In the same way that I proceed with many other countriesI am going to focus on the best writers in mexico essentially selected from between the XNUMXth century and the present. In the case of Mexico it was even more complex because of so many good choices. Great references of world narrative and new talents that appear with that feeling of finding ourselves in front of someone who will one day be classic.
Prolific Mexican writers in all kinds of genres or even avant-garde pens that move between different waters, probing narrative possibilities that always come in handy to project the literary towards new horizons. Without a doubt I will leave a Mexican writer who may be one of your favorites. But you already know that there is nothing written about tastes. Here 10 Mexican writers will come to the fore who, in my case, dazzled me without sometimes knowing which is the gift or imprint that most captivated me.
But that is the grace of literature as in so many other creative aspects. A work powerfully catches our attention and we enter the particular universe of the author of the day to end up pointing him out as one of those essentials of the country of the day.
Top 10 Mexican writers
Juan Rulfo
Sometimes excellence, proclaimed to the four winds by the officialdom, is fulfilled. The most respected scholars of literature in Spanish point to Juan Rulfo as one of the essentials. When you approach his work, you discover the reason and you have no choice but to agree with those official currents.
Speaking with current terminology, with that country-brand trend, probably no one will have done more for the Mexico brand than Juan Rulfo. Universal writer, one of the most admired on the world literary scene. Behind him we find another illustrious and contemporary Mexican writer: Carlos Fuentes, who, although he offered us great novels, did not reach that excellence typical of genius.
As on other occasions, I like to present a great edition that brings the reader closer to the whole of the author's work. In the case of Juan Rulfo, nothing better than this commemorative box of his centenary:
The XNUMXth century has a few exceptional writers. Among that select group we would always find this photographer capable of portraying reality under a multitude of filters towards a composition as heterogeneous as it is magical. Cult author, with Pedro Páramo he convinced critics and readers. A character at the height of Macbeth Shakespeare, with its own tragic breath, with that fatal combination of human ambitions, passions, love and frustration. But Juan Rulfo has much more. This masterpiece does not end up eclipsing the whole of a literary work that, although not profuse, stands out for its immense importance and intensity.
Octavio Paz
With Octavio Paz the perfect triangle of twentieth-century Mexican literature closes, because next to it we find Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes (albeit the latter sitting at his table for dessert only). On many occasions it happens that literature derives in a kind of generational synergy. From the incomparable historical coincidence in the lives of Cervantes y Shakespeare, Coetaneity has been a fact that has been repeated on several occasions.
And while the example of the two great European geniuses represents the summit of this synergy of letters, the triangle temporarily coinciding at its vertices between Rulfo, Paz and Fuentes also has its substance. Because the three represent similar literary peaks from Mexico for the set of Hispanic and world letters of the twentieth century. Known are the social and political disagreements between Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, but these are details that do not overshadow the creative scope of both and the final enrichment of the strictly literary.
But focusing on Octavio Paz, the most illustrious of the three, insofar as he ended up being recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, his creative capacity encompassed poetry and prose with the same solvency, garnering praise and gaining readers of one genre or another. thanks to its balance between aesthetics and background.
Elena Poniatowska
Getting out of Nazi-besieged Poland didn't have to be pleasant for the Poniatowska family. It was the year 1942 and Elena was counting ten springs. It was probably not so traumatic for her. At that age, reality is still diffuse, amid the mists of fantasy and the triviality of childhood.
But the subsequent awareness could have even more effect than expected. More so in a person like Elena Poniatowska, revealed as a great writer, traveled and committed to various causes concerning Human Rights.
Her aristocratic origins by both branches, paternal and maternal, were never for her a foundation, although they were a tool for that constant struggle in defense of equality in any field.
The novel, as Poniatowska's antecedents could not be otherwise, is understood by Elena as an instrument towards criticism and approach, towards introspection in the human in many facets, from the natural arrival of love to the motives for hatred, from the will to know the need to forget.
The "Red Princess" never disappoints in everything she writes. And it is that Elena has lavished herself in articles and essays, in novels and stories. We always find in her writings the passion for living and the intention to sublimate all emotions and ideologies towards something positive, leading us by basic personal perceptions such as empathy or resilience.
Laura Esquivel
Originality is a trigger for success. Then you have to consider the opportunity and the ubiquity. I say it because Laura Esquivel reached the literary firmament with an original novel that ended up being timely, in this case it did not need ubiquity (euphemism to talk about contacts and godparents ...)
Como agua para chocolate was a highly original work that was inserted into the popular imagination as a novel necessarily to be read. And so it moved in the literary circles of half the world, breaking records for years and years at the beginning of the 90s. The magical realism that the novel boasts is capable of transforming and elevating the kitchen towards an emotional realm ... but let's talk about she later, in her due position of my particular ranking.
For the rest, Laura Esquivel brings in her works that brilliance inherited from naturalism, with its tragic part and its push towards sublimation, positive fantasy made experiences and resilience as a human focus that can be assumed from the very consideration of staying alive every new day. . These very generic impressions that acquire their nuances in each of the different proposals of the narrative of this author, who has been endowed by Mexican politics for a few years now.
Guadeloupe Nettel
Guadeloupe Nettel It is the most prominent among great current Mexican storytellers. From the inexhaustible Elena Poniatowska but also Juan Villoro, Alvaro Enrigue o Jorge Volpi. Each one with his own particular "demons" (demons because there is nothing more motivating to write than a point of diabolical temptation, an "insane" taste for the strangeness with which every good writer strips the world in its miseries).
Nettel is one more example in the profession of writing as a full, deterministic vocation. Because both academic training and dedication to narrative have passed with that parallel becoming of someone who enjoys an iron will, forged from a powerful internal breath.
Everything in Nettel finds that ideal way towards the end why. To train in literature, begin by writing stories and end up breaking into novels or essays with the self-sufficiency of someone who already knows himself or herself in the essential arts. So today we can only enjoy his books.
Carlos Fuentes
Cradle traveler in his capacity as the son of a diplomat, Carlos Fuentes He acquired the virtue of being traveled, a wonderful tool for the thriving writer. Traveling offers an incomparable wealth of perspectives on the world, of learning against ethnocentrism, of popular wisdom. The author's privileged childhood was used to the maximum by him to end up becoming above all a great writer, as well as a renowned diplomat like his father.
As a trained writer and as a person in contact with diverse realities of his inexhaustible traveling spirit, Fuentes became a sociological novelist, with an almost anthropological search for the human being in his natural social environment.
It is not that his novels are a brainy attempt at pedagogical intention, but both his characters and his approaches always reveal a clear intention, the search for answers in history. Much remains to be learned from everything in the past, from all historical processes, from revolutions and wars, from crises, from great social conquests, the residue of history is a narrative that was nurtured Carlos Fuentes to propose his novels to us.
Logically, as a Mexican, the peculiarities of his homeland also stand out in many of his books. The idiosyncrasy of a people like the Mexican brings a lot of brilliance to its paradoxes, weighed down by an intention of a people with a strong differential identity despite the miscegenation that ended up building it (like all the peoples of the world, on the other hand).
José emilio pacheco
All the Pacheco's narrative concerns They emerged from a very young age, discovering the writer determined to be one before reaching the age of twenty. With that firm early vocation, José Emilio Pacheco soaked himself, with authentic conviction for the development of his own work, of all kinds of readings, in search of that synthesis that each author must end up addressing in search of his own path.
Without ever departing from his roots in which he fixed a large part of his work, especially in the essayistic and even poetic aspects, Pacheco addressed in my favorite field of fictional narrative, a multitude of stories and some novels with allegorical components and fanciful in some cases or stark sensuality in others.
Diverse compositions that in the end also end up connecting with a firm humanistic intention towards that literature committed to existence itself and to the chronicle of the times lived.
It is clear that this capacity for gender change made possible an experimental aspect in Pacheco's narrative pretension, finding that avant-garde point around an almost romantic idealism in which the sensations of childhood resonate as echoes, with the full conviction of a need to return to childhood, that paradise in which experimentation also forges temperaments and perspectives on the world.
Juan José Arreola
In the shadow of the greatest, others do not always end up being overshadowed. Those who may not have the enormous creativity but the will to improve, along with a learning capacity that ends up resembling a gift if the dedication is maximum.
Something like this should be considered when bringing up Juan José Arreola regarding a contemporary, compatriot and even namesake as giant as he is Juan Rulfo. Then, when life gave Arreola 15 more years, he was able to become heir to the legacy and follower of the work, with that change of focus of the genius that is no longer to whom he naturally appears as a singular predecessor.
Perhaps it is a matter of the shared language but in its countless stories and volumes, a Spanish-speaker will surely be more hooked on fantasies, dreamlike at times, and rich dissertations transforming the real or directly surrealist in his own free pen, than what could be an approach to the much praised Kafka with his fables of colder and existentialist tints.
Valeria Luiselli
Fictional from the projection of the most conscious realism with that irreverence of a young writer, Valeria manifests herself as a powerful speaker of a generation focused on the future from the foundations of everything new that the world may have left, raising her voice to reveal the manifest trompe l'oeil of a constant involution disguised as a brilliant advance. Critical literature in the broadest sense of the word.
In this sense, his ideology borders on his book «The missing child»The problem of borders as fictional walls (increasingly tangible in the case that the author is more closely related to between Mexico and the United States). Walls capable of stigmatizing those on one side behind the only disguise of aporophobia. In the same way that they idealize those of the other, those who inhabit a comfortable place in the world just for the fact of being, or perhaps simply of not being if we are ill-thought.
The question is to undertake the journey towards the humanistic of those edges of our days, to bleed on one's own skin and finally empathize with others, beyond the aseptic television news.
But in addition Valeria Luiselli also engulfs us in other of her books in that fragmented literature that moves comfortably between the estrangement of the fantastic and the real as if everything occupied the same structured place from the subjectivity of the protagonists.
Life, love, family, learning or death are always impressions; discovering the transcendent brilliance of the tragicomic poles of our existence is a narrative goal for a captivating Valeria in her way of telling stories.
Sergio Pitol
There are those, like Sergio PitolThey are writers in that other alternate life that passes while fate ensues. If we had more lives, each one would be a different thing in the new outings., but time is what it is and Sergio Pitol was enough things as if to limit it only to his facet as a writer.
Still or precisely thanks to his alternation, Pitol wrote some of the best works of Mexican narrative with his Trilogy of Memory at the top of his literary production. Something like the vital work of that Proust engrossed in his heptalogy.
It should also be noted in that definition of the writer that his life was not precisely a bed of roses. This is how it is shown that adversity when it does not destroy conforms to the irreducible spirit, the surviving human being, especially himself, the restless and hungry soul ...
Thus, strictly narrative we enjoy the Pitol that weaves our own and that of others in that scenario where the writer is the protagonist to provide lucidity, passion and answers in his own way to all the questions about existence.
1 comment on “The 10 best Mexican writers”