Latin American Boom - Critique

Critique

A common criticism of the Boom is that it is too experimental and has a "tendency toward elitism." In his study of the Post-Boom Donald L. Shaw writes that Mario Benedetti was very critical of Boom writers like García Márquez who, in Benedetti's view, "represent a privileged class that had access to universal culture and were thus utterly unrepresentative of average people in Latin America." In his article on Donoso's break from the Boom Philip Swanson articulates another critique of the "new novel" (i.e. Boom novel): "Though was essentially a reaction against a perceived staleness in conventional realism, many of the formal experiments and innovations of modern fiction have themselves become standardized features of modern writing, leading to another form of traditionalism where one set of stereotypes has been replaced with another." Also often criticized is the Boom's emphasis on masculinity, both in the fact that all of the movement's representatives were male and the treatment of female characters within the novels. The Boom fiction's emphasis on history and the fantastic has also been the subject of criticism as it was claimed that it is too removed from the realities of Latin American political situations that it criticized.