Two narratives, two homes

IN THE MID-1990S, THE CHILEAN NOVELIST

lberto Fuguet began championing a globalized, hyper-modern literary sensibility he called McOndo. Rather than pulling from the myths and folklore that influenced well-known writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, McOndo united Latin American writers who drew inspiration from pop culture and mass media. In a 2001 essay titled “Magical Neoliberalism,” Fuguet wrote that the word McOndo “began as a joke, a spoof of García Márquez’s magical and invented town of Macondo,” the setting of. In Macondo, history was doomed to repeat itself, often through surreal or enchanted means. But in McOndo writing, history hurtles forward. Fuguet and his cohort embraced a “global, mixed, diverse, urban 21st century Latin America” — a fast-paced, vibrant setting, written in colloquial language and symbolized by airports, movie theaters and malls.