Another of the great seams of narrative in Spanish along with Mexico or Argentina. From Chile we get a multitude of authors who display a homeland bibliography of many carats. It could only be so in a country full of geographical contrasts. From the fascinating Atacama desert, capable of flourishing when the time is right; to the great city of Santiago among its mountains; to its national parks and southern reserves with views of the end of the world.
Contrasts that are also admired in his narrative landscape. Quills of a very diverse nature to satisfy demanding readers. From imperishable works to new registers in the widespread noir genre as well as forays into avant-garde of all kinds.
The list of authors brought here, from between the XNUMXth century and the present, could be extended to many others. But it is what has to be emboldened with a ranking, there are always those who are left out from the mere subjective appreciation of the jury on duty.
For example, Neruda is left out because poetry is not my thing. A burdensome discard that many will not forgive me, but it is what it is. Here we live from prose. Nevertheless, ultimately and symbolically, I have left the list at 9 great Chilean authors. Empty chair for Neruda, one of the greatest in case one day I dare with the poetic.
Top 10 recommended Chilean writers
Isabel Allende
The Chilean writer Isabel Allende he manages as he wants one of the main virtues or gifts that every writer yearns to achieve throughout his entire career: empathy. The characters of Isabel Allende are vivid images from the inside out. We connect with all of them from the soul. And from there, from the subjective internal forum, we contemplate the world under the prism that the author is interested in showing in order to be more convincing, more emotional or even more critical if she touches ...
So, friend, you are warned. Putting yourself to read any of the novels of the queen of letters in Spanish will mean a mutation, an osmosis, a mimicry towards other lives, those of the characters in her novels. It happens like this, you start by listening to them walk near you, then you notice how they breathe, you end up deciphering their scent and seeing their gestures. In the end you end up inside their skin and start living for them.
And in short, that is empathy, learning to see with different eyes. And as I have always said, this is one of the greatest values in literature. It is not a question of believing yourself wiser, but of knowing how to understand others. Separate singular dissertations on work of Isabel AllendeI think I have nothing more to say.
Roberto bolaño
Neruda was more exclusively a poet. But his compatriot Roberto Bolaño is one of the clearest examples of commitment to literature in all its aspects. And it is that when the tragedy of an irreversible disease hung over him was when he most insisted on writing. His last decade (10 years fighting his illness) meant an absolute dedication to lyrics.
Although the truth is that a guy like Bolaño did not have to demonstrate that level of vital commitment to literature. Founder of infrarealism, that sort of surrealism postponed and transferred to Hispanic letters, he wrote great poems, with novelistic incursions that gained value as he opted for prose. This is how Bolaño was conforming as a countercultural totem with novels outlined in standard fiction genres, but bursting inside with acid and critical tints that assail us with a stark realism.
José Donoso
Chilean literature finds in José Donoso to its most transcendental narrator of the XNUMXth century. Not so much in the sense of narrative success, which also partly although less than Isabel Allende, but because of the existentialist scope of his novels. A Donoso whose fellow countryman Scarmeta admired for his great social conscience.
The taste of literary delicacy summarizes precisely what Donoso proposes in any of the genres he played. Because the question is to get us to soak up their characters, to remain spellbound in the plot while enjoying that relevant, clairvoyant, ecstatic intellectual depth.
Everything assails us with brilliance and formal conciseness, with that synthesis of the virtuoso of the letters. Then there is the bitter aftertaste of existentialism made nuances from loss, heartbreak, disenchantment, although all this compensated with an intense, very lively and colorful lyricism. Balances only at the height of geniuses like Donoso with souls capable of harboring and translating the whole range of possible visions of life.
Antonio Skarmeta
Beyond the theme and narrative intention, the generational coincidence between Chilean authors Isabel Allende y Antonio Skarmeta make Chilean literature one of the strongest current bastions of Latin American literature.
If we also consider the cinematographic projection of some of his great works, we look at a parallel bibliography that shares, perhaps by generational harmony, a sociological review, a dramatic intention and an action transmitted from very vivid characters. Nothing to see in the final style but more of a coincidence in the background.
In the case of Skármeta, his taste for cinema extends to writing scripts, also splashing a novelistic production loaded with that humanism of intrahistories in settings as disparate as the different ages of the human being with its discoveries and frustrations, of the social portrait with its critical load or its will to reveal the contradictions and imbalances of the individual in general morality.
Perhaps this is how he tries to encompass the immeasurable, because in so many good novels or in some of his forays into cinema, valuing can always be a vain exercise. Each story is an encounter with the essential, with that nakedness that every author must seek to awaken consciences, to reach that famous chord.
The literary and cinematographic tastes and predilections of Skarmeta they are also very present in his works. And Neruda becomes in this aspect something recurrent, a character and a work thoroughly revisited in Skármeta's extensive creation.
But regardless of these details, any of his novels have that taste of the independent jewel, of creation loaded with imprint and defeated by the will to tell something new, to delve into characters capable of transmitting essences adorned in forms and an unmistakable style. .
Marcela serrano
Current Chilean literature summarizes between Isabel Allende (always comes up) and Marcela serrano (each with its narrative interests and style) the benefits of the best sellers with the dregs of the great novels. And is that everything undertaken from a feminine prism can be opened to fascinating balances that satisfy the most demanding readers.
In the specific case of Marcela, and around 30 years of profession, her bibliography composes a rich mosaic of introspection where each character contributes their lights and shadows, the ranges of colors from which they see the world of course with manifest feminism when they play.
It is an art to compose live plots with that parallel degree of detail in the protagonists. But Marcela Serrano achieves it because everything naturalizes and integrates, and that means not throwing the roll in search of psychological or sociological revelations, because that should always be more of the task of the reader who likes to stop more at each scene.
So reading Marcela Serrano is that adventure of proximity. Almost a journey undertaken towards the soul. A journey in which we move alongside the characters and that leads us to a review rarely so humanistic, from a prose as brilliant as it is forceful.
Carla guelfenbein
Carla's trick, and that of many who end up being great writers, is having something interesting to rescue from the machinery of reality and knowing how to tell it in fiction. Always with that meticulous construction of realist writers, capable of offering mirrors of our days so that every reader can reflect on essential mimicry.
Above all because Carla's realism arises from the impressions gathered by the soul of her protagonists, from the boundless subjective cosmos of captivating characters in their depth, in their vital baggage, in their philosophy of life.
Building with that goldsmith's meticulousness, everything else unfolds with the natural and overwhelming cadence that reaches us when we feel that we are living under a new skin. Love, absences, spite or hope thus give off aromas and also manage to transmit flavors, practically spiritual nuances, with imperfections and mismatches between reason and what we can harbor from the soul.
Alberto fuguet
When someone asks why write? You can try to give an accurate answer by resorting to some works such as "As I write" by Stephen King or the "Why I write" of Xavier Romeo. Or you can simply implement the titanic strategy of Alberto fuguet. The one that for every answer alleges the "just because", the reason with which great things are faced.
Not in vain Fuguet writes everything with a holistic vision of the narrative. Books that are as soon as pure fiction as they rest on the realism of the chronicle, or on the wandering of the essay or the investigation of biographical essences ... That is what writing is. Writer is the one who begins to narrate for the sole interest of removing that story, or that investigation or that idea that does not stop pounding on the doors of the imagination.
So it is not easy for Fuguet to focus on his best novels or his best essays. The very scoundrel zigzags for bewilderment. Because there is a space between reality and fiction in which we all inhabit. There where the thresholds are foggy is where the stories of Fuguet catch us and win us for their cause of making literature of everything.
Alexander Zambra
It must be a matter of his direct view of the Pacific Ocean, that enormous blue where one can get rid of memory and past. The point is that a good handful of recent Chilean storytellers have the privileged honor of tackling the deepest narrative. From the already disappeared and mythologized Roberto bolaño but also Alexander Zambra going through the poetry of Nicanor Parra or the most popular narrative of Isabel Allende.
Of course, unifying is all audacity even taking the origin of the creators on duty. Because it is contradictory to baptize as current what each one writes with the intention of exorcism or in search of their own placebos. But our reason is like that, used to labels with difficult solutions. Something quite different is that, sharing idiosyncrasy, moral standards, social circumstances and a geographical influence as overwhelming as the drawing of Chile as a Pacific coast from north to south, something ends up being shared in that first motivation ...
To discover Alejandro Zambra is to recreate in his poetic vision inherited from Parra himself to let the lyricism end up being shadowed by a devastating prose. In the midst of this singular process of language, some characters that survive the brilliant adornment and the subsequent cruel subjugation of realism without regard. The actions are not free of critical connotations in social, moral and political aspects. Something for which, after all, a poet ends up assaulting a prose in which he already undresses all kinds of realities.
Paul Simonetti
Pablo Simonetti's stories are veiled confessions of protagonists who find a therapist in us. Only that the reader ends up reflecting on the corresponding plot from an inescapable empathy that soaks everything in the work of Simonetti.
intimacy with that brilliance of someone who risks undressing aspects in their characters that end up addressing us all. Placebo against another more frivolous vision of literature. Commitment to literature as a channel for humanistics. And it is not that in the attempt to "dignify" the novel, this author forgets the essence of an entertainment inherent in this type of reading. Rather, it is about complementing action and reflection. The perfect balance.
Introspection and analysis of life and what has been lived. But also suggestive developments around those more transcendent approaches. Adventure is life or perhaps it is the work on the stage with the touch of improvisation that everyone has in their interventions before their audience. Captivating surprises according to the essential protagonists, around whom the plot, events and perspectives of the world usually revolve depending on the moment in which they are faced. The subjective as a rich mosaic where the color but also the aroma and even the touch seems to come to us from the paper.