Post-Boom(er) Maximalism in the Americas

Valeria Luiselli's “Lost Children Archive”

Abstract

This article poses an alternative non-Anglophone starting point for twenty-first century maximalism through the Latin American Boom and “la novela total” that is its crowning achievement. Among such works are Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975). The term’s 1960s conception by Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa predates Thomas Pynchon as figurehead for maximalist theorizing within First World academic environments that control the conversation. Furthermore, I examine Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as a case of post-Boom(er) maximalism that differs from the big novels of the Latin American luminaries. Luiselli updates the heroic and “masculine” standards of “la novela total” based in an Archive of New World history that is the well of its authorial genius. Luiselli writes a first-personal account of the US-Mexico immigration crisis and its human collateral in the form of children. This disenfranchisement of Central American refugees peaks during the Obama era and worsens under the Trump presidency. Her writing points beyond the celebrated Latin American Boom. Its authors held confidence in the printed word’s ability to speak truth to power, and produce change before US-backed dictatorships that ruled across much of Latin America. Luiselli instead deploys a multimodal aesthetic of physical and sonorous witnessing to get “beyond” poststructuralist critiques of writing. Her masterwork is part of a First World academic reorientation of maximalism toward questions of history, language, and representation. The article contends that scholars should embrace Latin American literature for a better understanding of maximalist genealogy, yet also argues that Lost Children Archive is a skeptical variant that expands in size precisely by questioning the efficacy of its own literary humanitarian project. The panoramas of the Latin American Boom recede before Luiselli’s contemporary autofiction, which trades in countercultural passion for a post-postmodernist return to ethics through archival traces, global activism, and empathy.