By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Sep 24 1996 (IPS)

When Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez started selecting stories for their anthology ‘McOndo’, they were absolutely certain about one thing: they would not accept any “magical realism”.

The idea for the book was the result of an anecdote. At the University of Iowa, in the United States, a collection of short stories written by Latin Americans students was rejected by an editor because “it lacked magical realism”.

The editor would not listen to any of the objections of the frustrated authors, saying that their stories “could have been written in any country of the First World”.

‘McOndo’, a collection of short stories by young authors writing in Spanish, is a reaction to that narrow perspective on Latin American literature. As Fuguet and Gomez explained at the recent launch of the book, they want to call attention to the way Latin America is seen from outside the region – especially in the United States and Europe – as a place full of exoticism.

The collection includes stories by 17 authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Spain and Uruguay. It will begin to circulate in Spain in November and then cross the Atlantic to Latin America.

All 17 authors are male. A result of the selection criteria, the book’s editors claim.

Though admitting that the selection may have been somewhat arbitrary, Fuguet and Gomez say their conditions were that the authors should have been born around 1960, have at least published two works which provoked controversy and, above all, that they cultivate no magical realism.

They conducted their search throughout the region, through newspapers, critics, editors, thousands of faxes and numerous Internet connections, which resulted in the creation of a virtual cafe.

These criteria for selection ended up excluding women, “who tend to publish little when they are young,” and authors from Cuba, where the economic crisis has closed off possibilities of publishing young authors in the last few years.

They also searched among the Chicano community in the United States, but say they were unsuccessful “because all the Chicano authors write in English and are magical realists.”

Fuguet and Gomez are the only writers representing Chilean literature. Among the other authors are Juan Forn, Rodrigo Fresan and Martin Rejtman from Argentina, Edmundo Paz Soldan (Bolivia), Santiago Gamboa (Colombia), Rodrigo Soto (Costa Rica) and Leonardo Valencia (Ecuador).

The title of the book, the editors say, “could be considered an irreverent irony towards Saint Gabriel the Archangel, or a well- deserved tribute”, in an allusion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Macondo of his ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.

“The name (or registered brand?) McOndo is of course a joke, a satire. Our McOndo is as Latin American and as magical (exotic) as the real Macondo (which of course is not real, but rather virtual),” says the book’s foreword.

“Our country McOndo is bigger, overpopulated and full of pollution; with highways, subways, cable T.V. and slums. In McOndo, there are McDonalds, Mac computers and condos, as well as five-star hotels built with laundered money and shopping malls,” wrote the editors. They decided to present their book in a McDonalds restaurant.

Fuguet summarized the book’s main idea and its title as the expression of a “bastard culture” where unbelievable things happen, things that are fascinating and even magical, and “where it isn’t necessary to invoke to the folkloric stereotype”.

“It is an ideological book, but also a commercial book. We are not afraid of it not selling. We would like to have a comment by Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the title. Commercially, it would be very good,” he added.

Fuguet and Gomez were recruited by the Grijalbo-Mondadori publishing house to produce the anthology, given their merits as the young writers with the most following in Chile in the last decade.

Fuguet is the author of a collection of short stories called ‘Overdose’ and two novels ‘Bad Vibe’ and ‘Please Rewind’, the former produced as a play. Gomez is the author of ‘Goodbye, Karl Marx, See You in Heaven’, a collection of short stories, and ‘Exemplary Lives’, a novel.

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