Although Augusto Monterroso pointed out with great humor and talent that Latin American writers, faced with political situations, can face three fates – exile, imprisonment or burial – I would dare to add a fourth fate: becoming a character in a novel. There has been a literary tradition for decades. Poets and writers, and literature as a subject in itself, appear from the novels of Vargas Vila to those of Vargas Llosa, and swarm in the books of Humberto Salvador, Borges, Lezama Lima, Josefina Vicens, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Elena Garro, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Jaime Bayly, not to mention the great newer generations of Enrique Vila-Matas, Roberto Bolaño, César Aira or Javier Cercas. Perhaps Bolaño marks a recurring presence on the theme of the writer. It’s a classic theme. The formative novel tells, from Goethe, about the search of a young artist. In 2022, two Ecuadorian novels were published on the subject: Ulysses and broken toysErnesto Carrión and Tamia, the universe Roberto Rodríguez Paredes. And there are many more in previous years that revolve around literature and its writers. The latest one, which I want to talk about on this occasion, is mist (Seix Barral, 2023), Miguel Molina Díaz. Is that a sign of something? Of course. Every approach from the novel provokes criticism of the state of reality, breaks it down, exposes it, resists it, ironizes it and suggests new paths or the exhaustion of given paths.

Protagonist of mist, Emilio Cueva Salazar, an Ecuadorian, disappointed by his unfulfilled relationship with Martina Moscoso, travels to Barcelona to get a master’s degree in literature and become, in his own words, “the greatest representative of Ecuadorian literature”. What will happen will be a deep irony on these topics. The female characters are especially fascinating, both Emilio’s impossible girlfriend and the one he meets in Barcelona, ​​Belén Garmendia, a young professor of literature, of Venezuelan origin, who suffers from exile and the impossibility of returning to her country. Be careful with the changing times: he is no longer a left-wing exile fleeing a dictatorial right-wing government; She is an exile who must escape from a country destroyed by a left-wing government. Both are brilliant, talented, strong women, more intelligent than Emilio himself – which already marks the mastery of the novelist – and they are also deeply lonely. In the middle of the literary scenery, they stand out with a mysterious glow that the novel does not resolve, as if it came close to them in the part where they form Emilio, who finally does not know how to support them well to build a perhaps more authentic life. Although that fate is not guaranteed either.

Authenticity is one of the problematic backgrounds of Miguel Molina Díaz’s novel. Emilio will end up with apparent success. They will cover up their defeat with a puffed-up defense of publishing by independent and small publishers, with the small mouths of those who supposedly bet on the honesty of minor literature, but who cannot digest the failure of their futile expectation, so it ends with temporary inclusive language and other politically correct winks to connect – how opportunistic “ally”? – with a periphery eager for symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu dixit) which tries to cover the sun of reality with a self-pitying finger or an appropriate “x”. In short, a profound and amusingly articulated parody of contemporary mediocrity dressed up in good and bad intentions.

Molina Díaz studied for a master’s degree in creative writing in New York where she had teachers like Salman Rushdie. Privileged by the few, Rushdie’s sense of humor must have discovered or encouraged him to embrace his own humor. His first novel shows him as a promising novelist who relies on the fundamentally comic essence of the novel, in which complex humor is needed to break the discourse of a society and a time full of its own myths and exaltations. Of course, he breaks the clichés of the Spanish literary system – the author actually lived in Barcelona – but unlike his character, who desperately wants to interview Hispanic icons like Enrique Vila-Matas or Javier Cercas, and never succeeds, and also engages in fraud, the real the author nevertheless interviewed them and published those interviews, which reveals that primordial knowledge of the novelistic imagination: not a literal transmission, not a realistic sharpening that works better in other registers and genres, but a stake, proportionally reversed, that enables a deviation from reality through an imaginative digression in in which fiction plays its critical and dissonant role, and which is added to reality as a point of view of individual freedom.

This presentation of topics indicates the need to change the literary system and the change itself. As happened with Quixote, where he satirized about chivalric novels because the world of literature had transformed and one had to know where it came from. In the novelist’s mind, every book is a process of assimilation and transformation. That in the first novel as mist The way in which this topic is treated shows the pressure of reality that Wallace Stevens considered a decisive factor in the artistic character of an epoch. Resisting or avoiding that pressure, Stevens said, reverses the pressure. From José Donos to Roberto Bolaño and César Aira, and now s mist Miguel Molina, seeks to relieve the pressure of the Latin American boom and all branches which the literary system will continue to welcome or create, which excessively illuminate certain topics, but also allow the necessary darkness in order to emerge revealing works of longer duration, which transcend fashion trends and escape from what is expected, what is owed to what rises without with a critical eye and a lot of demagoguery. I celebrate the talent profile that emerges strongly in the first novel Miguel Molina Díaz. (OR)