By Sergio Ramírez.

There are a series of values generally understood to define a literary generation, among them, the dates of birth of the writers; personal coexistence; a contemporary historical fact against which they take a decisive position; and that in the face of the stagnation of the generation that precedes them, they renew literature in some way, until they come to create a new canon.

If we abide by the age rule, the boom generation would not be such, given the notable age disparity between two of its members. For instance, Julio Cortázar was born in 1914, and Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, are more than twenty years apart. Contemporaries would only be Carlos Fuentes (1927) and Gabriel García Márquez (1928).

I began to do these calculations after finishing reading ‘Las cartas del boom’, recently published by Alfaguara, which contains the correspondence between the four of them over almost forty years (between 1955 and 2012.) First a timid skirmish, then an intense, exultant crossfire, in the sixties and seventies, and finally a few farewell shots; a few letters, and congratulatory cables for awards, or condolences. But everything already sounds distant, like those majestic parades that after crossing the stage end with drum rolls that recede behind the scenes.

If we stick to the requirement of personal coexistence, this is plenty. It is a casual friendship that not infrequently becomes intimate. They send among themselves the originals of the works they are preparing, or those already completed, they praise and criticize each other, the most severe and sincere of all is Cortázar. They are all aware that they are participating in a phenomenon of renewal, convinced that they are ridding the Latin American narrative of the hindrances of the vernacular, and the dead weight of indigenismo.

It is the same awareness that the modernists had that they were fulfilling an innovative task in the face of an agonizing literature, and Rubén Darío knew how to express it in the prologues of his books, true aesthetic manifestos. If we add the existence of the literary manifesto as a generational requirement, these letters play that role.

Modernism produced a single style of colorful pyrotechnics. In the boom there are four styles. Magical realism only belongs to García Márquez, a unique license plate that instead of followers only got imitators. The exaggeration in him «is not a way of altering reality but of seeing it,» Vargas Llosa will say in ‘Historia de un deicide.’

But the spirit of identity that reigns among the four leads them to propose joint projects, a two-handed novel between García Márquez and Vargas Llosa about the 1932 war between Peru and Colombia; another collective novel about Latin American dictators, projects to which Cortázar turns his body away. And together they sign political statements, protest manifestos.

And if we talk about manifestos, Cortázar’s Hopscotch is one, not so much for the group as for a whole generation of readers for whom it functioned as a manual of personal conduct against the established code of customs; and a new conscience arose, that of cronopio, in the face of the detestable fames and the wavering hopes.

The greatest undertaking to create a new vision of history through the novel compromises the work of Carlos Fuentes, the ambition to use fiction as a unique and valid mirror of all the frameworks of the past and make them present. And it is Cortázar himself who, in his readings of the manuscripts of Vargas Llosa’s novels, discovers that he is facing something that he has not found anywhere before, the intertwining of time and space on simultaneous planes, the passage from a more distant past to a closer one, or to the present.

And, continuing with the primer, if there is a transcendental historical fact, in the face of which the four of them stand in the foreground, it is the Cuban revolution, first with unanimous fervor, the closest Cortázar and Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes and García Márquez more critical: «if the Cuban friends are going to become our policemen, they are going to take, at least for my part, a good errand to hell», García Márquez told Fuentes in March of 1967; “…they should not forget that we are with them out of conviction and not out of fear of being put in jail.”

In 1971, the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla and the scandal of his subsequent confession of guilt -the famous Padilla case—became a watershed moment that created insurmountable contradictions; Fuentes and Vargas Llosa become critical of Fidel Castro’s regime, while Cortázar and García Márquez remain close.

This generation also created something new: it took Latin American literature out of the catacombs, from domestic book circulation and from its local circulation, and created a new market, not only in Spanish, but in the world. «For me, the famous boom is not so much a boom in writers as a boom in readers,» García Márquez told Fuentes in 1967, recently published One Hundred Years of Solitude.

An epistolary book like few others, because it is the portrait of an era.