Conversation in the Cathedral”.
It also represents the culmination of a whole series of exceptional stories by different authors – “El Señor Presidente”, “Yo, el Supremo”, “El Autum del Patriarch”, etc. – whose main objective is to carry out a profound reflection on dictatorships in Latin America.
Vargas Llosa’s work also stands out for its style and narrative strength.
José Belmonte Serrano, professor of Spanish Literature, University of Murcia
“Your face tomorrow”, by Javier Marías
“Your face tomorrow”, by Javier Marías, is a trilogy composed of “Fever and Lance” (2002), “Dance and Dream” (2004) and “Poison and Shadow and Goodbye” (2007). In it, the author explores through his characters various episodes of recent history, people and events that have been marginalized or forgotten, with which the experience of his protagonist, Jaime Deza, is intertwined.
Through prose that evokes the narrative of grand styleMarías builds a world in which the plots of the spy novel, the campus novel and the most relevant historical events of the 20th century merge, in an immersive narrative that draws the reader along while reflecting on the writing process itself and the constitution of a world in which fiction and reality have very diffuse limits.
Juan José Lanz Rivera, professor of Spanish Literature, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
“The man who loved dogs”, by Leonardo Padura
This novel resembles the great ones of the Latin American boom due to its totalizing vocation and its historical and identity ambition, and it is placed outside the morass of doubts, weak thinking and dystopian surrenders of a large part of the novels of our century.
Leonardo Padura follows the canons of the modern historical novel and offers a monumental fresco, like very few dare to attempt, of a time in which totalitarian regimes and terror devastated the Western world, with a very pleasant style, without giving lessons. of history, by which readers are subjugated, and try to establish connections between the different stories that are combined in the story.
Yannelys Aparicio, Professor of Literature, International University of La Rioja
“Crematorium”, by Rafael Chirbes
The work of Rafael Chirbes was appreciated by critics, but largely unknown to readers until the appearance of “Crematorio”, a novel that anticipated the economic disaster that the Western world would suffer at the beginning of the 21st century.
The architect Rubén Bertomeu has his commercial emporium in an invented town on the Levantine coast. Their wealth is based not only on concrete, but on public and private immoralities. He carries out activities that all the characters in his family environment seem to question, but of which they do not hesitate to take full advantage.
In the short time that the body of Rubén’s brother, Matías, is transferred from the funeral home to the crematorium, all the characters, in long and intense interior monologues, reflect on the meanness that dominates their lives.
Chirbes draws the decline of an era and a country through a specific family, because the destruction of the Mediterranean landscape runs parallel to the moral destruction of the Bertomeu.
José María Fernández Vázquez, professor of Spanish Literature, Pablo de Olavide University
“Little Red Women”, by Marta Sanz
This detective novel tells the story of the family saga formed by Jesús Beato based on the enrichment he experienced with the self-serving denunciations offered to the Falangists in the summer of 1936.
The stigma of this family is greed and greedy crime, and the deaths caused by the Beatos fuel this black plot.
The novel builds a monument – not made of stone and not vandalizable – to the memory and epic of the vanquished (little red women) in the Spanish Civil War.
It constitutes a stylistic display, structure and literary technique, which explores the ways of representing violence and pain.
To this end, it projects the plot on the fantastic and horror story, in particular on the productions of the Disney factory from the classic times of “Uncle Walt” to the more recent ones of Tim Burton.
María Ángeles Naval, professor of Spanish Literature, University of Zaragoza
“Easy reading”, by Cristina Morales
The work of Cristina Morales can be defined as a determined commitment to the implosion of the conventional literary text. Few Hispanic novels of the 21st century take this demolition further than “Easy Reading,” thanks to its four narrative voices and the language used, as well as the mechanisms and materials that nourish the plot.
But, furthermore, very few of these fictions are inspired by a purpose as radical as questioning the notion of “intellectual disability.” Its depth is aesthetic and ethical; its creation, an achievement before which the most vulgar culture pales.
Rafael Manuel Mérida Jiménez, professor of Spanish Literature and gender studies, University of Lleida
“The Adventures of China Iron”, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
“The Adventures of China Iron”, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, is the first novel of the 22nd century.
The best thing is not his neo-baroque, carnivalized and parodic re-writing of the Argentine founding work, “El gaucho Martín Fierro”, through lyrical prose sprinkled with Spanglish, Guaraní and a ribald mixture of grammatical genres, identities, temporalities and spaces , but the brilliant discovery that to subvert the canon – patriarchal, mesocratic and colonial – it is not enough to make the authors and texts visible. forgotten, but one must cross-dress one’s own fiction and its criticism.
Only in this way will the literary future be a little more transfeminist. And happy.
Ana Gallego Cuiñas, professor of Latin American literature at the University of Granada, University of Granada
“Homeland”, by Fernando Aramburu
“Patria” stands out for the excellent design of the fictional characters, the coherence of its internal and dialogic discourse with the events narrated and for the interweaving of causes and effects that permeates its evolution.
The polyphony of the story is masterfully combined with the theme, as it addresses the issue of ETA violence in a new way, transmitting the thoughts of each protagonist, their beliefs, ideas and feelings, as well as the underlying causes and explains from their perspective. optics their behavior.
It provides true historical and social research from literature while managing to excite and achieve aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment.
María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre, professor of Spanish Literature, University of León
“Our part at night”, by Mariana Enriquez
“Our Part of the Night,” by Mariana Enriquez, brings together the supernatural horror characteristic of the Gothic genre and the crimes committed during the military dictatorship.
The link between both components is a privileged family, initiated into a sect that worships a bloodthirsty god they call The Darkness.
To ensure the protection of such divinity, the leaders of the family kidnap young people whom they sacrifice in ceremonies as violent as the torture and disappearances that the Military Junta carried out. against his dissidents.
By turning to Gothic, Mariana Enriquez reflects on the political reality of her country while affirming herself in a tradition present in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century.
Teresa Georgina González Arce, research professor at the Department of Literary Studies, University of Guadalajara
“Rescue Distance”, by Samanta Schweblin
“Rescue Distance” was awarded the Tigre Juan and the Ojo Crítico, nominated in 2017 for the Booker International Prize, awarded the Shirley Jackson in 2018, chosen by the Tournament of Books as the best book published in the United States and made into a film in 2021 by Claudia Llosa.
It is a short novel with the best features of the genre: tense, overwhelming and terrifying, it introduces the reader into a suffocating spiral from its first sentence thanks to the frenetic rhythm and crescendo that the author, who also specializes in drawing profiles, breathes into it. psychological depth.
Marked in equal parts by lyricism and the power of dialogue, it combines ecosocial denunciation – showing the dangers of glyphosate cultivation in the poorest peasant communities – with the expression of the fear that the experience of motherhood leads to.
Likewise, he masterfully transforms the characteristic locus amoenus into a macabre space, marked by the threat of disease at every step.
Francisca Noguerol Jiménez, professor of Latin American Literature, University of Salamanca
“Hurricane Season”, by Fernanda Melchor
“Hurricane Season” gives voice to a society deeply affected by both environmental degradation and social violence.
The narrative is articulated through a polyphony of fragmented voices, each providing a particular perspective on the brutal murder of the Witch.
Through visceral and poetic prose, which adopts stream-of-consciousness characteristics and lacks paragraph divisions, Melchor offers a stark portrait of the human condition in an environment defined by hopelessness.
With resonances of Juan Rulfo’s Mexico and the underworld of “La Celestina,” Melchor’s work examines deep-seated structural inequalities such as misogyny, poverty and systemic corruption in a Mexican town devastated by hurricanes.
Goretti Teresa González, Professor of Literature, IE University
“Soldiers of Salamina”, by Javier Cercas
Literature must necessarily be a mirror where the imagination looks. It is an escape that brings us closer to the reality from which we pretend to escape.
Great works are always born from this play of shadows and lights, from “Don Quixote” to “Soldiers of Salamina”, the novel with which Javier Cercas made an acrobatic leap towards an infinite number of readers, he renewed the novel of testimony, He turned the Civil War and its aftermath into literary matter and reminded the world that the writer – free of genres and laws – is the owner and lord of his stories, whether they are his own or those of everyone.
José Luis Vicente Ferris, professor of Spanish Literature, Miguel Hernández University
“Doctor García’s patients”, by Almudena Grandes
“The Patients of Doctor García” is a novel with an agile, even impetuous pace, and clean, pampered, uncompromising prose.
The intertwined stories that the author creates are told from different points of view and weave a dense and recognizable human tapestry, in the wake of the 19th century realist novel, with Galdós in the background.
The result is a stimulating reading, which reconciles us with the attractive, multifaceted and formally well-armed texts.
This episode of an endless war, one of the best versions of the best Almudena Grandes, has been able to seduce both critics and academics, as well as a wide range of readers who, for more than five years, have confirmed its relevance.
Montserrat Ribao Pereira, professor of Spanish Literature, University of Vigo
“The invincible summer of Liliana”, by Cristina Rivera Garza
“Time heals everything, except wounds.”
This is the fictionalized story of the life of Liliana, the author’s sister, who was murdered in July 1990 by an ex-boyfriend in Mexico City.
The novel deals with feminicide in Mexico as a background, but in reality it talks about women and the violence in their lives, the impunity of crimes, and above all about grief and how each person processes it in their own way.
A painful family reconstruction work that is at the same time the memory reconstruction of our society. Liliana is more than her death. Liliana we can be (we are) all of us.
María Teresa Orozco López, professor of Creative Writing and Children’s Literature, University of Guadalajara
“Ordesa”, by Manuel Vilas
“Ordesa”, by Manuel Vilas, offers us a highly original version of an old literary theme such as mourning the loss of parents.
In the novel we witness an exciting and heartbreaking nude of the author himself, where he allows his fears, phobias and fears of loss, loneliness, death and failure to emerge in a very convincing way, with hardly any cover-ups or literary tricks, with the that managed to empathize many readers.
But, above all, “Ordesa” dazzles us with that unmistakable “Vilas brand”, a unique and especially recognizable style, which combines lucidity, courage and elegance with an intelligent sense of humor.
Teresa Gómez Trueba, professor of Spanish Literature, University of Valladolid
“The difficult airs”, by Almudena Grandes
The difficult airs are the winds that cross the Cádiz coast – the east and the west – but they are also metaphors for the lives of Juan Olmedo and Sara Gómez.
Both characters escape from a past in Madrid that torments them and in the surroundings of a tourist complex they will meet thanks to their assistant, Maribel.
“The difficult airs” is a strange story of friendship between strangers who would never have met in which they openly open their hearts so that the southern winds carry away the sorrows that weigh down their lives in search of a possible future.
José María Fernández Vázquez, professor of Spanish Literature, Pablo de Olavide University
“Line of Fire”, by Arturo Pérez Reverte
“Line of Fire” recreates the Battle of the Ebro of the Spanish Civil War with a story more attentive to the Unamunian intrahistory than to the historical dimension of the conflict.
And this is, I believe, its main attraction: knowing how to look in depth at the men and women who carried out the events (their feelings, their fears, their expectations, their hopes, their values, their miseries) and to assess, in an accomplished and nothing easy balance, how much was admirable and how much was reprehensible on both sides, with a style characterized by narrative intensity, precision in the details and vividness in the dialogues.
Santiago Alfonso López Navia, professor of Philology, International University of La Rioja
“Made on Saturn”, by Rita Indiana
Argenis Luna’s detoxification trip to Havana, from his native Santo Domingo, leads us to confront the disenchantment of a failed revolution and disillusionment with artistic ideals consumed by capitalism.
In this masterful novel by the Dominican writer Rita Indiana, one of the most important figures in Latin American literature of the 21st century, Argenis embodies the contradictions of a generation that has been left adrift by the collapse of the redemptive stories of ideologies that, like Saturn, they have devoured their children.
María Teresa Vera Rojas, professor and researcher of Latin American and Spanish literature, University of the Balearic Islands
Mentions to…
“August, October”, by Andrés Barba
“The Deaf”, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
“Revolution”, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
“The things we lost in the fire”, by Mariana Enríquez
“Complete Poetry” by Mariluz Escribano
“The Night of Time”, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
“Himmelweg”, by Juan Mayorga
“The Mother of Frankenstein”, by Almudena Grandes
“What there is”, by Sara Torres
“On the shore”, by Rafael Chirbes
“Snow White’s Father”, by Belén Gopegui
“Dublinesque”, by Enrique Vila-Matas
“Antígona González”, by Sara Uribe
“Lie”, by Enrique de Hériz
“Windows of Manhattan”, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
“Bartleby and company”, by Enrique Vila-Matas
“General rehearsal”, by Francisca Aguirre
“Four by four”, by Sara Mesa
“Inside the Earth”, by Paco Bezerra
“Nona’s Room”, by Cristina Fernández Cubas
*This article was published on The Conversation and reproduced here under the creative commons license. click here to read the original version.
*The experts who participated were:
- Ana Casas Janices (Full Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Alcalá)
- Ana Gallego Cuiñas (Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Granada)
- Aurora Martínez Ezquerro (Professor of the area of Didactics of Language and Literature, Department of Hispanic and Classical Philologies, University of La Rioja)
- Emiliano Coello Gutiérrez (Contracted Professor of Latin American Literature, UNED – National University of Distance Education)
- Emilio Peral Vega (University Professor, Complutense University of Madrid)
- Francisca Noguerol Jiménez (Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Salamanca)
- Francisco Estrada Medina (Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, University of Guadalajara)
- Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez (Contracted Accredited Professor Doctor, Department of Modern Philology, University of Castilla-La Mancha)
- Goretti Teresa González (Professor of Literature, IE University)
- Isabel Giménez Caro (Full Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Almería)
- Jaume Peris Blanes (Professor of the area of Spanish and Latin American Literature, Universitat de València)
- Javier Rivero Grandoso (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of La Laguna)
- Javier de Navascués Martín (Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Navarra)
- José Belmonte Serrano (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Murcia)
- José Luis Vicente Ferris (Professor of Spanish Literature, Miguel Hernández University)
- José María Fernández Vázquez (Professor of Spanish Literature, Pablo de Olavide University)
- Juan José Lanz Rivera (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
- Juan Ramón Muñoz Sánchez (Senior Professor of the Spanish Literature Area, University of Jaén)
- Luis Alfredo Álvarez Ayesterán (Professor of the School of Letters, Andrés Bello Catholic University)
- Marina López Martínez (Professor of Francophone Language and Culture, Universitat Jaume I)
- María Di Muro Pellegrino (Professor and Researcher at the Center for Humanistic Research and Training, Andrés Bello Catholic University)
- María Isabel Calle Romero (Professor of Hispanic American Literature, Rovira i Virgili University)
- María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre (Professor of the area of Spanish Literature, University of León)
- María Teresa Orozco López (Professor of Creative Writing and Children’s Literature, University of Guadalajara)
- María Teresa Vera-Rojas (Professor and Researcher of Latin American and Spanish Literature, University of the Balearic Islands)
- María del Carmen Alfonso García (Full Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Oviedo)
- María Ángeles Naval (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Zaragoza)
- María Ángeles Pérez López (Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Salamanca)
- Montserrat Ribao Pereira (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Vigo)
- Natalia Vara Ferrero (Senior Professor of Theory of Literature, University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
- Pura Fernández (Research Professor at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology-CCHS of the CSIC, Higher Council for Scientific Research)
- Rafael Malpartida (Professor of Literature and Cinema, University of Malaga)
- Rafael Manuel Mérida Jiménez (Professor of Spanish Literature and Gender Studies, University of Lleida)
- Santiago Alfonso López Navia (Professor of Philology and Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Education, UNIR – International University of La Rioja)
- Teresa Georgina González Arce (Research Professor at the Department of Literary Studies, University of Guadalajara)
- Teresa Gómez Trueba (Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Valladolid)
- Yannelys Aparicio (Professor of Literature, UNIR – International University of La Rioja)
- Álvaro Rodríguez Subero (Professor and Researcher of Theory of Literature and Spanish Literature, University of La Rioja)
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