In the first pages of MiguelBarnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón(Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Esteban Montejo, the protagonist, narrator, and co-author, recalls how he never met his parents because he had been separated from them after his birth, and when he had the chance he was already a runaway and would not risk his precarious freedom in the mountains to go see them. “Because I was a runaway, I never knew my parents. I never even saw them,” he states, and adds immediately: “But that’s not sad because it’s the truth” (15). Similar thoughts are voiced less...

The search for communion through writing has been a constant element in the narrative career of Isabel Allende, whose books hold an ambiguous place in the canon of Spanish American literature. This is due to the fact that, even as they evoke certain aspects of the Boom, they also tend toward a “lighter” and more easily consumed kind of writing. In this sense, Allende’s work is typical of the Post-Boom and of the new sentimental narrative. Like many of these works, those of the Chilean writer display a constant use of commonplaces, of conventional styles and themes, in order to...

A true original among the Post-Boom authors, the Peruvian Alfredo Bryce Echenique must be regarded as the founding figure of the new sentimental narrative in Spanish America. The novels by Barnet, Poniatowska, and Allende discussed so far, although significant, are by and large individual experiments in the creation of a new sentimental discourse. In contrast, Bryce’s work, particularly after his second novel,Tantas veces Pedro(So Many Times Peter, 1977), has explored the issues of narrative sentimen- talism so intensely and consistently, and with such literary verve, that his infl uence can be detected even in works by canonical authors...

The rise of testimonial and sentimental narratives, along with the sociopolitical circumstances mentioned in the introduction, soon affected the production of some of the most celebrated authors of the Latin American narrative Boom. Thus, starting in the late 1970s, major Boom authors such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa began to incorporate and intensify the sentimental and amorous elements in their novels. In works such asAunt Julia and the Scriptwriterby Vargas Llosa andInfante’s Infernoby Cabrera Infante, with their mixture of autobiography, humor, and love, we find an overt exploration of subjectivity...

The notion that love is a founding myth of narrative fi ction and has even become a formula that serves as a framework for a vast category of fi ctions is implicit not only in García Márquez’sOf Love and Other Demonsbut also in the novels by Barnet, Poniatowska, Allende, and Bryce we have already analyzed and in practically all of the new sentimental novels. Only recently, however, under the aegis of postmodernism, has the use of love as a literary formula been unmasked, while simultaneously a “domestication”—in every sense of the word— of passionate love has been...

A dilemma faced by the authors of the new sentimental novel in Spanish America in their attempt to forge a new relationship with their readers was the seemingly trivial nature of this type of fiction, its relative unimportance when compared to the great political and social questions that polarized the Latin American continent and the world as a whole. Until recently in Spanish American literature and culture, to affi rm the primacy of the subject and of subjectivity, to give pride of place to the details of an individual’s emotional life, and to show respect and compassion toward others, including...