This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

Chapter 3 begins with an examination of how anticommunism manifested in Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay, highlighting the importance of the National Security Doctrine and the notion of internal enemy, and analyzing the secret police files of Octavio Paz, Frida Kahlo, and Elena Poniatowska, and others, as illustrations of anticommunist paranoia. The examination of anticommunism culminates with analysis of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s collection of stories Week-end in Guatemala and its references to the 1954 coup d’état. The chapter then turns to the Cultural Cold War, using declassified documents from the CIA, to examine the organization of the Continental Cultural Congress (Santiago, 1953), with emphasis on the counter-maneuvering led by the American Embassy in Chile and Pablo Neruda’s role as one of the organizers of the Congress. Finally, it discusses Neruda’s “non-political” poetry at the time, The Captain’s Verses, vis-à-vis his “political” poetry.