Alfaguara Acquires the New “Crack” Titles

by María Elena Cruz -- Críticas, 2/15/2006

Santillana’s literary imprint Alfaguara will publish the next novels of Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, two of the most celebrated authors in Mexico’s “Grupo Crack,” a literary movement that protests what it refers to as the imitative, formulaic offerings of contemporary Mexican literature.

Padilla and Volpi, both in their 30s, have so far published under Planeta, contributing significant sales in Mexico and abroad. Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) won the prestigious Seix Barral award in 1999 and has been translated into 19 languages. Padilla’s Amphitryon, available in six languages, won the Primavera de Novela prize in 2000.

Padilla told Críticas the move from Planeta to Alfaguara was “a natural step” since the Santillana imprint is more devoted to the kind of literature he writes. “As readers and writers [Volpi and I] have been influenced by Alfaguara’s books,” said Padilla at a press conference in Mexico last January. “We have read Alfaguara titles since they began to circulate.”

Due out in September, Padilla’s novel imagines the conquest of Dante’s Inferno. “The book mocks and at the same time pays tribute to the travel and exploration literature of the 20th century,” the author said.

Volpi’s novel, available this June, is set in the States and the Soviet Union and spans the fall of the Berlin Wall to the end of the century. The novel will close Volpi’s “Trilogy of the 20th Century,” which includes En busca de Klingsor and El fin de la locura (The End of Madness).

According to the members of “Grupo Crack,” which also includes Eloy Urroz, Vicente Herrasti, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the literature following the Latin American Boom is a light, worn out version of magical realism. The aim of the movement is to disengage from this formula—to create a “crack”—and to produce complex works that take risks.