Endnotes
1 Margaret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel refers to this as “the Breaking Trope” (310).
2 For more on the role of narrative in the forging of nations, see Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.
3 See Hector Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño, p 8, for a similarly upbeat take on the possibilities arising from Latin America’s peripheral status with respect to World Literature.
4 See Robert Alter’s introduction to his study, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre.
5 See Norris, Michelle. “Visualizing Race, Identity, and Change.” National Geographic. Sept 17, 2013. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2013/09/17/visualizing-change/
6 For a sustained reading of Gopegui’s oevre that addresses and contests this critique, see Haley Rabanal’s Belén Gopegui: the Pursuit of Solidarity in Post-Transition Spain (2011).
7 Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni
8 For a review and analysis of violence in recent Latin American fiction, see chapter five of Daniel Voionmaa’s En tiempo fugitivo, which includes a brief analysis of Abril rojo among other novels.
9 See Yuvah Noah Harari´s Homo Deus.
10 From the Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle on Lost City Radio; Mario Vargas Llosa on The Blue Hour; and Publishers Weekly on Red April.
11 More recently Lucero de Vivanco proposed a group of novels published since Abril rojo that he sees as adequately addressing the trauma of Peru’s “Guerra.” See his article “Tres veces muertos” for his analysis of these works.
12 Since the publication of Abril rojo, Roncagliolo has elaborated on Chacaltana’s backstory in his 2014 novel, La pena máxima.
13 For a general overview of Colombia’s history of violence from the mid-nineteenth century into the twenty-first, see Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia. For more in-depth and focused information see: Paul Olquist, Violencia, conflicto y política en Colombia; and Manuel Ernesto Salamanca, Violencia política y modelos dinámicos: un estudio sobre el caso colombiano. For more on the 1948-1958 “La Violencia” see Germán Guzmán Camps, Orlando Fals-Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna (eds), La violencia en Colombia. For studies of recent attempts at negotiating peace and the challenge of the ongoing violence, see Charles Bergquist et al. Violence in Colombia, 1990-2000: waging war and negotiating peace; and Thomas E Flores and Juan F Vargas, “Colombia: Democracy, Violence, and the Peacebuilding Challenge.”
14 In January 2005, then President Álvaro Uribe, declared there to be neither war nor armed conflict in Colombia (Hylton 121). Less than a month later in a town called La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, eight citizens, including one community leader, three children, and an adolescent were murdered, several in brutal fashion, bringing to a total of 152 the citizens of San José murdered over the course of its existence. By early April of the same year, most of the community’s 400 citizens had fled to found a new town nearby, though it lacked electricity, running water, basic medical services, and last but not least, a school. The events in San José, however, did nothing to change Uribe’s declaration the previous month. Colombia officially remained a land free of armed conflict. In light of such events, Rosero’s repeated placement of the phrase “pueblo de paz” on the tongue of his narrator, the profesor, to describe his beloved San José seems hardly a coincidence (see Hylton 123; also Isaacson, “San José de Apartadó: Jesús Abad’s disturbing account”; Bronstein, “Police in, Population Out”; Comunicado Público; and Tate, “A Visit to San José de Apartadó”).
15 For more on the persistence of self-conscious fiction, see Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel is a Self-Conscious Genre. Gide’s description of the novel earlier in the paragraph is borrowed from Alter’s study (xii).
16 For more information on contemporary Latin American novels of historical memory see chapter four of Daniel Voionmaa’s En tiempo fugitivo.
17 Of this problem as illustrated in Zambra’s novel, Daniel Voionmaa has written, “The challenge then (the call we might have said just a few years back) is enormous: rescue the transformational political potential of this literatura; in its conscious inability to change the world—from its minimalist immobility—to uncover the reason and possibility of the urgent and paradoxical need to carry out the transformation; to remember again, also, how to love again; to revolutionize the memory of the past that we would desire as our future” (“Formas” 60).
18 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
19 In the last two decades a growing number of readers of Hispanic literature have noted this spatial turn. See for example Malcolm Compitello’s work on urban cultural geography in contemporary Spain or my own Constructing Spain. For takes on cultural geographies—particularly urban geographies in Latin America, see Gisela Heffe’s Las ciudades imaginarias and Lucía Guerra’s Ciudad, género e imaginarios urbanos. Benjamin Fraser gives a theoretical overview of the topic in Toward an Urban Cultural Studies.
20 Nazario, S. “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got a Little Bit Safer.” New York Times, Aug 11, 2016.
21 Rosenberg, T. “Colombia’s Data-Driven Fight Against Crime.” New York Times, Nov 20, 1014.
