You can’t write good literature unless you come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Why did Russia produce so little literature for such a large country, and none since early Solzhenitsyn? Why can tiny El Salvador produce amazing literature today, while Russia can’t? This is because Russia was only half Christianized, preserving a very strong pagan tradition, and then completely dechristianized after 1917. The only two authors today who write anything resembling literature in Russian are Bykov and Veller, and they’re both very Jewish and extremely westernized.
The part of Latin America that is producing great literature is Western and Christian. The indigenous cultures of the region, of which there is an enormous number, have produced no literature at all.
V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, these are aggressively and almost comically Westernized authors.
The reason for this phenomenon is that the Judeo-Christian tradition is generative of a certain type of sensibility, which is the only kind of sensibility that can create worlds out of words. There is Kabbalah, there’s “In the beginning, there was the word.”
To answer the original question, yes, of course, it’s Latin America, for the reason I explained. Latin America has one of the strongest, most flourishing literary traditions in the world because it’s the Spanish literary tradition. Today, it makes no sense, in my opinion, to speak of Spanish and Latin American literature as separate from each other. Which is exactly why my new book, Neoliberal Love, talks about the entirety of Hispanic literature today. I was afraid that the anonymous reviewers would take exception to this because it’s still not done a whole lot, but they actually loved this facet of it. My argument that this is the same literary space is, honestly, so well supported in the text of the book that I don’t think you can argue with it.
Great question. I loved it.
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