‘Un viejo que leía novelas del boom’: natura, cultura y maravilla en Luis Sepúlveda
‘The Old Man who Read Boom Stories’: Nature, Culture and Wonder in Luis Sepúlveda

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to study how in the thin plot of the ‘global short novel’ that earned Luis Sepúlveda the first of his many editorial successes a number of textual echoes linger and intertwine, remixing and compacting themselves in a seductive pulp designed, with all evidence, for the market. In particular, the reader can track each one of the different segments of that great Twentieth Century Spanish-American narrative tradition whose main goal was the research or the construction of a local identity finally emancipated from colonial models, a prodigious series that strategically focused on blurring the boundaries that separate ‘civilization’ from ‘barbarism’, the Old from the New World, dismantling, in general, the validity of every fixed category, and disturbing, in particular, the exclusionary opposition that, in the Western episteme, regulates the ‘reality/unreality’ relationship. By resuming this glorious path, the Chilean writer achieves the not insignificant effect of creating a timely laceration in the continuum of the ‘globalized Hispanic-American literature’ that dominates in the 1990s.

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