Delirio americano

Carlos Granés, one of the most solid and original thinkers of today, recomposes with a great narrative pulse the immense, intricate and exuberant puzzle of the long twentieth century in Latin America. For the first time, readers can go through the stages, forces and events of a story traditionally told in a fragmented way and deeply marked by the complex relationships between culture and politics in the same story. The essay traces surprising connections, shows revealing contradictions and portrays figures such as José Martí, César Vallejo, Nahui Olín, Juan Domingo Perón, García Márquez, Doris Salcedo or Caetano Veloso. From the first demands for a Latin America with its own identity by poets and essayists, the rise of Latin American communism and fascism and the emergence of populism to the aftermath of the boom, the new tensions between the local and the global and the death of Fidel Castro in 2016, the book traces the role of ideas and the arts in the invention of Latin America and in the construction of national identities during dictatorships and revolutions. Granés brilliantly accounts for the influence of surrealism, whose decisive impact was also political, since it gave rise to an individualist, libertarian and imaginative alternative to totalitarian ideologies and populism that would lead to the heterodox left and liberalism. American Delirium is a marvelous fresco, admirably narrated, that broadens our gaze on a continent whose history and destiny affect the political and cultural practices of the entire West.