ABSTRACT

The writers who flocked there in the first decades after World War II were inscribing their names within a gilded tradition where the French pantheon of writers seemed to welcome their distant Latin American cousins. As in the classic pattern found in Henry James and others, the story of the American who goes to Europe only to encounter disappointment and a loss of innocence had its own resonance for Latin Americans. Paris has remained important on the Latin American map, not just for a shared history but for the continued presence of many writers there today. Salazar Bondy shows the enduring seduction of Paris for such characters, how on the merest foundations slant of light, a change of season, a few remaining coins hope springs anew. One has to indeed fall quite low, as Horacio Oliveira does at the end of the first part of Julio Cortzar's Hopscotch, to be disabused of the dream of Paris.