The Bolaño Industry

The emergence of Roberto Bolaño on the global literary scene should serve as a point of entry, not a dead end. This simple observation stands at the center of Héctor Hoyos's Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel, serving as a necessary corrective to the phenomenon of Bolañomania, itself a product of the global asymmetry of academic and market forces alike. Similar to Gabriel García Márquez in the Boom years and after, the figure of Bolaño often stands in for the entire field of contemporary Latin American literary production. Hoyos counteracts this synecdochical tendency. To do so, he uses the heuristic value of Jorge Luis Borges's “Aleph”—“a world in miniature,” or “an objectification of the idea of much in little” (Hoyos 2)—to examine a handful of post-1989 novels that both assert their status as global objects and, in the process, transform the idea of the global. The works of...