What are some good Latin American/Spanish authors? Pic

Borges

horatio castellanos moya. his books give me anxiety. very short and simple prose, much more accessible than Borges. i recommend dance with snakes or senselessness (if you really want to read something our of a nightmare).

He is Salvadoran, part of a post-dark decade latin american generation of writers.

>>9053925

Marquez is pretty good but not as good as he's made out to be IMO (although I read in English so it's very possible that the translation robbed him of his magic

>>9054379
senselessness was such an amazing book. The way in which he pushed the terror and creeping madness down left me creeped out for months.

Spain: El Cid (epic poem), Calderon de La Barca (Spain's Shakespeare), Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina (creator of Don Juan), Miguel de Cervantes (D. Quijote), Gongora, Ines de la Cruz, Perez-Galdos, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Portugal: Luis de Camoes, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Jose Cardoso Pires, José Saramago, Antonio Lobo Antunes,

Hispanic America: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Bioy Casares, Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda.

Brazil: Machado de Assis, Euclides da Cunha, Clarice Lispector, Graciliano Ramos, João Guimarães Rosa, Carlos Drummond.

Top 5 books, according to serious critical acclaim:

1. D. Quijote - Cervantes
2. The Lusiads - Camoens
3. Book of Disquiet - Pessoa
4. Life is a Dream - Calderon de la Barca
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez (I haven't read it); or maybe The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by Guimarães Rosa.

>>9053925
For Brazil, Machado and Lispector. Guimarães Rosa is also good but it loses in translation about as much as Céline, so fuck it.
Sides that, Cortazar, Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bolaño, the usual. You can find more suggestions in Bloom's Western Canon's appendix.

>>9054419
Book of Disquiet is better than Lusiads, Posthumous Memoirs is better than both, and Ficciones is better than all three tbqhwyf.

>>9054429
>Book of Disquiet is better than Lusiads, Posthumous Memoirs is better than both

Are you joking?

Machado de Assis was a great writer, but absolutely superficial. His style is a perfect copy and development of that of Sterne, but the psychological shallowness of his characters is, quite simply, too easy. He, in that sense, is like Eça de Queiroz, with the difference that Eça's caricatures were based after social types, while Machado's were based after strawmen of social worldviews - positivism (Quincas Borba), pessimism (Cubas), psychologism (Alienista), and so on. The only one who more or less escapes it is Bento Santiago, because he has a *real* problem to deal with. However, Dom Casmurro is inferior to other novels of the time which dealt with similar themes.

The characters of Camoens are also shallow figures. However, we all know that's not the point of the poem, so that this sort of criticism does not apply at all.

>>9054464
It's the other way around, really. Bento is an archetype, the archetype of cowardice (grew up without a dad, female friend, almost became a priest, extremely jealous, etc) and Cubas was a demonstration of advanced nihilism.
But I'm honestly not in the mood for arguing how you don't get it and I get it.

File: 1474142877401.jpg (5KB, 200x161px) Image search: [Google]

5KB, 200x161px

>>9054429
>Book of Disquiet is better than Lusiads
>Oranges are better than windows

>>9054495
>Frog
>Implying there's no such thing as objective value, or at least that Epics and romances can't be compared
Please leave.

>>9054512
>Implying there's no such thing as objective value

Stopped reading there.

>>9054486
>Bento is an archetype, the archetype of cowardice (grew up without a dad, female friend, almost became a priest, extremely jealous, etc) and Cubas was a demonstration of advanced nihilism.

Isn't that what I said? Machado's characters are based on ideas. Call them what you want, but the fact of the matters is that the ideas anteced the invention: first, he has the idea; then, he has the character. That's not how the best literature works! A great novel is made out of great people, not of great archetypes. Archetypes work much better in epic poetry. In order to create a great character out of an archetype one needs a much greater genius than that of Machado, because it takes a complete, absolute understanding of said archetype (Dante manages to do it with Beatrice, an archetype of love and goodness, but Dante is much above Machado and Eça). Just compare a character by Lobo Antunes with Brás Cubas or Bento Santiago and you're going to see the enormous difference between them! Antunes paints real people; Machado, personified strawmen.

As a consequence, Machado's characters are frustratingly fixed and unchangeable. Brás Cubas, for instance, never changes his worldview in order to do anything good, because he is simply unable to. Only real people can do genuinely good things, and Brás Cubas is nothing but a literary personification of a given set of ideas. Compare his course of action, and the non-development of his moral behaviour, with the development of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.

This is not to say Machado isn't a great writer. I am a fan of his works and have read and reread him many times. However, he is not as good as you would like to think.

Add Alejo Carpentier and Rafael Chirbes.