El World Literature Today dedica este artículo a Las segundas criaturas, de Diego Cornejo Menacho


Las segundas criaturasWhat is most striking about Diego Cornejo Menacho’s third novel is how his proliferating imagination frees just about every known narrative component into daring versions of what a novel can do. This is particularly positive since he builds fiction from metafiction, avoiding the typical traps of our abundantly solipsistic times. Cornejo’s inspired idea is to write an apocryphal and blatantly partial biography by defictionalizing “Marcelo Chiriboga,” purportedly an overlooked Ecuadorian Boom writer who kept appearing, Zelig-like, in novels and nonfiction by the real Boom writers José Donoso and Carlos Fuentes.
Las segundas criaturas, one of the best novels of its type of the last thirty years, is superior to what Fuentes and Donoso could have done with their misfiring yarn. The dominant point of view is a Catalan literary agent’s who, like Donoso’s in The Garden Next Door, is modeled on the Boom matriarch Carmen Balcells. Equally dominant is the refictionalized Jean Seberg, reclaimed from Fuentes’s Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone. Cornejo’s version has her leave Fuentes for Chiriboga, unsettling the connections between this novel and its Boom palimpsest. Fictional and real characters and events appear at will, including other recent writers and novels. Chiriboga is by now an ex-ambassador in Rome and Paris, a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a winner of the Cervantes Prize and others that Fuentes received and Donoso wanted. Translated widely, he lies dying.
That is the core narrative for a young Ecuadorian from the provinces who becomes successful outside of his small country, and from that premise Cornejo’s novel becomes more complex and ambitious. Hilarious and clever, Las segundas criaturas also reckons with the role of purportedly peripheral literatures in Latin American literary history, marketing and personal charm in canonicity, the intellectual follies of leftist commitment in the third quarter of the twentieth century, literary influence and/or appropriation, and ultimately the insecurity of novelists when faced with challenges like success, or even mundane obligations. Cornejo revisits those topics by showing Chiriboga’s great inability to reconcile his ambiguity, disorderly and imperfect nature, and by making his character’s origins opaque. This further complicates settling scores because the literary social contract will not stand for righteousness or reconciling inconsistencies.

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