GeoKIT 2021 (all year): South America

In this year-long KIT we re-visit the southern part of the American continent, from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Cape Horn, and including the islands of the Caribbean. You can read fiction or non-fiction, written by authors born or living in the region, or simply books set in a country or region that interests you.

The “1001 books you should read before you die” list also includes many books by South American authors, here’s a small selection of lesser-known titles:
Tent of miracles, A world for Julius, The devil to pay in the badlands, Heartbreak Tango, Our lady of the assassins.

Novels which are set in the region include The wide Sargasso Sea, A high wind in Jamaica, The treasure of the Sierra Madre, Under the volcano, The Honorary Consul, Captain Blood and many others.

The wiki is here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2021_GeoKIT#Central_and_South_America_.2...

The image is by NASA via Wikipedia.

(Touchstones not working)

The Caribbean
The Caribbean is a sprinkling of little islands with romantic names such as the Windward or the Leeward Isles. They conjure up images of white beaches and turquoise waters, of cruise ships and sailing. It is easy to forget that this is where Columbus made his first landfall and the misery that followed for the native inhabitants from this.

The islands have had British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonial masters, so there is literature written in several languages. Especially Cuba has a rich tradition of writers, many translated into English such as Reinaldo Arenas, José Martí, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Leonardo Padura etc.

Well-known writers from the other islands are Derek Walcott (Nobel prize winner), V.S.Naipaul, Alejo Carpentier, Edwige Danticat, Marlon James, Maryse Condé, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Caryl Phillips.

More suggestions for the smaller islands can be found in the Reading Globally group, for instance in this new thread (post 4): https://www.librarything.com/topic/327232#7343911
Many thanks to spiralsheep for this!

ETA

Central (Meso) America
Geographically speaking, the land bridge linking the two halves of this double continents reaches from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the Isthmus of Darien and comprises the countries Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. Many pre-Columbian cultures have left remains that are being explored and researched now with modern techniques. The official language in all countries is Spanish.

Authors from Nicaragua include Gioconda Belli, Tomás Borge, Ernesto Cardenal, Rubén Dario.

Guatemala can claim a Nobel prize winner with Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Authors from the smaller countries can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Central_American_writers

South America
South America begins more or less at the border between Colombia and Panama. The main languages today are Spanish and Portuguese, due to the division of the newly claimed lands between Spain and Portugal with the Treaty of Tordesillas. The continent is geographically and biologically diverse, endowed with many natural resources and plagued by poverty, exploitation and political instability.
But do not let this deter you from exploring the rich culture! Think of Argentine gauchos and tango, of Peruvian archaeological remains, Brazilian carnivals, travelling on the Amazon river, climbing the Andes, etc.
I have listed a few well-known authors for each country. If you can suggest more, please do so!

Argentina
Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Manuel Puig

Bolivia
Edmundo Paz Soldán, Gastón Suárez

Brazil
Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Paulo Coelho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade are the most widely known names.

Chile
Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Dorfman, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo neruda, Luis Sepúlveda, Antonio Skármeta

Colombia
Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Mutis, Laura Restrepo

Ecuador
Osvaldo Hurtado, Maria Fernanda Espinosa

Paraguay
José Ricardo, Josefina Pla

Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa, José María Argueda, Alfredo Bryce

Uruguay
Mario Benedetti, Eduardo Galeano, Juan Carlos Onetti, Horacio Quiroga

Venezuela
Andrés Bello, Rafael Cadenas, Rómulo Gallegos

A good place to look for more authors from the region would be this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_American_writers

I've added a link to this thread from the GeoKIT 2021 wiki page. :-)

Thank you for all those lovely lists of potential reads!

>5 spiralsheep: Thanks! I had completely forgotten about that wiki link. I hope that with a year-long challenge I read more from this region than I managed in 2020.

Thanks, Brigit, you did a wonderful job! I, too, hope to read more than the one from this region than I did last year. I'm not a fan of fantasy, nor of magical realism, so my hunt for literature from this area is sometimes unproductive.

On my radar for this year is Argentine writer Maria Gainza's Optic Nerve.

I also recommend Carolina de Robertis' Gods of Tango set in Argentina as well as Cantoras and The invisible mountain set in Uruguay. The author is Uruguayan-American.

And there is a buddy read of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector's Complete stories: Lispector at this thread.

You can also find some ideas for reading in this area of the world at Reading Globally's South America thread or their 2012/2019 Classics in their own country thread.

The classics list also includes recommendations from Mexico which is part of the North American GEOKit for 2021.

>8 markon: - Oh, I really enjoyed Optic Nerve - it hit the right spots of my interests.

>10 LittleTaiko: Good to know! I've heard good things from other readers as well, but never got to it in 2020.

Great set up, Brigit! This may give me the incentive to start tackling the South American writers from the 1,001 List that I have been nervous about.

Planning to read Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa. It has been sitting on my shelf for years.

Nothing's calling me at the moment, but I do hope to participate at some point

I really enjoyed Dom Casmurro, which is a Brazilian classic work.

I read Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, which is a bildungsroman set in Antigua. 4*

Read The Alchemist by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho for ny book club

I read The Ladies are Upstairs by Merle Collins, which is a collection of short stories set mostly on a fictional Caribbean island resembling Grenada. 4.5*

I read A Lady's Ride Across Spanish Honduras by "Maria Soltera" (pseudonym), an 1880s travelogue reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine, about an English spinster travelling coast to coast across the country by mule to become a school teacher serving colonists in their new banana plantations. As one would expect from non-fiction travel writing aimed at the readers of Blackwood's, who were a comparatively well-informed audience, this extended essay is full of astute observations and mildly amusing incidents. Perhaps more surprisingly the author is unafraid to compare cultural differences such as Mexican craftwork and Spanish names and Honduran sanitation favourably against their English counterparts, although it probably goes without saying that she also reproduces some racist and classist stereotypes.

In conclusion: I'm now slightly bitter that no stranger has ever given me a revolver and a bag of coconuts. 3.5*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Honduras)

I read The Black Sheep and other fables, by Augusto Monterroso, which is a collection of very short fables. They ask questions such as "Was Penelope weaving while she waited for Odysseus to stop travelling or was Odysseus travelling while he waited for Penelope to stop weaving?" and "If faith moves mountains then would fewer people die in landslides if we abandoned our faiths?" Clever, witty, mildly amusing. Readers who didn't receive a classical education might find a few glancing references to Aesop or Horace whooshing over their heads but Monterroso mostly uses ideas familiar to inheritors of "Western" education, e.g. the lion as king, the wise owl, the cunning vixen, etc. 4.5*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico)

I read Clean Slate: new and selected poems by Daisy Zamora, which is a collection of her poetry from 1968-93 in both the original Spanish and an English translation. 4*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Nicaragua)

I read The Underwater Museum : the submerged sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor with photos by Jason deCaires Taylor and two essays, by an art critic (5pgs) and a marine biologist (8pgs), which is a like a museum exhibition catalogue featuring the author's earlier works in Grenada and Mexico. The art photography is stunning, and the ecological intention of helping natural marine reef-building using carefully constructed sculptures of local people is fascinating. There are photos from the creation and installation of the sculptures, and later photos of organisms inhabiting their new undersea proto-reef homes. 5*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Grenada and Mexico)

I read Jamaica Inn and Who was Blackbeard.

I read Angel (revised 2011 edition) by Merle Collins, which is a novel about three generations of Grenadian women, during the thirty years from 1951 to 1983, that the author originally wrote and published in 1987 and then rewrote and republished with Peepal Tree Press in 2011. 4.5*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Grenada)

I read The Privateer Clause by Ken Rossignol which took place on various cruise ships in the Caribbean. This was an "action-thriller" but just meh.

I read At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette, which is a travel and history book focussing on Paraguay in South America. I found the author an unlikeable character and his often crude attempts to explain the, frankly, inexplicable history and society of Paraguay are an uphill struggle, although presumably less for the reader than the writer.

There are all the atrocities one might expect: massacres of indigenous people; destruction of the environment (although as the environment includes horrors such as piranha fish one can sympathise to some extent); endless torturing and mass murdering dictators from 16th century Conquistadors onwards into the 20th century; pointless wars leaving up to 66% of the general population and 90% of the male population dead; long term extreme poverty and lack of healthcare. There are also less predictable outrages: the Jesuits who claimed for 160 years that they were protecting and educating indigenous people but who were responsible for many thousands of deaths while failing to produce even one indigenous Catholic priest; or the pacifist mennonites resorting to fistfights with nazis on the streets of mennonite colonies (readers will be heartened to know that even the avowedly right-wing Paraguayan army sided with the mennonites and made the nazis leave for their own colony). 2.5*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Paraguay)

I read Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa. Peruvian setting, Peruvian writer. I've reviewed it on my thread.

I read A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman

"When I'm asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my reaction varies depending on the age of my interlocutor. If we're the same age, I say that understanding is simply a matter of piecing together that which was previously seen as disjointed. If they're younger, I ask if they believe in bad omens."

The story of these thirty-two children who create mayhem and murder in the small town of San Cristóbal is told by a social worker reflecting on his role in the ensuing tragedy. No one knows where the children came from, who their parents are, or what has motivated them. They speak their own language, do not appear to have a leader, and disappear every night only to return in the morning more vicious than before. The story is closer to legend than fable, a folk tale. But no matter how difficult to categorize, the plot is intriguing, the voice of the social worker succeeds in capturing the reader's attention while he attempted to capture the children who do not belong anywhere. It's a short, imaginative novel that is well worth reading.

I read Keepers of the House, by Lisa St Aubin de Terán, which is supposedly a semi-autobiographical novel, although the present date in the book is around 15 years too early for the author's time in Venezuela. The framing story is about a young English woman who marries into a landowning Venezuelan family and moves to her incapable husband's run-down sugar plantation in the Andes where she receives tenebrous tales of his family history from an elderly servant. The novel reads like a collection of short Hispanic-gothic literary fairytales about the rural gentry. These stories tell of lonely death, massacre, in-breeding, madness, disease, and famine (imagine if Aunt Ada Doom from Cold Comfort Farm came from Latin American rural gentry and had written a family history). Not my sort of thing, and nearly a dnf, but that's not the book's fault. 3*

GeoKIT: Central and South America (Venezuela)

I finally have a book to report here: Die dritte Kugel which is set during the Conquest of Mexico, but has a strange little twist.

I have also finished Wide Sargasso Sea which is set on Jamaica and (probably) Dominica, where author Jean Rhys was born.

And Die vielen Talente der Schwestern Gusmão is set in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, to be precise. You learn a lot about Brazil in the early 20th century in this.

I read Miguel Street by V.S. Naipaul set in Port of Spain, Trinidad and seen through the eyes of a boy.

I completed Tom Cringle's Log, where at least 50% of the "action" took place in the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica.

I've just finished Tom Michell's The Penguin Lessons, a memoir where the author rescues said penguin from an oil slick while on holiday in Uruguay in the 1970s, and then takes him back to the boarding school in Argentina where he's working as a teacher.

I have finished Der große Augenblick. Clarice Lispector is a well-regarded Brazilian author, but I found this very hard going.

Earlier this month I read A Long Petal of the Sea by the Chilean/American author Isabel Allende. Although the first part of the book takes place in Spain, the majority of it is set in Chile with a bit in Venezuela. The main characters decide that Chile is their home.

I just finished In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. Set in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Trujillo, this was an amazing story based on real events.

I read Infinite Country by Patricia Engel (Colombia).