South Toward Home

By Philip Herrera

SEVEN VOICES

by RITA GUIBERT

436 pages. Knopf. $10.

This is an ambitious book. Rita Guibert, an Argentine and former LIFE en Espanol reporter, confronts the fact that though Latin American literature is now often acclaimed as perhaps the richest and most original in the world, it simply has not caught on with U.S. readers. Part of the problem, as has long been recognized, is language--though translations are generally improving and are sometimes excellent. A greater impediment is a kind of cultural preconception, an unstated assumption that any art flourishing in Latin America will be too exotic or too frivolous for North American tastes. Rita Guibert sets out to show how misleading this assumption is. She presents her argument in an arresting series of long, first-person interviews with seven of Spanish America's leading writers. They form a marvelous bridge of words to another culture, another world.

Here is Miguel Angel Asturias, the leftist, Nobel-prizewinning novelist (El Senor Presidente, The Green Pope), relaxing over tea in his Paris home and recalling his 1920s youth in dictator-ridden Guatemala. The leaders, he says, "kept themselves hidden, spinning evil from secret corners like spiders." In protest, he created his "literature of commitment" to call attention to poverty and death on banana plantations and in quebracho forests.

By contrast, Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges is a private artificer. Now that his increasing blindness prevents him from working them out on paper, he describes to Interviewer Guibert how he composes his enigmatic short stories and poems, learning them by heart in silence before confiding them to a tape recorder or a secretary. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the brilliant Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, confesses that he became a conjurer with words only because he was too timid to become what he really in tended to be: a stage magician.

The best interviews are with two writers who are still almost unknown in the U.S. Octavio Paz, Mexico's most distinguished poet and essayist (TIME, Jan. 29), impresses the reader as one of the most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne of vertigo and tides."

In his interview, Cuba's Guillermo Cabrera Infante manages to set up a showy verbal circus, as full of puns, mockery and acerb wit as his novel Three Trapped Tigers, which was published in the U.S. last year. He wrote the book in the early 1960s, while employed as a magazine editor and cultural attache producing revolutionary rhetoric for Fidel Castro, whom he detests--"a gangster who has become a policeman." The only things that are run well in Cuba, Cabrera Infante says, are "the three Ps--police, propaganda and paranoia as a system of government." Not surprisingly, he now lives in London.

Sadly, perhaps significantly, Guibert found only Chile's Nobel laureate, Poet Pablo Neruda, in his native land, and Neruda was busily running for President on the Communist ticket in 1970. "Poets have just as much right to govern as businessmen or lawyers or soldiers," Neruda said, but another Marxist, Professor Salvador Allende, won the election. All the other writers were in the U.S. or Europe, pleased to be temporarily away from what even Neruda calls Latin America's "intellectual underdevelopment." To hear them talk, their vast continent sometimes seems as small and stifling as a village. Yet the point is that self-exile gives the writers a necessary distance from what is closest to them, their invariable subject--home. . Philip Herrera

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