El último juego: A Feminine Novel of the "Boom"

Abstract

The so called "boom", as a literary and editorial phenomenon, was a landmark in contemporary Latin-American fiction. Recent critical writing, however, has noted that it was viewed and projected as an essentially male expression. None of the women writers who published innovative novels during the sixties and early seventies —such as Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector and Elena Garro— was included in the "boom's" canon, although writers such as Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferré, and Laura Esquivel were later considered as prominent members of the "post-boom". In this article, the novel El último juego (1976) by the Panamanian writer Gloria Guardia is analyzed as a woman's contribution to the Latin American "boom". The analysis considers the historical context, the socio-political perspective, the nature of its main characters, its language, and its narrative techniques, to underline that the novel is part of "boom" fiction. It also signals the need to make visible fiction written by women as part of this literary phenomenon.