Patriarch

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers concocted a plan for a volume in which each participant would undertake a literary treatment of one of the larger-than-life political figures — dictator, caudillo, or what have you — from the annals of his or her respective native country. Despite a good deal of initial enthusiasm, the volume never came off, but García Márquez (Colombia) had already decided who he wanted to write about, and described his choice in a letter to Carlos Fuentes:

My candidate is General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, aristocrat, former officer under Bolívar, who assumed the presidency four times. To be sure, he had much in common with your Santa Anna. Don Tomás was completely crazy, and nevertheless he was a great man: the first liberal to intercede against the dictatorial fever of the Liberator, and, of course, he ended up a dictator in his turn. He had his entire jaw reconstructed from silver, he dressed, in his second period, like the kings of France, and he was cruel, arbitrary, truly progressive, and a very fine writer. He expelled the Jesuits from the country, headed by his own brother, who was archbishop primate of Bogotá. In his full decadence, crazy and alcoholic, he walked around with his old cutlass chasing the boys who made fun of him through the streets. He complained to the president, and as the latter paid no attention to him, he kicked him out of the palace and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief for the third time. In short, he belongs to the great line of the fathers of the country.

García Márquez, who was living in Mexico City at the time, may have misremembered some of the details. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera did have a brother, Manuel José Mosquera, who was an archbishop, but the latter was already dead when Tomás expelled the Jesuits (in 1863 or 1864), and had left the country in 1852, under pressure, in an earlier wave of anticlericalism. But whether true or not, the image of the old soldier with his prosthetic jaw brandishing his sword to chase away impertinent boys, and taking the government into his hands when he couldn't get satisfaction, must have been too garciamarquesco to pass up.

Image: Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, looking a little jaundiced, portrait from the Museo Nacional de Colombia. The text of the letter from García Márquez to Carlos Fuentes is from Las cartas del Boom (translation mine).

Echoes of the Boom

Two recent publishing events revisit the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary "Boom" of the 1960s, in particular highlighting the four novelists — Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) — who are widely regarded as the movement's seminal figures. Las cartas del Boom (Alfaguara, 2023) collects the correspondence exchanged between the the fab four, as the editors call them, during the years of literary ferment when they were reinventing the modern novel. Regarding the importance of the volume, in the words of the editors:

To find an example parallel to Las cartas del Boom, and exaggerating only a bit (there are more languages involved), one would have to imagine Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner engaging in an intense correspondence in the decade of the 1920s concerning literature and politics, including the sometimes instantaneous reactions to the works of each one.

The vagaries of preservation affected what could be included. Cortázar wrote countless letters but preserved few of the many that he must have received, García Márquez periodically destroyed letters (as well as his own working notes and manuscripts), and only Fuentes kept copies of most of his outgoing correspondence. The letters begin, haltingly, in the late 1950s and dwindle to a trickle in the 1970s, in part because two of the writers (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) were by then no longer on speaking terms, but also no doubt because greater reliance on the telephone had made written correspondence less essential. Many of the letters from Cortázar to Fuentes printed here were not included in the monumental five-volume edition of the former's letters because of restrictions from the Fuentes estate that have now been lifted.

Las cartas del Boom has been translated into several languages but not, thus far, into English. The good news on that front involves a related event: Archipelago Books — which seems to be able to undertake translation projects that few other publishers are interested in handling — will be releasing the first installment of a generous two-volume selection of Cortázar's correspondence, Letters from Julio, in September 2026. The translators are Anne McLean and Sarah Moses.

The University of Oregon hosts a blog with more information on the Boom correspondence.

In addition, New Directions — another indispensable publisher — has published a revised translation of José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, incorporating portions of the novel that were excised from the original US version. The New York Review of Books has a review. While he isn't included in Las cartas del Boom (his correspondence with Fuentes has been published separately) Donoso was another key figure in the movement and The Obscene Bird of Night is regarded as his major work. I've had a copy of the old Knopf edition on my shelves for close to fifty years; one of these days I'll have to get around to reading it.

Update: There is a thorough and thoughtful review (in English) of Las cartas del Boom in New Left Review. It can be accessed at either of the links below:

A Bolivarian Republic of Letters?
A Bolivarian Republic of Letters? (PDF)