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