Latin American Boom - Hallmarks

Hallmarks

The Boom novels are essentially modernist novels. They treat time as nonlinear, often use more than one perspective or narrative voice and feature a great number of neologisms (the coining of new words or phrases), puns and even profanities. As Pope writes, in reference to the style of the Boom: "It relied on a Cubist superposition of different points of view, it made time and lineal progress questionable, and it was technically complex. Linguistically self assured, it used the vernacular without apologies." Other notable characteristics of the Boom include the treatment of both "rural and urban settings", internationalism, an emphasis on both the historical and the political, as well as "questioning of regional as well as, or more than, national identity; awareness of hemisphereic as well as worldwide economic and ideological issues; polemicism; and timeliness." Boom literature breaks down the barriers between the fantastical and the mundane, transforming this mixture into a new reality. Of the Boom writers, Gabriel García Márquez is most closely associated with the use of magical realism; indeed, he is credited with bringing it "into vogue" after the publishing of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1966.