Mexican writers have long felt trapped on the outside. In 1950, Nobel Prize-winner Octavio Paz wrote, “We have been expelled from the center of the world and are condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in the underground mazes of the labyrinth.” The path blazed by Paz was soon paved, lined, set with streetlights by novelists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.
Now a new group of writers, the ‘Crack’ movement, says that road has fallen into disrepair, that impostors made “magical realism” milk chocolate in a bittersweet world, and painted Mexico as a pastoral village forever floating in a bodice-ripping past.
No more. Authors like Ignacio Padilla are rewriting the Mexican novel.
Guests:
Ignacio Padilla, author of “Shadow Without a Name”
Carlos Fuentes, author of numerous novels, former diplomat.