In honor of “Drink Corona (or whatever Mexican beer you choose) Day,” I thought I’d go find some well-regarded Mexican authors whom I’ve never read a word of. Only having thought up this idea this morning, I decided to dive into the “canonical appendixes” of Harold Bloom’s Western Canon
Except for Latin America, which is lumped together. So I had to spend a few minutes checking out the nationality of all the authors he listed, only to discover that he only has two Mexican authors on his list and I’ve actually read a book by one of them (Aura
Bloom’s list did manage to yield a Mexican 0-fer author for me: Octavio Paz.
For the sake of bulking up this post, here’s the full list of Bloom’s canonical authors of Latin America (in the sequence he lists them), with 0-fer annotations:
- Rubén DarÃo (Nicaragua): 0-fer
- Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): I’ve even read his long novel!
- Alejo Carpentier (Cuba): 0-fer
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba): 0-fer
- Severo Sarduy (Cuba): 0-fer
- Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba): 0-fer. Haven’t even seen that movie about him.
- Pablo Neruda (Chile): We read one of his poems at our wedding.
- Nicolás Guillén (Cuba): 0-fer
- Octavio Paz (Mexico): 0-fer
- César Vallejo (Peru): 0-fer
- Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala): 0-fer
- José Lezama Lima (Cuba): 0-fer (but his wife is awesome)
- Julio Cortázar (Argentina): I tried reading Hopscotch
, but didn’t get far.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia): Read One Hundred Years of Solitude
and some short stories
- Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru): 0-fer
- Carlos Fuentes (Mexico): The aforementioned Aura.
- Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil): Wh0-fer?
Looks like Bloom really digs Cuban writers, huh? Now go get messed up on Tecate!