Origins
While most critics agree that the Boom started some time in the 1960s, there is some disagreement as to which work should be considered the first Boom novel. Some (such as Alfred McAdam) would start with Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) while others prefer Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero which won the Biblioteca Breve Award in 1962. Fernando Alegria considers Augusto Roa Bastos' Hijo de hombre the inaugural work of the Boom even though, as Shaw notes, "it was published in 1959." One could, however, even go as far back as Miguel Ángel Asturias's 1949 novel Men of Maize.
Another variation is articulated by Randolph D. Pope: "The story of the Boom could start chronologically with Miguel Ángel Asturias's El Señor Presidente (published in 1946, but started in 1922). Other starting points could be Sabato's "El túnel" (1948) or Onetti's "El pozo" (1939), or even the vanguardist movements of the 1920s. However, the writers of the Boom declared themselves orphaned and without any autochthonous model, caught between their admiration for Proust, Joyce, Mann, Sartre and other European writers and their need to have a Spanish American voice, even if they rejected the most respected Spanish American writers Indigenistas, Criollistas, and Mundonovistas."
The major representatives of the Boom claimed that they were an "orphan" literary generation, without a "Latin American "father" of influence; however, they owe much of their stylistic innovation to the Vanguardists. Jean Franco writes that the Boom marks "a refusal to be identified with the rural or with anachronistic narratives such as the novela de la tierra."
Read more about this topic: Latin American Boom
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